The election of the Labour government last year and the strong electoral performance of Reform at the English local elections this year has attracted a lot of comment and analysis. The Labour government won 411 parliamentary seats on a vote share of 34%, the lowest of any party forming a majority government since the last war. The Conservative result was the worst since 1832, winning only 121 seats with 24% of the vote. The overall turnout was 59.7%, the lowest since 2001.

In the local elections in May, Reform won 677 seats and control of 10 councils while the Conservatives lost 674 seats and the control of 16 councils. Labour lost 187 seats and also the parliamentary by-election in Runcorn to Reform. Reform won the mayoral contests in Greater Lincolnshire with 42% of the vote and in Hull and Grimsby with 36%, as well as coming second in three others. Professor John Curtice, the much-cited election expert, stated “Reform are clearly the winners of Thursday’s local elections”, going on to claim that “the party seemed able across the country to tap into voters’ widespread dissatisfaction with Conservatives and Labour”. 1 The result was much worse than both Labour and the Conservatives expected, while at the same time the Liberal Democrats and the Greens did well.

Much of the commentary on these results has focused on whether the UK is at a political turning-point signalling the end of the two-party system based on Conservative and Labour dominance, to be replaced by a more open multi-party system. Fuelling this view was Curtice’s ‘Projected National Vote Share Score’ based on the local election results, which estimates what the overall vote share would have been if the whole country had been voting. This gave Reform 30% of the vote, Labour 20%, The Liberal Democrats 17%, the Conservatives 15% and the Greens 11%. 2 Needless to say, this raised alarm in many places.

Before adding to this cacophony, it is well to take a break and look at the issues in the long term and in a wider perspective, as well as to reflect on what Marx might have had to say. This reveals a more complex picture than a simple breakdown by party.

In 2017, James Tilley and Geoffrey Evans published a study, The New Politics of Class, with the subtitle The Political Exclusion of the British Working Class. 3 They argued that, contrary to arguments in the previous fifty years, the British working class had neither disappeared nor changed but that it had become politically marginalized: “We show that while the size of class groups has changed, there are remarkably stable class divisions in values and policy preferences. Class division thus remains a key element of Britain’s political picture, but in a new way. Whereas working class people once formed the heart of the class structure and the focal point of political competition, they now lack political representation. This is because the political environment has changed. Political parties have reacted to changing class structures by changing their ideology, policy programmes, rhetoric, and elite recruitment strategies. Vote-seeking parties now focus on the middle class, not the working class, and it is the working class, not the middle class, that has become a ‘class without a party’. That, in essence, is the argument of this book” (p8).

Their understanding of the working class is based mainly on occupation, comprising skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers in manual occupations, including agricultural labourers. These workers would once have been concentrated in heavy industry and found on the factory floor but now “are more likely to be found in service jobs” characterized by the same “erratic and insecure incomes” of the traditional working class. These unfavourable circumstances contrast them with the more fortunate middle class, which has grown considerably in recent years, largely on account of education, to become much larger than the working class by the year 2000. Precise figures are not given but graphs indicate that whereas the working class made up 60% of the census data for 1931 they were only 20% in 2001.

Tilley & Evans also draw a distinction between social continuity and political change, arguing that the former “has remained remarkably unchanged despite Britain’s transition from an industrial to a post-industrial society”, whereas the latter has altered dramatically, not among voters “but among parties, politicians, and the media” (p11). Such distinctions, along with change in class sizes, have led to Labour reconfiguring its electoral base to win the middle class by shifting its ideology toward the Conservatives, promoting professional career politicians as political leaders and indulging the media to lead to “a perfect storm, whereby electoral strategy has resulted in the convergence of political parties on the middle class voter and the exclusion of the preferences of working class people from the political mainstream, which in turn has been amplified by the disappearance of class politics from the press”. The result has been that “references to the working class that were standard practice by Labour (and even the Conservatives) in the post-war era, started to fall dramatically from the late 1980s onwards. At that point class effectively disappears from the lexicon of party politics”.

The effects of this, they argue, have been “the demise of class voting” and “class-based abstention from voting”, the combination of which has led political parties to abandon the working class, leading to its political exclusion from electoral politics. Much of this has now become commonplace assertion by political commentators and even within the Labour Party, where it has fed the rise of Blue Labour. More recently it has been given as a cause for the success of Reform, where the claim is that it has shifted in part to represent the working class, delivering a ‘seismic shock’ to the political system and allowing new political themes to be introduced as well as improving the prospect in the future of a Reform led government. 4

However, there is a final pause for thought. While political parties have abandoned the working class, Tilley and Evans also conclude that “class divisions in social attitudes and political preferences remain robust” (p16), leading to the possibility - contrary to their expectations – that this could be reversed, even if it is unlikely that for electoral reasons any would do so.

It is also important to widen the perspective. Tilley and Evans make the closing point that “the most significant feature of the post-industrial class structure is not its disappearance but the changing size of its classes. Inequalities have not only survived but have in some respects actually increased” (p16). This is unquestionably the case and has been extensively documented in two much acclaimed books by the French economist, Thomas Piketty.

The first, Capital in the Twenty-First Century,5 charts in detail the growth of inequality in the last two hundred years in the major capitalist countries and demonstrates that for most of this time the rate of return on capital has exceeded the return on output and income, leading to the significant growth of wealth, mainly in the form of capital, and its unequal distribution. The exception was the thirty years after the Second World War (what the French term ‘les trente glorieuses’) in which economic growth improved and inequality declined, leading to marked improvements for the working class. The current situation is one of ‘spiralling inequality’ (“hypercapitalism”) demanding drastic action to correct it.

The second book, Capital and Ideology6 widens the study historically and globally to explicitly link politics to economics to show that ideology is used to justify inequality. It discusses regimes from the seventeenth century onwards including European societies (especially France), slave and colonial societies (especially India), the great transformation of the twentieth century (including European social democracies, the United States, the Soviet Union/Russia and China) and the hypercapitalism of the twenty-first century. The final section focuses on what is to be done and includes a detailed consideration of what he terms ‘the Brahmin Left’ and Social Nativism which, in his view, offer different and wrong solutions to the current crisis, which can only be resolved by a new form of ‘participatory socialism’.

In Piketty’s analysis, the Brahmin Left and its opposite the Merchant Class represent the ideological left and right in the electoral politics emerging from class conflict in advanced capitalist societies. The former includes social democrat, socialist, communist and green parties and the latter conservative, Christian democrats, anti-immigration parties and liberal democrats. While there has been little change in the composition and views of the Merchant Class, the Brahmin Left has been transformed largely by education. Whereas at the beginning of the twentieth century the low income and low educated working class voted overwhelmingly on the left and the high income and highly educated to the right, by the end of the century many of the highly educated had shifted to the left and many among the low educated working class had abandoned politics or were seeking alternatives to the right. This had the combined effect of weakening class-based politics and class conflict, introducing a ‘multi-conflictual system’ based on a variety of issues from gender to the environment. Piketty arrives at these conclusions from detailed consideration of massive data sets over time7 and argues that they apply among others to France, the Democratic Party in the US, where it explains ‘lost opportunities and incomplete turns’, and ‘the transformation of the British party system’, especially the Labour Party. In all three there was a failure dating from the 1980s “of the postwar social democratic coalition to update its political agenda, specifically in regard to fiscal, educational and international issues” (p720) when faced with growing financial globalization, the end of the old colonial empires and the fall of Soviet Communism. Inequality everywhere increased, along with a vast concentration of income and wealth.

Not surprisingly, Piketty concludes this can only be countered by new policies promoting new forms of social ownership, which would include: power sharing within companies; progressive taxes on property and wealth to fund a universal capital endowment; progressive income taxes and a basic income; educational justice; and the reorganization of the global economy ‘to favour a transnational democratic system’. They constitute what he terms ‘participatory socialism’ and are based on “the historical lessons presented in this book” (p969). To sum them up he borrows from Marx the famous line ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (Communist Manifesto, 1848) and reformulates it as follows: “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of the struggle of ideologies and the quest for justice. In other words, ideas and ideologies count in history” (p1035).

In turn, this invites a consideration of what Marx might have had to say. In another famous line, Marx argues: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859). This seems to present a direct refutation of Piketty - ideologies grow from existing material situations and are not independent of them as Piketty suggests. The problem here, though, is a much bigger one and concerns how Marx (and Engels) conceptualise politics. This in itself is a highly contested area as Ralph Miliband notes, not only because many of Marx’s political commentaries are fragmented, hurried and specific, but also because neither he nor Engels was an economic determinist, insisting instead that economics (the mode of production) must be the starting point of analysis in which political forces may have a degree of autonomy. “In this usage” Miliband notes, “the notion of ‘primacy’ constitutes an important and illuminating guideline, not an analytical straitjacket. The ways in which that ‘primacy’ determines and conditions the political and other forms remain to be discovered, and must be treated in each case as specific, circumstantial and contingent; and this leaves open for assessment the ways in which political forms and processes in turn affect, determine, condition and shape the economic realm, as of course they do and they are acknowledged to do by Marxists, beginning with Marx”8 (pp8-9). Piketty’s approach is therefore not inconsistent with Marx although the autonomy he gives to ideas in politics is greater than many Marxists would approve.

The other issue concerns the working class. Marx, of course, puts this class at the core of the transition from capitalism to socialism. Tilly and Evans, however, note it is now much reduced in size and increasingly marginal to political life, and this raises objective and subjective questions as to its role. Yet they claim the working class remains essentially unchanged and it is the middle class that are now more significant. Their definition of class on occupational grounds, however, misses Marx’s point that it is not what one does that matters but whether your labour is a source of surplus value that is appropriated by capitalists. Most of the middle class identified by Tilly and Evans are exploited in this way and so are really a working class. Together both classes may not reach the fabled 99% super-majority of the population claimed in the Wall Street demonstrations some years ago to be the losers in the current class war against the capitalist oligarchs, but they do not fall all that far short.

But can such a mass ever develop a subjective understanding of the need for decisive political action in their interests? In Marx’s day the core of the working class were the industrial workers, but changes in capitalism and class structure have introduced what Tilly and Evans identify as middle-class elements and by Miliband as the “new working class” of a “vast and ever-growing number of people who man the technical, scientific, supervisory and cultural posts of advanced capitalist societies” and are “sharply pulled in contrary directions” (p37). To these Tilly and Evans add the petty bourgeoisie, identified by Marx as a separate class opposed to the working class. It is difficult to conceive of such a ‘differentiated mass’ ever developing a coherent political consciousness, but it is not difficult to conceive of them being the targets of political parties for votes. It is this choice which the Labour Party has taken and which Reform now and in its former incarnation as the United Kingdom Independence Party has taken. Elements of the working class rightly feel ignored by such action, but what action they might take, to become “a class for itself as distinct from a mere ‘mass’ in a common situation and with common interests” (p19) in order to pursue their real interests, as Marx (and Lenin) said they must, is as difficult to determine now as it has been in the past.