Each month, Theory Corner will look at and explain a different idea or action. This month, we will look at what is meant by the often misunderstood term ‘class war’.
EACH TIME A group of workers walk out on strike, or ordinary people target or criticise a boss or millionaire, right-wing rags such as the Sun and Daily Mail start screaming about ‘Class War’. To an extent, they’re right, but that’s only half the story.
Class war is not just about ordinary people attacking the rich and powerful: rather, it is a fact of everyday life that gets played out in hundreds of different ways, every day. We live in a society divided into classes. At its most basic, there are two broad classes – bosses and workers. It is rare that these two classes co-exist happily, as the power and wealth of one depends on the oppression and poverty of the other. When a boss increases his profits, he does so at the expense of the worker, through increased workload, pay reductions, redundancies or other cost-cutting measures. When a worker wins a strike for more pay, or against bullying, she does so at the expense of some of the wealth or power of the employer. ‘Class war’ simply describes the fact that there can be no real peace in the world while one class owns all the wealth and power and the other, far larger, class has none.
Class war is all around us all of the time. When the government allows big banks to get away with fraud and financial crimes, but bangs up ordinary people for the same thing, this is class war. When the rich send in police to break up a strike or demonstration, this is also class war. In this class war, most of us are fighting our corner. Sometimes, this involves large actions like strikes or workplace sabotage. Often, it is small things like pinching supplies from work or pulling a sickie. This may not sound like much, but would we need to do it if we were treated fairly at work?
So, class war is not just riots or strikes, it is a description of the tension that arises from the fact that the rich tries to maintain its power and privilege at our expense. Sometimes, we win, sometimes the boss class wins, but class war is something that is all around us all the time – not something that some of us have chosen to fight, but a struggle that is going on whether we like it or not. The question is, how can we, the ordinary people, win? As Warren Buffet, investment banker and one of the world’s 10 wealthiest men likes to say, “There’s class warfare all right, but it’s (often) my class, the rich class, that’s making war”.
