Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
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workers) is disappearing, it is as well to remember that the industrial working
class has always been in a minority in all countries except Britain (and even
there it only just constituted a majority for a short period), and that manual
work for much of modern history has been undertaken very largely by agricultural
labourers. In Britain, for instance, farm workers accounted for 25 per
cent of the occupied population in the mid-nineteenth century, more than
the sum of those engaged in mining, transport, building and engineering
(Hobsbawm, 1968, pp. 283, 279). Agriculture’s continual decline since then (it
is now less than 3 per cent of total employment) highlights the fact that the
working class (i.e. manual workers) has a long history of recomposition
(Miliband, 1985) with certain occupations growing and others in decline.
This being so, we might then also be sceptical of those commentators who
conclude that a steady growth of white-collar work announces the end of the
working class. This very much depends upon one’s definitional criteria. Thus
the expanding army of non-manual employees certainly does have particular
characteristics, but it may be premature to assume that they are more decisively
differentiated from the factory worker today than was the engineering
tradesman from the agricultural labourer at the turn of the century. Moreover,
recollecting these sorts of division within manual occupations, we might
usefully reflect on the fact that there has never been a period of working-class
homogeneity as suggested by the Fordist typology. After all, to take just voting
preferences, we may be reminded that the 1950s in Britain were a period of
continuous Conservative ascendancy despite the fact that manual workers
contributed the overwhelming majority of voters.
In sum, it is as well to hold in mind that the equation of manual work with
the working class, and this with a homogeneity of outlook, is very much a
construction of intellectuals. It may imply a confluence that in reality is absent,
just as it may suggest an unbridgeable gulf separating the working class from
white-collar (and thereby middle-class?) work. Finally, while we ponder these
problems, we might also remember that manual work has far from disappeared
in the ‘post-Fordist’ era – in Britain today it still amounts to about half the
total workforce.
• Post-Fordism makes a good deal of the decline of work in factories and the
shift to service occupations such as in finance and leisure. This is undeniably
empirically true, but, as we saw in Chapter 3, it is hard to contend that this
marks a really profound change. On the contrary, the spread of many services
is to be explained by divisions of labour introduced to make more effective
capitalist activity.
• The post-Fordist emphasis on consumption, to which I return, has met with
many objections. Prominent among these are the following:
(i) Consumption has been a concern since at least the latter part of the
eighteenth century when industrial techniques began to make consumer
goods available on a wide scale (McKendrick et al., 1982). Seen from a longterm
perspective, recent developments may indicate an acceleration of
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