Arbeitsbewusstsein und Gesellschaftsbild revisited

The starting point for this article is the industrial-sociological studies of the post-war period where consciousness research into understanding work and employment was pursued not only from a scientific point of reference but also explicitly from the political interest in the knowledge gained: can cooperation in the reconstruction of Germany be expected from the industrial workforce, as accentuated by capital, or rather rejection and resistance? The results of this analysis indicated that the theory of the upward movement of the working class towards the middle class proved to be a premature claim. The class compromise remained fragile. And the observed critical distance to operational and corporate management relationships did not give grounds for any substantial perspective for structural change. The new research into the understanding of work and employment underlines that with all the differentiations of the real situation, there are common experiences which prevail: growing workloads, intensification, threats to health and safety, a fairness gap. In many sectors personal and social insecurity is apparent. There is a collapse of important aspects of legitimacy in the system which does not however result in legitimacy conflicts which threaten the system. This characterises an open situation which politically does not play into the hands of the progressive elements of the system, but rather the regressive. Clearly the right-wing populist organisations from Pergida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) to AfD (Alternative for Germany) are successful in taking the social problems out of the context of a progressive perspective and embedding them in the national question and reinterpreting the distribution struggle between “top” and “bottom” into “domestic” and “foreign”. The article closes with an attempt to analyse the conditions for this change of perspective.