The 1451 Review (Volume 1) 2021

Classes then are continuously formed through historical processes that are
specific to time and place. If we are going to think with class, it is necessary to consider
the interaction of economic, social and cultural processes that shape the class relations
of any given society. By being attentive to these issues, thinking with class can
illuminate a variety of mechanisms at various levels of analysis. The final section of
this essay will attempt to outline how we might define and consider a limited number
of these class mechanisms: class as opportunity hoarding, class as exploitation, and
class as symbolic distinction.
The control of many resources and opportunities in a capitalist society is zero-sum.
There is a finite amount of resources and differing interests about how these resources
should be organised. These individual interests can be thought of as collective interests
to the extent that they cannot be achieved without collective action. For example, the
desire among many workers at various points in time has been to create ‘closed shops’
where the supply of labour in a production process is controlled solely by the
Unionised workers working within the organisation. This is at odds with the capitalist
profit motive as it has the effect of increasing the price of labour. It is here we might
suggest that there is a conflict of which group has the right to take control and organise
resources. This is a process of ‘opportunity hoarding’ (Tilly 1999: 10), whereby a group
sets out to gain control of a resource and restrict access to it, or in the case of many
working-class struggles, expand access to it.
Opportunity hoarding is a central mechanism of class politics, but as a process
is rarely drawn purely along lines of class. As Virdee (2000: 547) argues, there is no
reason that we should see the Trade Union movement as a straightforward expression
of a unified class-consciousness. Trade Unions are the expression of a sectional,
defensive desire for opportunity hoarding for their members. As such, when a union is
primarily dominated by white-male workers in a time of growing industrial
participation of migrants and women, they can deploy exclusionary strategies against
other workers (Virdee 2000: 549). An explicit class consciousness can exist alongside
a sectional interest with no apparent contradiction between these interests in the
minds of the Union members.
Historically, however, these strategies of trade union racism were not
inevitable, and indeed while Unions deployed strategies of exclusion, the very same
Unions also deployed strategies of solidarity (Virdee 2000: 549). Many of the same
dockworkers who went on strike in support of Enoch Powell, would later declare
solidarity with the strikers at the Grunwick factory, a workforce predominantly
composed of Asian women (Virdee 2014: 134). To understand why those workers at
one time believed that their interests were best served by attacking other workers, and
at others by engaging in solidarity, we need to consider processes of class exploitation.
Opportunity hoarding is strongly related to exploitation, but they are
necessarily distinct process. It is simply not possible to have a complex society without
certain resources being restricted. For example, the title ‘doctor’ is restricted to those
that have completed a rigourous medical course. This is not exploitation in any sense
that the term is normally used. The most powerful form of opportunity hoarding is
private property. In a society where the means of production are privatised, the ability
to sell one's labour is for those that do not own property, the only way to survive. In
this context, new sources of labour can be seen to jeopardise the security of those
established workers. The strategy of trade union racism is only a rational strategy
insofar that it is not imaginable that the dominant monopoly of rights accrued to the
owning-class can be upended or usurped. To return to Du Bois' example, the desire to
maintain a white ‘labour aristocracy’ is as much about the exploiting power of the
owning-classes, and their ability to control the working class by threatening a segment
of it with a worsening of conditions both materially and symbolically, as it is about
intra-class processes of opportunity hoarding (Du Bois 1998: 701).
We can define exploitation analytically by arguing that it is the moment in class
relations whereby class-power is directed towards the control and extraction of value
from the labour of other classes. The white-male workers in the prior example
dominate but do not exploit black-male labour as there is no extraction of value in
their relationship (Wright 2015: 10). As an aside, women in the same position could
be said to be both dominated and exploited by this same practice. Men directly exploit
women as part of patriarchy, and this relationship (fundamental to the class system)
has been sustained in part due to the frequent preference in male-dominated Unions
for keeping women in the home, and out of paid-work (Hartmann 1979: 16). All three
sections of the working class described above are exploited by the owners however, as
the ownership and enforcement of private property rights necessitates a system
whereby the working-class must sell their labour to survive, and at a rate which
generates profit for the owning class (Wright 2005b: 23). Exploitation is a central
mechanism in any class system and plays a key role in mediating class boundaries. It
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