Gran Therborn

Why Some Classes Are

More Successful than Others

A theoretical model of class formation must undergird any serious theory of

capitalist politics, just as the concrete analysis of class formation must be the
prerequisite for the realistic examination of the historical development of any
particular capitalist country.1 So far, in contemporary Marxist research, two
approaches to the problem of class formation have predominated. On one
hand, there is the current of social and labour history whose unrivalled
exemplar remains Edward Thompsons The Making of the English Working
Class. Primarily concerned with the nineteenth century, the main contribution
of this historiographic work has been to tell us when and how, and sometimes
to what extent, a distinctive, self-conscious working class first came into
existence, set apart from the rest of the population. On the other hand, there is
another body of research and debate which commences from the reformist
versus revolutionary dichotomy, and has the aim of explaining why, when and
to what extent this or that working class became reformistas the supposedly
unexpected normdeviating from the vision of revolutionary socialism. The
37

literature on this topic is almost inexhaustable, but its fulcrum may be said
to be the debatefor and againstthe labour aristocracy thesis.2 Here,
however, I am mainly interested in class formation as a twentieth-century
explanans, not as a nineteenth-century explanadum. Likewise, I am not so
much concerned with the characteristics of a given class per se, as with its
capacities and achievements in conflict and in other types of relations with
other classes. From this relational perspective, the question of whether
and why a certain class at a certain time should be called reformist or
revolutionary loses its centrality, and is replaced by a question of the
capacities of a given class to act in relation to others and the forms of organization
and practice thereby developed.
Behind this reformulation of the classical question is obviously the
hindsight that all working classes under advanced capitalism have
become predominantly reformist, thus making variations amongst
reformist classes more interesting, and politically salient, than the
abstract reformistrevolutionary distinction per se. But other considerations are also involved. First, revolutionsso I will arguedo not
spring so much from revolutionary class consciousness, cultivated in situ,
as from revolutionary situations of institutional breakdown in which
masses become revolutionized. Therefore the degree of revolutionary
ideology in a non-revolutionary situation has little definitive explanatory
power. Secondly, from the standpoint of a materialist concept of history,
what is being done and what is being achieved are more important than
what ideas are being held. Forms of practice are, typically, more
interesting than states of consciousness. Thirdly, reformist and revolutionary practices and postures are important to an analysis of societal
development, not in themselves, but in their effects upon social relations
of power. Which type of practice is more capable of advancing the
positions of a given class in a certain society in a certain period cannot be
determined a priori. For all these reasons, the reformismrevolutionism
1

This article attempts to integrate provisional findings and hypotheses from two,
interrelated endeavours of the author. One is the development of a theory of capitalist
politics, the other is the analysis of the formation and trajectory of a particular capitalist
country, Sweden. Moreover, in its dual character, this article draws upon two earlier papers.
At the International Political Science Association Congress in Moscow in 1979 I presented a
paper, Enterprises, Markets and States, dealing with the structural determinants of
capitallabour relations. It had a spatial focus, centering on the relations between three
major arenas of class conflict and on the relative range of the controlling capacities of capital
and labour. (The present paper, in contrast, has a more historical orientation and
concentrates largely upon how historical time and the interrelationship of different
temporalities affect the spatial relations of power.) The other paper, Sweden Before and
After Social Democracy, was included in the special issue of Acta Sociologica prepared for
the 1978 Congress of the International Sociological Association, and summarizes research
by myself and my collaborators engaged in the project on Sweden Under Social
Democracy. In this paper we argued that the development of the Swedish welfare state
under Social Democratic governments from 1932 to 1976 could not be explained by a
parliamentary histoire evnementielle, but, rather, required the analysis of class relations whose
formation predate the entry of Social Democracy into government.
2
The most remarkable recent work in the Leninist labour aristocracy tradition is, of course,
John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, London 1974; while the sharpest
recent critique is probably H.F. Moorhouse, The Marxian Theory of the Labour
Aristocracy, Social History 3 (January 1978) and The Significance of the Labour
Aristocracy, ibid, 5 (May 1981). The best overview of the whole discussion is in G.
Olofsson, Mellan klass och scat, Lund 1978 (English translation forthcoming).
38

dichotomy can be more fruitfully subsumed under the problematic of

class capacity.
I. How and When Are Classes Formed?

By class we mean, with the mainstream Marxist tradition, a concept

designating an aggregate of people having a common location in the
relations of production. The rationale for paying attention to class and
class formation is our assumption that such a common economic location
ensures an inherent tendency to common collective action. In general,
class is simultaneously an objective and subjective phenomenon, both
something independent of members consciousness and something
expressed in conscious thought and practice. From this it follows that
class formation must be conceived as a double process. In its objective
aspects, class formation is a socio-economic process accompanying the
development of a mode of production: the process of agents moving into,
being shaped by, and being distributed between the different kinds of
economic practices which constitute the given mode of production. In
the case of the working class, this process first of all entails the formation
of a mass labour-force for industry and other capitalist enterprises. In its
subjective aspect, on the other hand, class formation is an ideological and
political process of the tendential unification of class members into forms
of common identity and of concerted action as conscious class members
in relation to members of other classes. This second constitutive process
is manifested in the development of class-specific collective actions and
institutions. Here again we part ways with the Thompsonian current by
not treating the making of a class as exclusively a process of conscious
self-identification. The reason is our suspicion that the capability of a
given class depends not only upon its degree of self-identity, but also
upon its concrete economic location and the organizational and power
resources available to it.
In a problematic specifically concerned with explaining twentieth-century socio-political developments, the questions of how and when classes
are formed also raise other problems not encompassed within nineteenthcentury historiographic discussion. In particular the question of class
formation no longer is pivoted around one point in time, as in enquiries of
the type: When can we for the first time talk of a self-conscious working
class in England? Was the German proletariat at any point ever
predominantly revolutionary? When did the Swedish working class
become reformist?And so on. Instead, in a perspective of the class
analysis of contemporary social change, the problem arises of how to
tackle class formation as an open-ended process with no fixed destination.
Classes must be seen, not as veritable geological formations once they
have acquired their original shape, but as phenomena in a constant
process of formation, reproduction, re-formation and de-formation.
We will, therefore, have to distinguish crucial moments or periods of the
formative process. We may, for instance, distinguish a founding
moment, a possible de-forming moment, as well as possible re-forming
moments or periods. We should also look out for mechanisms of
reproduction which prevent de-formations and re-formations. To take
the case of the modern working class, the founding moment in the
39

subjective sense would be the emergence of class-specific concerted

action: the first mass labour movements. An early example of workingclass de-formation in a subjective sense, on the other hand, would be what
happened in England after the smashing of Chartism. Prior to contemporary deindustrialization, and the mass unemployment of the Depression
partially aside, a working-class de-formation in an objective sense was
always at the same time a re-formation, such as that brought about by the
rise of the giant US industrial corporations at the turn of the century. In
the history of capitalist dictatorships, moreover, the current military
regime in Chile stands out as unique in its deliberate attempt at a
de-formation of the industrial working class, not only in the latters
conscious, subjective existence but also as a structured labour-force.
An ongoing process of capital accumulation, and the social structures
specific to it, always entail a particular process of reproducing the classes
of capital and wage-labour. Special mechanisms of reproduction are
necessitated by ruptures or sudden accelerations in either the valorization
or labour processes. Likewise government policies may affect the
reproduction of classes, most importantly, perhaps, with regard to
farmers and to the urban petty bourgoisie. At the level of the subjective
workings of class formation, amongst the most important mechanisms
are the practices of the labour movement itself and the related context of
state labour policy. Both crucially affect the simple or expanded
reproduction, the de-formation or re-formation, of the working class as a
conscious collectivity.
Formative Outcomes

If we are going to use the results of class formationconceived in a

non-teleological senseto explain ulterior social developments, the
formative outcomes we should look for will depend on some theory of
the determinants of class relations of power and of patterns of class conflict.
Without a lengthy digression on this topic, let me simply suggest that the
capacity of a given class to act and to achieve its objectives in relation to
other classes (as well as to non-class social forces) will, within the
parameters of the situation, depend upon two kinds of class attributes: (1)
the intrinsic strength of the class in terms of the power resources available to
it; and (2) the hegemonic capacity of the class in the sense of its ability
and opportunity to deploy its intrinsic strength for the purposes of
isolating, cowing, dividing, and striking against an enemy. This
proclivity for hegemony should not be regarded as exclusively an
attribute of political leadership, but as something which also pertains to
classes in a more general sense, as manifested in their overall social
relations and practices. Yet how social forces will actually act in a
given situation depends centrally upon the forms of action which have
been institutionalized in their founding moments. Thus for some
purposes the form of politics of a given class is a third important formative
outcome.
Intrinsic class strength derives from the specific socio-economic relations
that a given class is the bearer of. It varies within the same type of class
according to the particular historical formation of that class within a
concrete society in a specific period. Drawing upon previous theoretical
40

work,3 I would argue that the fundamental specific strength of a

bourgeois class is its market-expanding capacity.4 This is a capacity which
asserts the power of the market and of the logic of incessant capital
accumulation against stable territorial forms of control, whether feudal or
popular-democratic. The strength of a latefeudal aristocracy, on the
other hand, might tentatively be ascribed to its seigneurial capacity: that is,
its capacity to develop and to maintain personal social bonds of patronage
and deference. In the case of the petty bourgeoisie of self-employed
commodity producers and dealers, that its specific source of power
probably resides in its autonomy: its non-dependence upon landowners,
peasant communities, employers or workers. The strength of the modern
working class, in contrast, is mainly based on its mode of existence as
personally free individuals concentrated and interrelated through
increasingly cooperative processes of work. The fundamental power
resource available to the working class, therefore, is its collectivity:
especially its capacity for unity through interlocking, mutually supportive and concerted practices. The rise of the labour movement was above
all a process of enlarging, deepening and structuring this collectivity.
To study class formation in its totality, therefore, implies that the degrees
of bourgeois market expansiveness, petty-bourgeois autonomy and
working-class collectivity must be treated as a set of variables of
determining importance to ulterior societal development. Hitherto little
attention, if any, has been paid to the making of the modern bourgeoisie
and petty bourgeoisie, while in the case of the proletariat the focus has
been predominately upon the formation of states of consciousness.
Space/Time and Working-Class Collectivity

The notion of working-class collectivity may be said to encompass

several dimensions. Least important for the purposes of political analysis
is probably the dimension which has elicited most historiographic and
sociological attention: class collectivity as a closed-off local cultural
community. The dimensions of working-class collectivity denoting class
strength, and thus affecting the capacity of the working class to set an
imprint upon societal development, arise on other terrain, and two kinds
of collectivity would appear to have a particular significance.
First is the extent to which a given working class is constituted as a
national political collectivity: that is, the extent to which the public practices
of the working class are coextensive with the territorial range of the
supreme political power which the class must confront. The important
range of variation here is not between national and international, but
between national and sub-national, given the always strongly localized
character of class formation.5 Marx stressed the importance of this
dimension of class formation very strongly when he wrote in The
3

See Therborn, Enterprises, Markets, and States, IPSA Congress, Moscow 1979.
This may be said to be congruent with classical Marxist theory, which, however, has
proven mistaken in its assertion of very narrow limits of bourgeois market-expanding
capacity, whether because of the falling rate of profit or underconsumption.
5
Alternatively, the range of working-class collectivity should be measured in relation to
that of the political system which the working-class movement wants to create in a national
secession from an existing imperial or supranational state.
4

41

Eighteenth Brumaire: In so far as there is merely a local interconnection

among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests
begets no community, no national bond and no political organization
among them, they do not form a class. The degree of working-class
national political cohesion may be most easily gauged from the range of
its formal mass organizations. But such bonds of formal organization
should be regarded as a special case of a more general set of interlocking
class practices, whether organizationally structured or not.
The second crucial dimension of working-class collectivity we might call
labour process collectivity. It derives from Marxs discussion in Capital of the
rise of the collective worker as the true bearer of productive technology
and as the subject of the socialized labour process following the transition
from formal to real subsumption of labour-power. It denotes the
extent to which workers collectivity is present at the point of production
and to the degree to which it is coextensive with that of the power of
capital.
Regimes of Accumulation

Class formation, of course, is always simultaneously class struggle, and

the specific strength of a class, whatever its objective potentialities, has to
be actualized and defended in formative battles. But a couple of
particularly important determinants of the outcome in terms of class
capacities may be further identified. One is what we might call the
constraint of the regime of accumulation, borrowing but modifying and
narrowing (in the sense of making it more sensitive to variations) a
concept from Michel Aglietta and the so-called Regulation School of
Marxist political economy.6 Very generally, this may be defined as the
specific form of capital accumulation established in a particular locality
viewed from the angle of class relations of power. With respect to
working-class strength, then, this would refer to the system of capital
accumulation in terms of its structuring of working-class collectivity,
most directly what we have named labour-process collectivity. The major
implication is that capital may be successfully accumulated in a large
number of ways, but with widely varying effects upon working-class
collectivity.
Three particular aspects of each regime of accumulation are especially
pertinent in analysing the constraints upon working-class collectivity: the
major source of wealth-making; the kind of labour-force recruited and
employed; and the socio-technical relations of the labour process per se.
With regard to the first aspect, whatever its ultimate source in an intricate
system of exchange, capitalist wealth, within a given territory, can be
made and accumulated in several very different forms. For example, a
capitalist economy dominated by industrial production and by the
transport and storage of goods tends to produce working-class collectivity; while, in contrast, capital accumulated in wholesale trade, banking
6
Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, NLB, London 1979, p. 66ff. The usage of
the concept of a regime of accumulation in this context is much inspired by Mike Daviss
Sunshine and the Open Shop: The Urbanization of Southern California, 18801930,
unpublished ms. (1980).

42

and the capitalization of ground rent (e.g., the control of fertile land,
attractive real estate, oil deposits, and so on) will produce far less
proletarian unity or self-conscious organization. The second aspect
signifies that the more homogenous the workforce, the more easily
collectivity may develop out of it. Homogeneity, or heterogeneity, in this
instance depends on the sources of labour-force recruitment, the skill
structure of the work process, the system of remuneration and, more
generally, the degree of integration of local labour markets.
The third aspect pertains to what we might call the space of autonomy
available to workers as a collectivity in the labour process. This space is
not simply a function of workers skills and level of qualification, rather it
is a variable dependent upon the relationship between the workers skills
and managerial skill. Dockers, for instance, are not usually counted
among skilled workers, but they have traditionally had a developed
collective control over their work process as they have faced little
managerial skill in designing and supervising it. The importance of the
relationship between the competencies of capitalist management and
those of the collective worker also means, contrary to classical Marxist
expectations, that large-scale industrial concentration does not necessarily strengthen the position of workers vis vis capital. The opposite could
be the case if the managerial capacity of control outgrew that of the
workers to unite at the point of production.
Differential Temporalities

Another determinant of working-class collectivity, especially in its

national political dimension, is time. So far we have defined collectivity in
terms of space: that is, in terms of its spatial range in relation to that of
bourgeois productive and political power. But one of the key determinants of this collective spatiality is the time of the industrial working
classs formation. Crucial here seems to be the relationship of political time
and economic time, the time of industrial take off and the time of political
development. At least one major reason for the variation of this
relationship is the international interdependence of political units, which
means that we may discernat leasta world political time, a local
political time, a world economic time, and a local economic time.
Historiographic evidence would appear to support the idea that a
coincidence of economic and political timeof industrial take-off and of
popular struggles for political rights of participationis the most
propitious for the creation of a national working-class collectivity. Prior
industrialization means a politically inexperienced proletariat, very
vulnerable, in its loose organizational forms, to ruling-class repression:
this seems to be one way, at least, of making simultaneous sense out of the
successful smashing of English Chartism and the failure of the Wilhelmine Reich to suppress German Social Democracy. On the other hand,
pre-industrial popular politics tended to take very localized forms, even
in a country otherwise as centralized at the summit as France.
If, therefore, we regard the power base of a class as a class-specific
resource, then the implications are clear that the class relations of power
are not zero-sum games and that the power of one class is not necessarily
43

the weakness of its opposite. In his The Road to Power, Kautsky was well
aware of this characteristic of class relations which sometimes has gotten
lost in the best of contemporary analyses, such as Walter Korpis, who
ended his The Working Class in Welfare Capitalism by stating: When the
competition among the wage-earners ceases, the foundation of capitalism
has eroded.7 However, the Marxists of the Second International were
wrong in assuming that the ultimate determinant of what would happen
to the economic system and to the global relations of social power was the
balance between bourgeois and working-class intrinsic strength, or, more
precisely, that sooner or later the collectivity of the working class would
outweigh the strength of concentrated capital. The most obvious, but not
exclusive reason for this was, of course, that socio-political relations
never became reducible to a bipolar class conflict.
II. Processes and Possibilities of Hegemony

The hegemonic capacity of a class must, of course, be seen as dependent

upon class strength, but the former remains irreducible to the latter.8
Two reasons for this are especially salient to our analysis. First, as just
suggested, opposite classes are not negations of each other but have their
own positive characteristics and their own specific bases of strength.
Thus a high degree of working-class collectivity does not necessarily
accompany a low degree of bourgeois market expansiveness or vice
versa. This raises the question of how a class utilizes its power resources
in relation to its opposite class as a special problem. Secondly, the
development of capitalist societies has turned out to be irreducible to a
two-class conflict, and has reproduced, in varying forms, a complexity of
class as well as non-class forces and cleavages.
On the bases of what I have, elsewhere, called the three modes of
interpellationtelling us what is, what is right, and what is possible 9it
is possible to distinguish three fundamental hegemonic processes: (1)
displacement, meaning that ones own accumulation of strength is
concealed from view or rendered of secondary or nugatory importance to
the other; (2) submission, making the other lose self-confidence in his
ability to contest power or to rule; and (3) isolation, confronting the other
with impossible odds. (It should be noted that even our broad conception
of hegemony has its limit: not violence and dictatorship, but death. In
strategic terms annihilation is the fourth logical option, although we do
not include it among hegemonic processes. In actual class conflict it has
played little part, although it is true that Stalinist parlance and practice
included the liquidation of the kulaks as a class. Annihilation has been
more central in ethnic or religious conflicts.)
7

London 1979, p. 324.

Our introduction of conceptions of hegemony and hegemonic capacity into this context
owes, of course, an important debt to Gramsci; but our usage will depart from orthodoxy
without any attempt at exegetic extrapolation. Hegemonic capacity will be treated as a
variable which classes have or have not; while hegemony will be very generally defined to
mean the direction of society. Moreover, drawing upon the critique in my The Ideology of
Power and the Power of Ideology (NLB/Verso, London 1981, pp. 89, 1089), I reject a rigid
dichotomy between force and consent and stress that in the present context hegemony
should not be counterposed to violence or dictatorship.
9
The Ideology of Power, p. 18.
8

44

The Displacement of Class Conflict

The possibility and efficacy of these three processes depend to a large

extent upon the concrete social mould into which a given class is formed.
Thus displacements of class issues and class conflicts have in the modern
period principally taken two forms: religious and national displacement.
What determines the occurrence of these kinds of displacement is still a
very under-theorized terrain, but a first overview of the issues involved
and of the historical record may allow us to venture a few hypotheses.
Intrinsically there is no reason why religion and nationalism could not
operate in opposite directions: displacing working-class advances and
power as important issue in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, as well as the
other way around. In reality, however, the former case has been
extremely rare; religion seems almost never to have significantly operated
to the advantage of the proletariat in capital/wage-labour relations. The
only instance, moreover, where I can think of a clear-cut displacement of
bourgeois antagonism to working-class power because of nationalism in
a relatively developed capitalist society was the dramatic moment in
Hungarian history in 1919 when Count Krolyi as head of the new
bourgeois government handed over state power to the Hungarian
Communists in face of the Rumanian invasion. The easiest explanation of
this asymmetry, and perhaps the most cogent one, is that the bourgeoisie,
and particularly its highest strata has never taken religion or nationalism
quite as seriously as workers quite frequently have. If this supposition is
true, it would also fit with the fact that religious mass movements, and
less often nationalist ones, have at times had a popular, anti-big-capital as
well as anti-socialist thrust. This holds, for instance, both for Abraham
Kuypers Calvinist Anti-Revolutionary Party in Holland and for Dutch
Catholicism, as well as for the pre-World War One Austrian Catholic
Christian Social Party. Given the constellation of forces in a capitalist
society this stance has probably proven more detrimental to the
realization of working-class collectivity than have, per se, commodification or capital accumulation.
But there are religions and religions, nationalisms and nationalisms.
Their specific effect upon class formation have been very different. As far
as nationalism is concerned, a first distinction is between that of imperial
nations and others. In the former case, nationalism has always tended to
strengthen the bourgeoisie in relation to the working class. The
nationalisms of non-imperial states have been more varied in their effects.
Sometimes, for instance, nationalism can take on a popular-democratic
small is beautiful coloration, of which a moderate working-class
movement may be widely seen as a legitimate political representative, as
in Denmark and Sweden in the late 1930s when the Social Democratic
premiers Thorvald Stauning and Per Albin Hannson became almost
national father symbols. On the whole, nationalism in sovereign nations
tends to operate as a hegemonic displacement of class conflict only
intermittently, in conjunctures of international crisis.
Religion has had a more stable influence, if it has one at all. The
established Lutheran and Anglican churches have been singularly
unsuccessful in keeping workers from the class struggle, but the Catholic
45

and Calvinist churches have had more success. This difference seems to
have little to do with theology per se. Catholicism has organizedin trade
unions, parties and other organizationsa very significant part of the
working class in Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, but only a
very limited stratum in Germany, Austria, France and pre-war Italy. The
key determinant seems to be the churchstate relation. Established state
churches, like the Lutheran and Anglican, as well as the Dutch
Hervormde Kerk, have been unable to keep any operative social control
of the industrial proletariat. Dissenting denominations of the same
theological trunk, on the other hand, have been more successful, as the
durability of the Dutch Gereformeerde Kerke testifies. Likewise
Catholicism has been most successful politically in Catholic countries
with a weak central state. It appears that it is in the cases where churches
or denominations have been able to step into fissures of the stateeither
of state churches or of weak and distant secular statesthat religion has
been able to function as a major class-conflict displacement mechanism,
and then invariably in favour of the bourgeoisie over the working class.
Submission and Isolation

It is possible to distinguish two major forms by which one class cows

another into submission. Either the other has been inculcated with
self-doubts already when the game begins, or it is produced during the
conflict by the hegemonic classs resolute preparedness to inflict crushing
damage on the other. In modern capitalist politics these two ways of
reaching and maintaining a hegemonic position have each had their own
particular socio-political base. Deferential submission derives its strength,
first of all, from the survival of precapitalist social forces, relations and
institutions: especially from latefeudal seigneurial forces and from
pre-capitalist churchesboth of which are linked up and integrated into
capitalist development. Resigned submission, on the other hand, tends to
follow rather naturally from historical experiences of defeat, for whatever
reason.
Conjunctural experiences apart, there seems to be a structural basis for
why some capitalist classes display a particularly ferocious resolution that
raises the stakes of any working-class opposition. Likely, we might
expect that a capitalist class with big power resources directly centralized
into its own hands within an otherwise weak state structurea class,
therefore, whose relations to its own workers are only limitedly mediated
and totalized by a broader state framework10to be particularly ruthless
and intransigent in the class struggle. The impact, however relative, of
state mediation in this respect is well known from the notorious cases of
private colonial ultra-exploitation before a colonial state structure was
established: the East India Company in Bengal, the Dutch East Indies and
the Congo under Leopold II. It also seems that the extraordinary
anti-union aggressivity of US corporations (by European standards),

10

See Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules, NLB, London 1978, pp.
21920, 228 ff. The state should not be seen only as a centralization of ruling class power, but
also as a totalization of social relations: as something which not only confronts the ruled and
exploited, but also as something which constitutes their social coherence.
46

might be explained in the same way: an enormous concentration of

private capitalist power, linked to a friendly but weak central state.11
And it further seems plausible that the victorious determination on the
part of the leading US corporations to liquidate any working-class
oppositionas exemplified by Carnegie at Homestead or Rockefeller in
Coloradowas important in establishing a virtually unchallenged
bourgeois hegemony in the United States. Among workers and trade
unionists there arose a resigned submission which to an extraordinary
extent recognized the capitalists right to rule.
Isolation, the third basic hegemonic process operates, above all, along
two paths. The more important one derives from the complexity of the
capitalist class structures and takes the form of isolating the other from
possible allies. In the formative period of industrial capitallabour
relations, this referred mainly to the farming population and, secondarily,
to self-employed artisans and small masters and tradesmen. Given the
asymmetrical relation between labour and capital, the key distinction in
this respect is the degree of autonomy of the rural petty bourgeoisie from
seigneurial landowners and the urban bourgeoisie. The less autonomous,
and the more isolated the working class, the more autonomous and
hegemonic the bourgeoisie.
The other important mechanism of class isolation has been ethnic closure.
To the extent than an important sector of a class belongs to an ethnic
minority or minorities, or has consisted of disfranchised foreigners, the
more isolated the class. This has been a particularly important phenomena in countries of new settlement like the United States whose
working class has been formed by waves of successive immigration, but it
also pertains to nations like Switzerland whose capitalists already by the
turn of the century recruited about a third of their workers from
non-enfranchised immigrants, mainly Italians. In other words, one
crucial aspect of the formation of the Swiss working class has been the
permanent disfranchisement and ethnic isolation of a very substantial part
of it.
The implications of these provisional theses about the dialectic of class
formation and the development of power resources are summarized in
Table 1 which depicts the two polar ideal-typical cases of modern
advanced capitalism: Ultra-Capitalism and Labourite Capitalism.

III. An Illustration: the Formation of the Swedish

Working Class
What follows is an attempt to illustrate our theory of class formation by
making reference to the concrete history of the Swedish working class.
The Industrial Revolution in Sweden is usually conceived to have
commenced in the 1870s. In 1870 the country had about a hundred
11

See James Holt, Trade Unionism in the British and U.S. Steel Industries, 18801914: A
Comparative Study, Labor History, 18, 1 (1977).
47

48
1. Class Capacities

1
LABOURITE CAPITALISM

Isolated Working Class, due to:

Farmers dependent upon landowners and/or urban bourgeoisie;
urban petty bourgeoisie small or dependent, ideological degradation of manual out labour of strong aristocratic traditions.
Ethnically separate and/or divided working class.

mic power in weak, friendly state.

Deferential Working Class, due to:

Strong seigneurial residue adapted to capitalism.

2.3 Isolation
Central Working Class, due to:
Autonomy of farmers and of urban petty bourgeoisie in an economy
where industrialized bourgeoisie is a small ethnic minority.

2.2 Submission
Non-deferential Working Class, due to:
Non-existent or weak seigneurial links. Unrestrained working class
due to scarce, highly skilled labour-power in weak, friendly state.
Unrestrained bourgeoisie because of strongly concentrated econo-

2.1 Displacement
Pro-bourgeois, due to:
Pro-labour, due to:
Imperial nationalism and non-state church(es) holding sway over
Small-state, popular democratic nationalism.
working class.
No religious displacement due to state church.

2. Hegemony

1.2.2 Labour Process Collectivity

Low, due to:
High, due to:
Capital accumulation dominated by trade, finance and/or forms of
Capital accumulation through industrial production.
ground rent.
Skilled homogeneous workforce working for little skilled and/or
Highly skilled management using little skilled labour and/or a
remote employers.
labour force
very heterogeneous in background, skills and remuneration.

1.2.1 National Collectivity

Low, due to:
High, due to:
Disjuncture of industrial formation of national polity of popular
Coincidence of national industrial formation and formation of
participation; national bourgeois politics preceding international
national polity of popular participation; international working-class
working-class politics.
politics preceding national bourgeois politics.

1.2 Working-Class Collectivity

1.1 Bourgeois Market Expansiveness

High, due to:
Low, due to:
Large original market; elastic demand; technological openness.
Small original market; inelastic demand; technological restrictiveness.

ULTRA-CAPITALISM

TABLE

thousand industrial workers, whose numbers then grew at decadal rates

of 26%, 65% and 48%, reaching an average total in the first decade of this
century of just above 300,000.12 But the country long remained
predominantly agrarian and rural, in spite of rapid industrialization,
indicating a small mercantile sector. Politically, Sweden was a bureaucratically governed monarchy, but with a substantial influence of the
propertied farmers. The first real parliamentary government was not
established until 1905, when about a fourth of adult males had the right to
elect the Second Chamber, although usually only between a fourth and a
fifth of those enfranchised made use of their vote. The main socio-political conflicts in the early and mid-nineteenth century centered on the
abolition or maintenance of late-feudal taxes and military obligations tied
to non-noble land; in the mid-1880s the tariff became the main issue, soon
superseded by the suffrage question. A broad manhood suffrage to the
Second Chamber came into effect only in 1911, and democracy followed
from the outcome of World War One and the fear of revolution.13
Industrialization thus clearly preceded a liberal politics as well as modern
mass politics. On the other hand, whereas Swedish bourgeois politics was
dragging its feet in an undeveloped society, Swedish socialist politics
from the 1880s marched in step with world labour time. From more
developed Denmark, trade-union conceptions and socialist ideology
travelled through Sweden along the same route as agricultural and
cultural innovations. They spread first to Malm and the southern
province of Scania, then jumped from there to the Stockholm area, and
somewhat later to Gothenburg, before finally diffusing to the rest of the
country.14
The first trade unions emerged in the 1870s, the first national trade-union
federations in the latter half of the 1880s. By 1898 there was a national
trade-union confederation, LO, having a central leadership and to which
only national federations of unions could be affiliated. This was the same
year as Denmark, and, in fact, part of a joint Scandinavian trade-union
decision, only six years later than the establishment of the German
Generalkommission, three years after the French CGT and the same year
as the founding of the Commission Syndicale by the Belgian Workers
Party. The British TUC, of course, was considerably older than any of
these, but it did not yet provide a central national leadership. Socialist
ideology, after an abortive beginning in the 1840s connected to the
Communist League, was brought to Sweden from Denmark and
Germany in 1881 by a wandering tailor, August Palm. In 1889 a national
Social Democratic Workers Party of Sweden was constituted: a date
which should be compared to the German Gotha Congress of 1875, the
12

L. Jrberg, Growth and Fluctuations of Swedish Industry, 18691912, Lund 1961, p. 51.
The historical formation of the modern Swedish state is treated in Therborn, Structures
of State, Forms of Politics: The Formation of a Bourgeois-Bureaucratic State in Sweden and
Its Political Effects, 1982, unpublished.
14
The comparative reference for an analysis of the spread of the labour movement is taken
from Knut Norberg, Jordbruksbefolkningen i Sverige, Lund 1968, pp. 208 ff. The international
trailblazer for this king of comparative studies is the Lung geographer Torsten
Hgerstrand; see his dissertation, Innovationsfrloppet ur korologisk synpunkt, Lund
1953.
13

49

1885 establishment of the Belgian Workers Party, the Hainfeld Congress

of Austrian Social Democracy in the winter of 188889, and the founding
congress of the Second International later in 1889. Moreover, the Italian
Socialist Party was only founded in 1892, the Social Democratic Workers
Party of the Netherlands was organized in 1894, divided French
Socialism, assuming modern forms in the early 1880s, was finally united
in 1905, and the Labour Representation Committee, forerunner of the
Labour Party, was, of course, set up in 1900.
The point here is not the conventional thesis that feudalism begets
socialism. Indeed, the falseness of that idea is particularly clear in
Scandinavia, where Norway, which never had any feudalism proper and
had had a broad franchise since 1814 and a parliamentary government
since 1884 (all during a period of weak dynastic union with Sweden),
produced the most radical labour movement in Northern Europe. (The
Norwegian Labour Party rallied to the Comintern in 1921 under a
leadership which was heterodox but inspired by the American Industrial
Workers of the World.) On the contrary, the point is that the German and
Scandinavian pattern of modern working-class formation involved the
establishment of national organizational structures for a class-conscious
proletarian collectivity before any means of bourgeois or clerical political
penetration of the working class had emerged. In Norway, to use the
same example, a working-class party structure was established in 1887
and a national union confederation in 1898: all well in advance of the first
major wave of industrialization in the decade just before World War One.
TABLE

Comparative Levels of Unionization in 190515

All organized
(%)
Denmark
Britain
Sweden
Germany
France
Hungary
Austria
Belgium
Norway

Organized in national confederation

affiliated to the International
Secretariat of Trade Unions (%)

49
26
24
24
18
16
13
10
5

38
8
18
18
45
16
12
2
4

The General Strikes of 1902 and 1909

In Sweden these national organizations had especially rapid success in

recruiting decisive sectors of the working class and Sweden soon
overtook older industrial societies in the degree of its class organization.
By international standards, the Swedish unions, in particular, had a
relative solidity that was remarkable. After the turn of the century, the
15

Calculations from Third International Report on the Trade Unions Movement in 1905 (Swedish
Edition), Stockholm 1907, pp. 45.

50

Iron and Metal Workers Union, for example, never had a high
membership turnover in any year greater than 43%, whereas German
unions often experienced turnovers of 100%. The way in which
economics and politics, and their temporalities, were intertwined in
Sweden, moreover, created very early a broad political unification of the
working class. In May 1902 the Social Democratic Party called a
three-day general strike for universal suffrage as a non-ultimative
pressure upon Parliament. In all, 95,000 workers took part: more than a
fifth of all workers outside agriculture and domestic service. It was not
yet quite a nationwide mobilization, as the agrarian provinces between
Scania and Stockholm were untouched, as were the North (with the
exception of the sawmill district around Gvle) and the old iron-working
belt between Stockholm and Goteborg. Still the turnout must be
regarded as impressive, and in terms of the percentage of the participating
non-agrarian proletariat it was on par with the great Belgian general
strike of the same year. In contrast to the Belgium events, however, the
Swedish strike, called by the central Social Democratic (SAP) leadership,
took place in a disciplined and peaceful manner, whereas the Belgian
workers, explicitly left to their own initiatives by the POB leaders, engaged
in riotous protest and violent confrontation.16
Although the political strike of 1902 was immediately unsuccessful in
obtaining the vote (as was the contemporaneous Belgian strike), it had
epochal consequences for the development of Swedish industrial
relations. It led directly to the organization of centralized, national
employers organizations; and, in spite of the countrys size (fifteen times
that of Belgium; twice that of Britain) and its diversified industrial
structure, Swedish industrial relations and class conflict assumed a
nationwide and synchronized character. This soon led to what was
probably the most extensive industrial conflict in the history of any
capitalist country (May 1968 in France perhaps excepted): the 1909
General Strike. It was called by the LO in a defensive action against a series
of lockouts by the employers organizations. For one month, August,
about 40% of the entire Swedish working class in mining, construction
and manufacturing was locked in battle, against the employers. In all,
about 300,000 workers took part for a shorter or longer time.17 In
comparison the famous nine-day British General Strike of 1926 comprised at most 25% of all insured employees. The largest and best
prepared general strike of the French CGT in this erathe May Day strike
for the eight-hour day in 1906involved about 200,000 workers, or
45% of the non-agrarian workforce.18
In the first elections for the Second Chamber based in principle on
universal male suffrage (1911), Swedish Social Democracy scored 28.5%
16 About 300,000 Belgian workers went on strike out of a non-agrarian working class three
times the size of the Swedish. Strike figures from Marcel Liebman, Les socialistes belges
18851914, Brussels 1979, p. 137.
17
Cf. Arbetsstatistik A:9, Redogreise fr lockouten och storstregken 1909, Stockholm
1910, p. 124; and S. Carlsson Den socials omgroupperigen i Sverige in Samhlle och riksdag,
Stockholm 1966, vol. 1, pp. 280 and 295.
18
M. Morris, The General Strike, London 1976, pp. 21 and 28; and Peter Stearns,
Revolutionary Syndicalism and French Labour, New Brunswick (N.J.) 1971, p. 24.

51

of the vote. What was remarkable was that the total vote for the Social
Democrats, 172,000, exceeded the total number of votes given by
non-agrarian workers by 20,000 or 14%.19 While the SAP certainly got a
number of votes from semi-proletarianized small farmers in some areas,
from self-employed artisans, some agricultural workers, and a sprinkling
of support from other classes and strata, it seems reasonable to assume
that at least two-thirds and possibly three-quarters of the non-agrarian
workers who voted in the 1911 elections voted Social Democrat. The
main problem was passivity and not organized clientelism; electoral
turnout was very low in Sweden before World War Two, reaching and
passing the 70% mark only in 1936a level reached by the German
electorate in 1887.20
The Growth of Labour-Process Collectivity

From the final defeat of the military ambitions of the Vasa dynasty at the
hands of Petrine Russia, Sweden languished in a protracted geopolitical
isolation until the Industrial Revolution suddenly stimulated a new
demand for its primary products and capital goods. Swedens entry into
the world market as a specialized exporter and important secondary pole
of capital accumulation was conditioned by several highly specific
circumstances: first, an ample endowment of certain natural resources
quality iron ore and timberin high international demand; secondly, a
small but old and highly developed technological tradition of iron-making; and, thirdly, an inheritance of sophisticated mercantile skills and
connections from the pre-industrial age when Swedish merchant houses
controlled the European trade in quality pig iron and bar castings. These
circumstances, in turn, formed a basis of transition in the early twentieth
century for a regime of accumulation dominated by a specialized
engineering sector. By 1912 it already comprised 22% of the workforce
and 18% of the production value of Swedish manufacturing. Indeed, by
1902 the engineering industry, embracing the most advanced and
profitable of Swedish corporations, had assumed the leading role in the
representation of industrial capital as a whole.21
The working class which faced this most advanced sector of the Swedish
bourgeoisie was itself skilled and industrially experienced. From the
standpoint of understanding the future evolution of Swedish industrial
relations, it is important to emphasize that within the engineering sector
there almost simultaneously developed a symmetry of internal class
relations. Just as engineering capital tended to hegemonize industrial
capital, so too did the Iron and Metal Workers Union, Metall, (at least
after 1905) come to form the leadership of the entire organized Swedish
working class. From public investigations of the major engineering
enterprises in 18991900, we have a fairly good profile of the workers
who were the core of Metalls militancy. Of the 32 firms with 13,500
19

Riksdagsmannavalen ren 19091911, Stockholm 1912, pp. 30 and 41.

See S. Rokkan and J. Meyriat (eds.), International Guide to Electoral Statistics, The Hague
and Paris 1969.
21
The formation of the modern Swedish bourgeoisie is treated in Therborn, The
Bourgeoisie: Limitations of a Success Story, 1981, unpublished.
20

52

workers which were studied, 10 had more than 500 employees, 6 between
300 and 500, and 10 less than 300. All the workers, except 80, had
completed primary education and almost one in five (187%) had some
secondary education as well. Only 24% had a father with an agricultural
occupation, whereas 41% had a father in metal manufacturing.22 Thus
the predominance of relatively educated workers from heriditary
proletarian families concentrated in rather large firms testifies to the
importance of the old tradition of mining and metallurgy as a foundation
for the development of the modern engineering sector.
But modern engineering also represented distinct ruptures in skill and
traditions. The union, organized nationally in 1888, was a child of
modern industry, of workers outside the craft traditions of the guilds.
Because of the way in which industrial and political time were related in
Sweden, the skilled workers who formed the union considered themselves more in class than in craft terms. From the beginning the union
sought to organize the entire iron and metal trades complex, regardless of
skill, and its operational area included 27% of the workforce (and 30% of
industrial value-added).23 At its congress in April 1909 the union
adopted the rule of industrial unionism, and a Metall motion to the LO
Congress in the fall of 1909 demanding the general reorganization of the
Swedish trade-union movement along industrial lines was, in principle,
carried. Differentials between skilled and unskilled workers always seems
to have been relatively small in Sweden. The Swedish Tariff Committee
of 1882, for instance, found differentials amongst industrial workers in
Sweden in the 1870s to be clearly lower than in Britain and the United
States (although hardly different from various German cases). On a much
firmer statistical basis, employers statistics from the interwar period
show that differentials in the engineering industry were smaller in
Sweden than in any other Western European country.24
Out of Metall originated very early another extremely important aspect of
Swedish industrial relations: the powerful union presence on the
shopfloor. The inspiration, as usual, came from Denmark, where out of
the survival of guild traditions had evolved a shop-steward system
institutionalized by collective agreement. On Swedens more industrial
soil, this was turned into an organization principle of organizing
workshop clubs in every plant which comprised all union members and
acted as a foundation for all higher trade-union structures.25 This, of
course, was not accomplished without struggle; but after the engineering
lockout of 1905, which ended in a draw, this kind of union shopfloor
organization spread and eventually became institutionalized across the
entire national labour-market. From it, and from general union strength,
derives the specific feature of plant-level industrial relations in Sweden:
22

Arbetsstatistik III. Underskning av den mekaniska verkstads-industrie i Sverige, Stockholm

1901, vol. I, p. 50.
23
Calculated from Jrberg, op. cit., pp. 385 ff. For a history of Metall see J. Lindgren,
Svenska Metallindustriearbetarfrbandets historia I., Stockholm 1938, pp. 87 ff.
24
Tullkommittens underd niga betnkande av r 1882, vol. II, table 140.
25
Lindgren, op. cit., pp. 454 ff. The development of plant-level trade-unionism in Sweden,
and within an international frame of reference, is being undertaken by Ander Kjellberg in
our collaborative project on Sweden under Social Democracy.
53

that there is no significant internal state structure26 (like the German

Betriebsrat) nor a unionshop steward duality (as in Britain), but rather an
institutionalized duality of union and management. Furthermore, the
industrial character of Swedish unions in most cases ensures that this is a
class duality of enterprise organization as well. In spite of the sometimes
considerable distance between the plant union leadership and the rank
and file, this is undoubtedly one of the most advanced examples of a
labour-process collectivity achieved by a working class under large-scale
industrial capitalism.
Problems of Hegemony

An old, non-imperial nation-state with a Lutheran state church offered

the Swedish ruling classes little opportunity for displacement of class
conflicts. For different reasons, neither side of the capital/labour divide in
Sweden was particularly ruthless and determined in deploying its fighting
capacities to the very end. Pressures and traditions of an old, well-established Rechtsstaat impeded both employers and workers. Moreover, the
very centralization of employers organizationwhich followed from
the advance of industrial upon bourgeois political time as we have
seenrestrained capitalist ultras in various ways.
Two historical examples may clarify what this politics of class restraint
involved. First, the 1905 Engineering Agreement, which allowed a
compromise settlement to the big lockout, came as a result of heavy
pressure from a Conservative government, which in turn had to face
mobilized public opinion as a result of the simultaneous crisis of the
Norwegian secession. The compromise was negotiated by the undisputed
leader of the engineering employers, John Bergstrmhead of Separator
(the large dairy machinery firm) and of the Engineering Association.
What is remarkable about the Agreement is that the man who signed it on
behalf of the employers was a far-right politician who directed a
corporation which still successfully staved off unionization. Almost alone
amongst the major engineering companies, Separator managed to keep
its works going with unorganized workers; but, under intense political
pressure, Bernstrm signed a national agreement which, as we have seen,
cleared the way for the advance of workplace unionism.
The second example is the aftermath of the General Strike of 1909. The
Swedish Employers Confederation, SAF, had since 1907 been led by a
former high civil servant, devoted to the regulation of industrial relations
rather than to the destruction of unions. In the trough of union weakness
and an international recession, the textile employers offered the almost
extinguished textile workers union a national collective agreement.
Amongst employers the only important group that attempted to smash
the unions was the northern sawmill owners, many of them unaffiliated to
the SAF.
26

We owe the notion of an internal state, with reference to labour relations within
enterprises, to Michael Burawoys seminal Manufacturing Consent (Chicago 1979); but we use
it in a more restricted sense, referring to general representative institutions and grievance
procedures in the enterprise, in contrast to institutionalized bargaining.
54

On the part of the workers there was no moment of triumph comparable

to the employers 1909. But the fact that Sweden had had no popular
revolution at all, and no workers killed in industrial repression until 1931,
made reformism and gradualism the dominant perspectives. An important difference between Sweden (or Scandinavia in general) and Germany
and Austria was the position of the industrial classes in the overall class
structure. In Sweden a long tradition of peasant independencea
recognised and unique fourth estate since the end of the Middle
Agesdeprived the urban bourgeoisie of a secure rural conservative
hinterland. In the formative period of the working class, the propertied
and fairly prosperous farmers of southern Sweden were overwhelming
conservative (in their own terms), but the suffrage question, the tariff and
the controversy over military expenditure created broad areas of contact
between the labour movement and liberal small farmers, especially in
central and northern Sweden. In 1911, at a time when the SPD was still
discussing the agrarian question in the abstract, the Swedish Social
Democrats were campaigning effectively in alliance with the Liberals in
most of the countrys rural areas. Thus the Swedish labour movement, in
contrast to the Central European cases, was never relegated to a political
or geographical ghetto.
The Swedish class pattern which emerged out of the formative period of
18701914 has undergone several important changes since then, but, so
far, it has never experienced a decisive period of re-formation. Neutral
Sweden with its internationally competitive capitalism has been evolving
gradually. The combination of intrinsic strength and non-isolation has
made the working class and the labour movement decisive forces in the
making of modern Sweden. Hegemonically weakas most recently
demonstrated in the pathetic performance of the four bourgeois coalition
governments, 19761980the Swedish bourgeoisie, on the other hand,
has had great expansive strength, continuously reproduced, and exemplified in the vigor of the capitalist system after forty-four years of
uninterrupted Social Democractic government (19321976). In the 1970s
it seemed that the strength of the Swedish working class had finally
matured to the point of posing a major challenge to capitalism: thus
demonstrating the vacuousness of various theories of integration. Yet,
at the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that left-wing Social
Democratic theorists of this accumulation of working-class power have
mistaken the actual dialectics of capitalist politics, which is not decided by
the strength of one class alone. Any adequate theory of capitalist politics,
as a basis for socialist strategy, must take at its point of departure the
global system of class formation as it is shaped both in its conflictual
interaction and by the specific capacities of individual classes.

55