Reflections on Strategy for Labour

Abstract

To speak of strategy for labour needs some justification today. Class analysis went out of intellectual fashion almost two decades ago; and class politics has been increasingly displaced as the pivot of party political discourse and electoral mobilization. Class, as we have been so often reminded, is not everything. But nor is class nothing, and the costs of the marginalization of class in the intellectual and political arena are becoming increasingly severe, especially in the context of 'globalization'-which is another word for the reach of American imperialism, the power of financial markets, the spread of capitalist social relations, the intensification of exploitation and a vast growth in social inequality. An extensive process of what looks like classic proletarianization is taking place in many countries of the so-called 'developing' world; and in the advanced capitalist world the decline in the size of the traditional industrial labour force is accompanied by the proletarianization of many service and professional occupations and the spread of more unstable, casual and contingent employment. These are developments that can only be comprehended through a revival of class analysis; and they may also provide the grounds for new strategies for labour which transcend the limits of the old forms of class politics.