Why the right uses 'class' against the left

Arena Journal, Annual, 2001 by Damien Cahill

The idea that there is a powerful 'new class' of tertiary educated cultural elites which pursues a radical, left-wing agenda whilst profiting from public monies, has been a feature of right-wing thought since the early 1970s. (1) In Australia this idea has been adopted by both neo-liberal and conservative writers and found a home within the pages of such journals as Quadrant and IPA Review. The new class thesis forms part of the conservative assault upon the radical movements of the 1960s. Whilst the 1960s has been de-radicalized through processes of commodification--the slogans, events and style of the times being turned into commodities--it has also been de-legitimized by the new class thesis. It holds the protest movements of the 1960s responsible for cultural decline and reduces the actions of the radicals to oedipal politics and middle-class self-interest. At the same time, the new class thesis has been an integral component of the hegemonic project of neo-liberalism--the assault upon the remnants of the welfare state and its political defenders.

How can it be that terms and concepts, traditionally the preserve of the Left, have been adopted with such vigour by the Right? This is the central question addressed in this article. I want to suggest some reasons for the Right's use of class and, specifically, its use of the term 'new class'. The contemporary Right's use of new class terminology is derived primarily from American neo-conservative intellectuals. (2) During the early 1970s, these intellectuals developed a critique of the radicalism of the 1960s which revolved around the idea of the new class.

Neo-conservatism in the United States was an intellectual movement centred around the likes of Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Peter Berger. Many were former liberals and socialists who had travelled the road to anti-communist conservatism during the 1950s and '60s. Journals such as The Public Interest and Commentary provided an ongoing forum for the articulation of the neo-conservative worldview, and it was primarily through these journals that the new class thesis was developed from the early to mid 1970s. (3) Although the precise definition of the new class varied from writer to writer, the following excerpts from Irving Kristol provide a sense of the argument:

   There are people 'out there' who find it convenient to believe the
   worst about business because they have certain adverse intentions
   toward the business community to begin with. They dislike
   business for what it is, not for what they mistakenly think it is.
   In other words, they are members of what we have called 'the new
   class'.

   This new class is not easily defined, but may be vaguely described.
   It consists of a goodly proportion of those college educated people
   whose skills and vocations proliferate in a 'post-industrial
   society'... We are talking about scientists, teachers and
   educational administrators, journalists and others in the
   communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those
   lawyers and doctors who make their career in the expanding public
   sector, city planners and the staffs of the larger foundations and
   upper levels of the government bureaucracy, and so on. It is by
   now a quite numerous class; it is an indispensable class for our
   type of society; it is a disproportionately powerful class; it is
   also an ambitious and frustrated class. (4)

Business thus had much to fear from this powerful new class, according to Kristol, as:

   ... they are acting upon a hidden agenda: to propel the nation from
   that modified version of capitalism we call 'the welfare state'
   toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail as to
   fulfil many of the traditional anti-capitalist aspirations of the
   Left. (5)

According to the neo-conservatives, the new class has its origins in the radicalism of the '60s. The radicals hoped to bring about a revolution in US society, but the decade ended, as Norman Podhoretz writes, 'not with a revolution but with the election of Richard Nixon'. (6) The new class resulted from the confounded expectations of the student radicals who subsequently changed tactics and pursued their revolutionary ends with renewed vigour, 'this time working within the system'. (7)

The Fourth International

Ironically, the roots of the neo-conservative manifestation of new class discourse are located in the debates within the Fourth International around the time of the Second World War. (8) It was in and around US socialist politics of the 1930s and '40s that many neo-conservatives began their intellectual life. And it was the break with Trotskyism and the Fourth International which began the journey right-ward for a number of intellectuals.

Following his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929, and the formation of the Fourth International, Trotsky and his followers wrestled with a critique of the Soviet Union. Trotsky maintained that the Soviet Union remained a workers' state, because of its progressive socialization of industry. However under Stalin the revolution had been stymied, with the bureaucracy becoming, 'the sole privileged and commanding stratum in Soviet society'. (9) So although it was still a workers' state, it was a degenerated workers' state. What was needed, argued Trotsky, was a political revolution --overthrow of the Stalinist dictatorship--not a social revolution. Trotsky's contradiction revolved around his contention that Stalinism continued to play a partly progressive role within the Soviet Union, but worked totally against the forces of proletarian revolution internationally.