In "It's the degree that counts" Jo O'Brien has produced a very readable and stimulating article. I have no quarrel with her argument that as well as the major contradiction between capital and labour there exist other contradictions which reflect the primary source only in a distorted manner. They can exist within the working class, as does the exploitation of women and blacks, and are neglected by Marxists at their peril. I do, however, disagree fundamentally with her thesis that racialisation is directly proportional to exploitation. This runs throughout the article: "The British proletariat suffered far greater physical hardship in the nineteenth century than it does today. In consequence the reaction to exploitation was both more militant and more consistent" ... and ... "Degrees of exploitation are like nerve endings - where they are raw the reaction to unfavourable conditions is instantaneous!" An equation has been constructed: exploitation = radicalisation, double exploitation = double radicalisation.
There are at least three meanings given to exploitation, by the left. Marx related it to the amount of surplus value extracted from a sector of workers. The sense in which Jo O'Brien uses it employs the concept of "greater physical hardship". A further definition regards it as, in part, a subjective phenomenon that relates to the degree of alienation. Definitions one and three do not most accurately apply to those in group two, and seem to most obviously apply to the "affluent" working class and the newly proletarianised layers of skilled technicians and white-collar workers. In this reply I will use the term exploitation in the sense that Jo O'Brien uses the term.
Professor Walt Rostow, the "anti-communist historian", strongly argued that exploitation meant radicalisation. He constructed what he termed an "index of social tension" for the period from 1792 to 1850. He found that the trough of a slump was associated with maximum unrest. For this period of history the evidence is not as conclusive as Rostow has claimed. Many aspects of working-class political education suffered during slump times as Thomas Cooper's "Life" shows [illegible] arrival of the world-wide cyclical crisis may be responsible, the pattern changes. Working-class activity now occurs less at the trough of the slump and more at the upswing of the cycle. Both the 1887-90 and the 1909-12 upswings in Britain were marked by explosions in trade-union membership and activity. This pattern was less clear cut on the Continent, where the old depression pattern, especially in Belgium and Italy, lasted into the early 20th Century.
In Britain during this century slumps have been periods of political reaction. The militant Shop Stewards and Workers Committee Movement flourished during the full employment of the first World War. The interwar slump weakened the working-class movement and installed a monumental Tory majority in Parliament. It was not until the second World War brought back full employment that the shop stewards movement revived. Today it is not the beleaguered NUM but ASTMS and DATA that exhibit militancy.
The degree of exploitation argument presents revolutionaries with a problem as to which sector will form the vanguard of the struggle. In the absence of a slump, the protagonists of this theory might be forced to "sit out" a whole period until there is sufficient misery and deprivation to generate activity again. Alternately, they might, recognising that the working-class is played out, look for new progressive forces. This is the road that Marcuse has taken. "..the masses are integrated and marshalled within the framework of a democratic pluralism. Outside, or rather beneath, this democracy, there are whole sectors who are not integrated into it, who perhaps never will be: racial minorities, the permanently unemployed, the poor. They are the living negation of the system." Why have the workers been downgraded from their historical role? They are affluent and insufficiently exploited. "Why should the overthrow of the existing order be a vital necessity for people who own, or can hope to own, good clothes, a well stocked larder, a TV set, a car, a house and so on, all within the order?"
In this last passage, aspects of the arguments seem like a Tory diatribe against cars on council estates. Marcuse is absolutely incorrect to dismiss the revolutionary potential of the workers. It is very likely that "non-integrated" sectors such as blacks, students or women might weaken the structure of capitalist power, but it is only the working-class (regardless of its "affluence") that can replace capitalism. Mandel comments decisively on the affluence/apathy syndrome: "Those who were blinded by the rise in standard of living during the last 15 years did not understand that it is precisely in periods when the productive forces are increasing (periods of accelerated "economic growth") that the proletariat acquires new needs, and that the gap between their needs and the available purchasing power grows wider." As the workers' standard of living and level of culture rises, so the hierarchical inequalities of capitalism and the intensified [illegible] intolerable to the workers. Deprivation motivation is still a goad to revolution, but we will disarm ourselves in dealing with the problems of neocapitalism if we see it as the only goad. It seems more useful to assemble a model in which the major causation of radicalisation is the degree of exploitation. When workers are affluent they are also confident. Their gains, which they have fought for, they come to accept as normal. Even small cuts in this standard will provoke very sharp reactions. We need to refine our analysis of the roots of revolution in this period. We will pay a hard price if we fail to do so.