ABSTRACT
One of the most vexing problems in the theory and practice of Marxism over the years has been understanding the process by which the international working class shall become the human race. Marx, of course, placed the very highest tasks on the working-class agenda—to be the gravediggers of capitalism, the first non-exploitative ruling class in history, the class that would “substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism” and in which association “there will be no more political power, properly so called.” An important preoccupation of British sociology has been with accounting for the relative stability in industrial relations in contradistinction to Marx, but without denying the Marx-influenced understanding of “the precarious nature of industrial peace given the ineradicable opposition of certain interests.” According to Martin and Fryer, deference is “commitment by lower social groups to a moral order which legitimates their own subordination.”.
