Calling the working-class back into being: The constitutive rhetoric of trade union leadership

Abstract

In western economies, neoliberal hegemony has contributed to the cultural erosion of class. Yet with class disidentification, awareness of structural inequality can be obscured and the working-class depoliticised. Despite this, there is a lack of literature and analysis of high-profile activist rhetoric in the UK that could challenge this consensus. As a unique case study, I rhetorically analyse the speeches and media interviews of a prominent UK trade union leader to show how they utilise specific techniques in attempts to reconstruct a working-class identity and invite audience identification. In doing so I contribute to literature on class consciousness and proffer constitutive rhetoric as an emancipatory tool for challenging hegemony and reinstating the political identity of the working-class.

Introduction

The working-class is back now and we’re gonna fight for our rights. (Mick Lynch, General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) in the UK, Enough is Enough, London, 16 January 2023)

In our modern ‘civil society’ (Gramsci, 1971) the Marxist understanding of class is often critiqued as irrelevant in describing contemporary socio-economic relations (Harrits and Pedersen, 2018). Neoliberal subjects are encouraged to internalise the reality of being an ideal economic actor (Foucault, 1991). Particularly invasive are public discourses on individualism and meritocracy, resulting in the cultural erasure of class (Savage, 2015) or the ‘death of class’ (Beck, 2007). As the working-class is disidentified, however, structural factors causing the reproduction of inequalities can be obscured (Savage, 2015); the working-class loses its political identity (Tyler, 2015), effectively demobilising it as a collective political force (Reay, 1998).

Despite the potential for activists such as left-wing trade union leaders to exercise subjective agency in socially constructing workers’ collective interests (Darlington, 2018), many trade unions have also dropped ‘class’ from their rhetoric, preferring discourses of justice (e.g. Però and Downey, 2022). Feeding into this debate is Mick Lynch, General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (UK): ‘I use that term “working-class” cause it’s gone out of fashion, so many people in my position including the TUC [Trade Union Congress] and the Labour Party don’t like using it, but there is a class’ (BBC Political Thinking Podcast, 28 May 2022).

In the context of a cultural erasure of class (Savage, 2015) and an ‘erosion of credible rhetorics’ in industrial relations, this article explores how unions might ‘recapture the ideological initiative’ (Hyman, 2001: 173). Specifically, I ask how trade union leaders might attempt to reconstitute the working-class as a political identity in challenge to neoliberalist ideology. I explore how Lynch, as a well-known activist in the UK, uses public discourse in the form of constitutive rhetoric (Charland, 1987; Rancière, 2010; Seitz and Tennant, 2016) to encourage working-class identification. Findings demonstrate he uses several rhetorical techniques to challenge the hegemonic interpretive schema of individualism and attempts to reconstitute his audiences as a collective subject, defining and locating the working-class as a transhistorical subject and positioning this working-class towards a telos to inspire worker movement.

This study contributes to the literature on working-class consciousness by enlightening how activists might present cogent challenges to hegemonic narratives. One of the key tasks of sociologists is ‘to pay heed to the power of naming’ and ‘the symbolic violence of classifications’ (Tyler, 2015: 500) or, in this case, non-classifications. Therefore, as antidote to the cultural erosion of class, this article answers calls to re-engage with the working-class as an economic and ideological reality (Hanappi and Hanappi-Egger, 2021). Literature highlights how class consciousness is co-determined by the ideological positions of politicians and leaders of working-class movements (McKenzie, 2017). While there is a body of work on political rhetoric and disidentification with class, for example New Labour and Thatcherite texts (Skeggs, 2003; Tyler, 2015), analysis of contemporary activist rhetoric and how it might reconstitute working-class identity is under-researched. This is significant given the purpose of rhetoric is to offer contestation rather than consensus (Billig, 1996). This article therefore asks how activist rhetoric can be utilised to challenge the cultural erosion of the working-class.

The death of class

The ‘death of class’ thesis (Beck, 2007) reflects a debate on the existence of the working-class as an economic and ideological reality (Hanappi and Hanappi-Egger, 2021). With the transition to post-industrialised economies, Marxist understandings of class have been critiqued as irrelevant in describing contemporary socio-economic relations (Harrits and Pedersen, 2018). Based on the industrial economic reality of subordination, Marxist class analysis describes how a dominant group (the bourgeoisie) holds control of another group (the working-class) to appropriate their labour (Bottero, 2004). Early research therefore conceptualises class as an economic power relationship incurring exploitation, structural inequality and conflict (Jarness et al., 2019).

In post-industrial economies, however, institutionalised individualisation has arguably led to disidentification with class as a collective (Beck, 2007). Workers tend not, or are reluctant, to identify with class as a political collective grouping (Savage, 2015). Neoliberal subjects in modern civil societies (Gramsci, 1971) are encouraged to internalise an identity as the ideal economic actor. As Foucault (1991) argues, through governmentality, regimes of power use discourse to construct knowledge and associated identity positions (who it is possible and not possible to be); the political discourse in the West of homo economicus individualises the subject as self-interest based. More specifically, increasing individualisation promulgates principles to which contemporary workers must adhere: human capital development, individual responsibility and individual integration into the labour market (Beck, 2007).

Concurrently, academic conceptualisations of class veer away from the political/economic nexus towards the analysis of individualised ‘classed’ experiences. A key point in departure is the ‘cultural turn’ (Jarness et al., 2019) where class is conceptualised as a descriptive stratification of unequal economic, social, cultural and symbolic capitals (Bourdieu, 1984). Herein, class is a cultural process whereby individuals internalise dispositions (habitus), then utilise and compete for capitals in different social arenas (fields). Social capital is particularly restricted by existing power relations (e.g. race, gender, class) allowing inequalities to be continually reproduced, with symbolic violence occurring when the elite habitus is accepted as superior and subordinate groups accept their lower position as natural. Nevertheless, while such individual perceptions can engender resentment, subjects’ collective perceptions of exploitation and class conflict are often absent (Bottero, 2004).

A form of imperialism (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2001), the neoliberal reforms of the Reagan (US)/Thatcherite (UK) era depend on the conversion of the public to neoliberal ideas via political discourse (Carstensen et al., 2022). Ideational power describes how actors influence others’ normative and cognitive beliefs, with power ‘in’ ideas conceptualised as those ideas, legitimised identities and cultural narratives that have become so dominant that they are rarely considered changeable (Carstensen et al., 2022). Neoliberalism particularly involves the state fabricating ‘the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to realising markets’ (Wacquant, 2012: 66). Hegemony subordinates workers to consent to unequal power and wealth distribution (Gramsci, 1971) and the idea of hyper-individualisation inscribes the public to a myth of equity in opportunity with the root cause of inequality attributed to personal failing rather than exploitation from a ruling-class (Skeggs, 2003).

Literature highlights how class consciousness is co-determined by the ideological positions of politicians, with New Labour and Thatcherite rhetoric demonstrating how class dis-identification is incurred (Hanappi and Hanappi-Egger, 2021; McKenzie, 2017). Bourdieu and Wacquant (2001) argue the terms ‘capitalism’, ‘class’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘domination’ are often conspicuous by their absence; this indicates that the dissolution of class is a ‘rhetorical ploy’ (Skeggs, 2003: 83). Indeed, the 1997 UK Labour Party manifesto declares: ‘Many of these conflicts have no relevance whatsoever to the modern world . . . bosses versus workers, middle class versus working class’, while the current Labour Government applies the term working ‘people’ rather than ‘class’. Class dis-identification can therefore be viewed as the successful outcome of the ruling-class’s ideological strategy to demobilise the working-class (Reay, 1998). The overarching issue from a Marxist analysis is one of false consciousness (Gramsci, 1971) where the proletariat are unconscious of any injustice and accept their own exploitation, having internalised the worldview of the ruling-class.

In the absence of mainstream political parties calling on class identities, it is pertinent to look elsewhere for sources of identity validation. Hyman (2001) argues it is the authentic purpose of trade unions to operate along three key axes: market (bargaining for better working terms and conditions); society (fighting for social justice and democratisation); and class (fighting in the struggle between labour and capital, which includes socio-political mobilisation). Nevertheless, continuing privatisation has generated a representation gap and reduced union density, which in the UK is concentrated in the public sector rather than traditional blue-collar industries. Neo-pluralist perspectives view the notion of trade unions as general worker organisations a ‘sociological misconception’; rather they are professional associations of middle-class doctors and teachers, which require long-term support from employers, the state and public opinion (Ackers, 2015). Relatedly from the 1990s, conventional union rhetoric was largely perceived as outdated and irrelevant within post-industrial and globalised economies (Schmalz et al., 2018). Even indie unions veer away from class-based frames towards ones of ‘justice’ (Però and Downey, 2022). Accordingly, although rhetoric ‘is one of the mechanisms through which class struggle occurs and can be identified’ (Skeggs, 2003: 79), contemporary union rhetoric in challenging hegemony is under-utilised and under-researched. This is significant given the purpose of rhetoric is to offer contestation rather than consensus (Billig, 1996). Trade union leaders have a key subjective role in socially constructing collective identities and inspiring collective action by reframing inequity (tolerable) into inequality (unjust and immoral) (Darlington, 2018). Class awareness is a key motivator for such collective organisation, yet unions in the UK have drifted into market-based bargaining rather than mobilising against class oppression (Hyman, 2001). An additional contemporary challenge after the ‘cultural turn’ (Bourdieu, 1984) is how to collectivise workers who identify more readily with social (e.g. race, gender) or occupational identities (Carstensen et al., 2022). If class inequality is not recognised by people experiencing it, the question arises as to how a collective class identity can be formed and mobilised (Bottero, 2004).

Constitutive rhetoric

In response, this article argues that constitutive rhetoric (Charland, 1987) is one mechanism by which to challenge the cultural erasure of class. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion; the linguistic techniques through which social identities and power structures are argued into existence (Billig, 1996; Laclau 2005, 2014). Drawing on Burke’s (1950) meaning of identification and Althusser’s (1971) concept of the interpellation of an audience as subjects through identification, Charland argues that constitutive rhetoric is a necessary step prior to classical rhetoric (appeals to reason, emotion or character). An audience can be called into being as a collective identity, which subsequently positions the audience for potential social action as prescribed in relation to the schema of that identity. Building on Rancière’s (2010) political theory, Seitz and Tennant (2016) further argue the value of constitutive rhetoric lies in its emancipatory power. Rancière positions consensus, ‘the general agreement that the partition of the sensible and its distribution of roles is a reasonable one, and that there is no reasonable alternative to it’, against dissensus as the countervailing force (May, 2010). He argues workplaces have become apolitical spaces:

Today, the average worker (blue collared or white) is no longer a political subject capable of speaking in solidarity with others for more rights, better pay, or equality, and must engage those (upper management) who have neither the inclination nor ability to comprehend workers’ arguments as arguments. (Rancière, 2010: 5)

Dissensus occurs when those who are invisible emerge with a powerful voice, calling society to reconsider what identities and interests legitimately exist. Critically, legitimation is not an outcome of dissensus but the presupposition upon which dissensus ensues. Thus, the very act of being, of having and voicing a political or collective identity, legitimises that identity and calls the established order into question.

According to Charland (1987) there are three ideological effects that incur successful constitutive rhetoric. The first is constituting a collective subject: interpreting characteristics, positionalities and actions of group members as fundamentally collective rather than individual. The second ideological effect is the positing of this collective identity as a transhistorical subject where the past is presented as an extension into the present. Consubstantiality between the dead and the living is established, resulting in a tautological dilemma where the proof of existence of the collective identity is dependent on its a priori acceptance. The third ideological effect is the illusion of freedom: as the collective identity is positioned and prescribed, so too are its expected actions and responses within a narrative. In accepting the ascribed identity, the subject is constrained to maintain that narrative’s consistency by fulfilling the prescribed ‘being’ and ‘doing’; they are positioned towards a telos.

Nonetheless, constitutive rhetoric is not always successful. In the ‘rhetoric of interiors’ the focus of analysis is on the primary text and its rhetorical form (Jasinksi and Mercieca, 2010). The audience may not recognise that they are being addressed and interpellation fails. While a text can invite an audience to identify as a collective, the audience may accept or reject the offered identification. Additionally, the embodied subjects must be materially able to act freely in the social world to affirm the collective identity and their positionality in the social structure (Charland, 1987). Jasinksi and Mercieca (2010) further identify three ways in which the ‘rhetoric of exteriors’ is evaluated. The first is reception, wherein other texts produced in response to the primary text are analysed to gauge its impact. Second, subsequent circulation of the primary text can indicate wider impact. Third, articulation indicates how the circulated primary texts are framed, (re)interpreted or appropriated by others. Accordingly, the following section introduces and briefly evaluates Lynch’s rhetoric of exteriors before the remainder of the article focuses on his rhetoric of interiors.

The RMT and Mick Lynch

The RMT has presented itself as a notable UK case study for industrial relations scholars numerous times given its reputation for militancy focused on class struggle and socio-political action (e.g. Darlington, 2009, 2012; Gordon and Upchurch, 2012). Unlike most European trade unions taking a social partnership approach and British unions concentrating on market concerns, the RMT has continued to vote for a string of politicised left-wing leaders who seek to bring trade unionism back towards the class axis (Darlington, 2018).

Mick Lynch has been particularly singled out for his ability to speak authentically for the working-class in ways that other trade union leaders have not (Gall, 2024). During his General Secretaryship (May 2021–March 2025), he engaged the media and public through his persona and rhetoric; especially over the ‘summer of discontent’ when thousands of workers across separate UK trade unions (including transport workers, firefighters, barristers, doctors and teachers) undertook non-coordinated strike action over wage disputes amid a Cost-of-Living Crisis, resulting in 2.472 million working days lost between June and December 2022. Unlike all other union leaders, including those of Unite and Unison (with approximately 1.4 and 1.3 million members respectively), Lynch alone (whose union has approximately 100,000 members) went from being relatively unknown to being a household name in the UK and ‘turned 2022 into something of a “glorious summer” for the union movement’ (Gall, 2024: 5). He gave numerous media interviews and delivered rousing rally speeches in support of the RMT but also in attempts to influence the wider trade union movement and sense of class consciousness. He spoke at social movement rallies (e.g. Enough is Enough (EiE); The People’s Assembly) and was invited to give speeches to other unions, including the University and College Union (UCU) and the British Medical Association (BMA).

Briefly evaluating his rhetoric of exteriors, while some labelled him a troublemaker, several UK newspapers called Lynch a ‘working-class hero’, ‘working-class superhero’, ‘folk hero’ or ‘hero of our times’ (Gall, 2024: 29-31). Observing reception, the phrase ‘working-class’ became increasingly legitimised as a discussion point in mainstream media. Regarding circulation, there was a proliferation of Lynch and ‘Mick Mania’ references in social media with links to his interviews and speeches. Google searches for Lynch rose by 1400% in June 2022 and the RMT gained more Twitter followers than it had members (Gall, 2024). Indeed, the Trade Union Congress conferred the RMT with the Best Media Story award for ‘Creating the Mick Lynch media storm’. Regarding articulation, several Socialist news outlets (e.g. the Jacobin), appropriated Lynch’s texts and framed them as putting working-class politics back on the agenda. Therefore, while it is not possible to gauge how far different audience members accepted or rejected identification, Lynch’s rhetoric of exteriors indicates a promising level of impact in relation to increasing the legitimacy of working-class identity in political debate. The rest of this article focuses on analysing Lynch’s rhetoric of interiors and asks: how does Mick Lynch attempt to rhetorically constitute working-class identity as a challenge to the hegemony of neoliberalist ideology?

Data collection and methods

To answer this question, I rhetorically analysed Lynch’s writings, speeches and media interviews between May 2021 and November 2024. This period marks the commencement of his General Secretaryship, includes the high-profile 2022–2023 railway strikes and ends with the aftermath from his Jimmy Reid Memorial Lecture on 24 October 2024 entitled ‘The working class is back?’. Data collection comprised publicly available texts: 22 speeches at rallies or events ranging approximately 2–60 minutes; 16 newspaper/magazine interviews; and 73 television and radio interviews/appearances ranging approximately 4–60 minutes. I listened to/watched the original recordings of all interviews and speeches to fully immerse myself in the context, tone and delivery of the rhetoric being employed. I selected for analysis those scripts that explicitly included the word ‘class’ since this term served as the point of identification and interpellation. This included Lynch’s speeches at RMT, other trade union or workers’ rallies during industrial unrest and the Cost-of-Living Crisis, alongside media interviews, mostly from outlets agreeable to highlighting critical perspectives or politically left-leaning (e.g. Hard Talk, Novara Media, PoliticsJOE, The News Agents). I excluded shorter media interviews from neutral or hostile media outlets where he referred to ‘workers’ rather than the ‘working-class’.

Rhetorical analysis first involves examining the speaker, purpose, audience and context to set the interpretive lens for the argument being made (Billig, 1996). The concentration of selected texts around unionist, left-wing and worker audiences demonstrated Lynch’s focus on reawakening the working-class consciousness of trade unionists and activists. This is important in the context of UK trade unions veering from their class axis, which Lynch, as a left-wing activist, was seeking to redirect. Texts within this period pertained to the railway dispute and to expressions of solidarity with other collective disputes (e.g. BMA), broader social movements (e.g. EiE) and political issues. As such, Lynch framed various identity fields depending on the context. A key part of constitutive rhetoric is demarcating the ‘we’ versus ‘they’ (Seitz and Tennant, 2016). My interpretation of the data considered the shifting identity positionalities; for example when antagonists were labelled as the Government, or capital as the owners of production, and thenceforth how those identities were contrasted with the ‘we’ (RMT members, left-wing unionists, other union members from less left-wing unions or the public) being constituted in different texts. To understand the meaning of the references to class, I analysed data through a hermeneutic circle, moving between individual sections and the totality of the text they belonged to, to that text’s relationship with the whole body of collated texts, and back to individual texts and sections.

Second, rhetorical analysis involves examining both the appeals and linguistic devices used in support of the argument being made (Billig, 1996). In this case, the appeal under analysis is constitutive rhetoric rather than classical appeals of persuasion (reason, emotion or character). Charland’s (1987) outline of constitutive rhetoric provides a coding structure corresponding to the three key ideological effects. I deductively coded the data to identify where Lynch was attempting to constitute the subject as the ‘working-class’, where he was positing the working-class as a transhistorical subject and where he was attempting to establish the illusion of freedom and telos. I then coded the linguistic devices he utilised within each of these three ideological effects. Based on Charland’s (1987) technique of analysis, this included examining Lynch’s particular use of pronouns, language, narratives and rearticulation (resolving contradictions) in defining and positioning subject identities. I then extended the analysis to identify how dissensus (Rancière, 2010) also appeared within Lynch’s constitutive rhetoric.

Third, given the focus of analysis was on what constitutes the ‘working-class’, I inductively coded the overall features and qualities Lynch bestowed on the collective subject in each of the three ideological effects.

Findings

Constituting a collective subject: The working-class

First, Lynch often implicitly constitutes his audiences into a collective subject using both collective nouns and differentiation: ‘all of the workers’ and ‘the whole working-class community’ (EiE Rally, London, 10 January 2022); ‘The super-rich are getting richer and richer, year after year. The workers are getting poorer, year on year’ (RMT Rally, London, 25 June 2022).

By process of elimination, he invites listeners who work and do not recognise themselves as the super-rich to categorise themselves as workers (plural). He also attempts to move the audience beyond identifying with experiences of unequal economic capital towards explicitly identifying class in relational terms. In Lynch’s narratives, a Marxist interpretation of class as an economic relationship pervades, with the ruling-class identified as employers, business owners, oligarchs (including the owners of the media) and the Conservative Party (both as the Government and a public sector employer) – all positioned as opposite identities and antagonists:

it’s that the interest of the owner, the owning class, is in opposition to the people that are making the wealth on their behalf. (PoliticsJOE, 12 September 2023)

We are in a class struggle now. If your conditions are being attacked, if your pay is being attacked, if your jobs are being stripped from you, you are in a class struggle. And there are people over there, in that Parliament, who are meant to be on our side, who have got to answer the question, ‘Which side are you on? Are you going to be with us? Or are you going to sit on the sidelines, while these Tories butcher the working-class all over this country?’ (We Demand Better Rally, London, 18 June 2022)

Of note, Lynch uses ‘we’ when addressing varying audiences including his own union members, other union members and the working public (in public rallies and the media). The use of the personal pronoun ‘we’ rather than ‘you’ invites the audience to identify with the speaker and other audience members, constituting a collective identity. In many texts, he questions the interests of the Labour Party whom he identifies as ‘you’ above: a potential ally but not part of the ‘we’. Defining class as interest-based and relational is important since only then can a struggle be justified; the idea of struggle positions the working-class as a legitimate socio-political actor who can fight back defensively with or without the support of Labour as a mainstream political party.

To neutralise any fear or hesitancy in identifying as the working-class, Lynch at times challenges the neoliberal consensus that to do so is to label the self as Marxist:

Class conflict is every day . . . You don’t have to be a Marxist to know you’re experiencing it. If they’re cutting your pay, taking your job, cutting your pension, your holidays, taking your sick pay in order to make more profit, you are in a class situation, whether you like it or not. (Jacobin, 6 October 2022).

Accordingly, Lynch positions the working-class as the everyday worker, not an outlying extremist; he presents tangible, relatable and normalised experiences with which the audience can identify. He calls the audience to become aware that class can be a concealed identity. The rhetorical address, ‘whether you like it or not’, acknowledges some audience members are hesitant to engage in this identification, but he presents class identity as factual rather than optional. Thereby he attempts to interpellate the audience as working-class through revelation rather than just invite identification.

He further informs the audience that the working-class has always existed (there is a priori acceptance of the collective identity) but Margaret Thatcher (UK Conservative Prime Minister 1979–1990) and subsequent UK Governments destroyed the idea of working-class existence through a philosophy of neoliberalism and hyper-individualism:

so when the economics of the world told us that the reason you’re poor is cause you’re bad, people went along with it . . . but her achievement is . . . she’s broken the idea of solidarity, she’s broken the idea in many ways of class consciousness, economically and politically. (Novara Media, 19 June 2024)

Last year Grant Shapps, remember him? He’s still around, lurking around all these buildings round here, running the Government . . . trying to ban the working-class. (Walkout Wednesday Rally, London, 1 February 2023)

Here Lynch places a negative value on individualism since it ascribes fault and moral judgement on individual people. He explicitly challenges hegemony and gives the audience an explanation for why they may not have hitherto recognised themselves as working-class. By ascribing this to powerful economic and political forces of both yesteryear and today, he invites the audience to see how they have continued to be manipulated through time. The antagonists break, ban and lurk: actions associated with insidious motivations towards the collective. Thus, he invites the audience to recognise that banning the idea of class is oppressive. This is an important emancipatory step: first, Lynch attempts to free the audience from what he sees as continuous ideological manipulation; second, by interpellating a banned class identity, those who were invisible emerge.

Constituting a collective subject: Who is the working-class?

Lynch further challenges the consensus on prejudices about the working-class as a social identity: ‘what I was pleased about, we were able to cut through the cliches . . . [of] a lot of . . . journalists maybe under 50 . . . that they’ve been taught that working-class people are chavs’ (The News Agents, 13 February 2024). Here Lynch negates the fear of being labelled a ‘chav’, an insult indicating someone’s dress, speech, behaviour and lack of education. He also challenges the traditional stereotype of the working-class as blue collar:

It’s about where you are in the economic structure, so if you sell your labour you are working-class. You could be a barrister and be working-class and over the last two years many people who thought they weren’t working-class suddenly discovered they were. (The News Agents, 13 February 2024)

By incorporating into the working-class those who had internalised neoliberalist doctrines around human capital development, individual responsibility and labour market integration, Lynch attempts to reduce the value placed on individualism and occupational identity. While barristers are relatively high-earners, in the UK they are classified as self-employed and face increasing financial precariousness with below-inflation pay rates and under-payment in proportion to the amount of work carried out. Barristers have only taken industrial action twice in recent UK history, in 2014 and in 2022, the latter at the same time railway workers were also striking. Lynch therefore proclaims a revelatory and growing class consciousness within and between disparate occupations. In his portrayal, class is not a stratification but is fundamentally structural; class identity supersedes occupational identity. Indeed, Lynch brings people of different economic status into one community:

Now if you become a successful trades person . . . you’re likely to move out and live a separate life to the rest of the working-class, whereas in those days you were probably likely to be leading working-class communities, you’d be active in the Tenants Association, active in the Labour Party, active in the social club . . . I think that’s the separation that somehow . . . working-class culture is different from an educated culture . . . communities become splintered and fractured. (Novara Media, 19 June 2024)

Utilising historical narrative as a positive exemplar, he challenges the education-classed perspective and at once shows how people of different capitals (e.g. Bourdieu) have been, and can in future be, one community. He juxtaposes the past reality of community with the present reality of social division, attempting to move the audience from fear of the present ‘splintered’ existence towards desire for regaining community.

His view of the working-class is also inclusive of other social identities and interest groups. He challenges the traditional stereotype of the British working-class population as white. Here, he utilises the past as a negative exemplar. Reflecting on the Thatcher era of de-industrialisation and what he terms a ‘plot’ to ‘break working-class culture’ he states:

there were a lot of problems in working-class communities with racism and homophobia and all sorts of stuff, and a slightly closed mind, but it shattered us and we’re still trying to recover ‘What is our culture?’, ‘What do we believe in as working people?’, ‘What binds us together?’ (A Celtic State of Mind, 24 October 2024)

Lynch often acknowledges and calls out the racism, sexism and homophobia of many UK working-class cultures from the 1970s–1980s, which centred in industrialised, mainly white male, working populations. While he positions the UK Conservative Government as breaking the solidarity of the previous culture, this existential hiatus does give Lynch an opportunity to break with this past and consider how working-class culture might be experienced and redefined within contemporary society. His rhetorical questions point to an existential crisis but also offer the audience an opportunity to participate in the dialogue and offer narrative closure as they respond. There is an opportunity to reject the inheritance of negative values and reconstitute today’s working-class as a more inclusive collective body utilising the social identities of the audience. Concurrently, he often reframes inequality as a structural issue, transposing the role of antagonist to capitalists rather than the working-class; for example, he calls out the ‘institutionalised racism’ of outsourced zero hours contracts (PoliticsJOE, 12 September 2023). He continues to reflect the audiences’ many social identities by using inclusive statements:

We are a rainbow, we come from all over the world and everyone is welcome in this country who wants to earn their living. No worker is illegal. (RMT Rally, London, 25 June 2022)

We’ve got to . . . build a new working-class movement based on all our interest groups; the disability groups, the identity groups, the people struggling against poverty have all got to be brought into the working-class movement. (RMT Save Ticket Offices Rally, London, 31 August 2023)

we’re going to organise in every church, every town hall, every mosque, every gurdwara, every temple, anywhere the workers are we will be there. (The People’s Assembly, London, 6 November 2022)

He repeats the phraseology about reaching into different religious communities in many of his speeches. In one interview, he explains how gatherings for EiE were hosted in religious buildings:

I thought this is brilliant. We’re actually going into temples bringing people from the white community into a mosque, never been in one before, and hearing trade unionists and others . . . and me speaking about political issues and then the Imam would come out and say ‘I’m not getting involved but you’re all very welcome to be here’ and I thought this was a breakthrough. The same happened in the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool. Loads of people from every community coming out and that’s what a workers’ movement has got to be . . . if you went around asking people individually what they believed or where they worshiped, you’ll never get people together . . . You’ve got to leave some of that at the door. (A Celtic State of Mind, 24 October 2024).

In his narrative, he challenges the focus on division based on social identity and advocates unification based on worker interest. To further encourage identification, Lynch challenges people’s perception of his own social identity. His personal narrative often includes openly discussing his Irish identity though speaking with an English accent. While no longer practising, he points to his religious (Roman Catholic) upbringing and migrant family identity, his Irish parents having settled in London, and how he grew up in a multicultural area with immigrants from other countries. He charts his professional journey from being a construction worker, railway worker, up to being General Secretary (RMT) where he acknowledges his high salary but still feels he is a ‘working-class bloke’ (Good Morning Britain, 22 June 2022). Thus, he presents himself as an embodiment of various social identities and the inclusive working-class.

Transhistorical subject: The working-class movement

Lynch often uses the prefix ‘re-’ to signify that the working-class existed in the past but needs to be reconstituted in the present: ‘Let’s rebuild the working-class movement and rebuild our members’ working-class lives in our communities’ (Trade Union Congress Fringe Event, Liverpool, 11 September 2023). He also generates consubstantiality between the living and the dead to endow the working-class with the interests of previous generations:

Well working-class people have always had to fight. Our welfare state and our NHS, unemployment benefit, sickness benefit, were not given to us as gifts by the rich, by the ruling-class if you want to put it that way. We had to fight for them from the time of the Chartists, we had to fight for universal suffrage, we had to fight to get MPs paid in the House of Commons so working-class people could go there. Everything that we’ve gained, whether it’s a collective agreement in a company or the nature of the welfare state has had to be fought for through struggle. And if we give up our terms and conditions we’ll be back to another era, to a Victorian or Edwardian era before any of us had sick pay, and many millions of people in this country are now in that condition which is why many people are not just poor, many of them are actually going into destitution. (Hard Talk, 13 February 2023)

The use of collective pronouns such as ‘we’ transcends the limitations of individuality at any historical moment; historicising is inherently collectivising as the speaker makes connections between the dead (e.g. Chartists) and the living speaker/audience. The choice to use the National Health Service (NHS) as an example, established in 1948 but in financial crisis in the 2020s, effectively links past and present. Critically, the telos is indicated: being a class is not just a group, it is a political movement, as the Chartists were. In many speeches Lynch mentions ‘heritage’, something that he recognises as critical in endowing the audience with identity, purpose, obligation and a repertoire of actions for the present and future. If the working-class fought and won tangible gains in the past, they must and can do so again today. To not do so is to give up these hard-won gains and regress. Therefore, there is no option to stand still; movement and action are required.

Illusion of freedom: The telos

Lynch offers an ending to his working-class narrative, which, if his audience recognises themselves as being addressed, must be fulfilled by the collective subject. He has specific instructions for the working-class, positioning himself and the audience as one collective body with personal pronouns such as ‘we’ and ‘our’. The first is for the working-class to believe in themselves as a collective power base:

we’ve got to get back to the idea that we believe in unity, that we believe in solidarity, that we are one class and it’s in our interest to act as a class. We are not just consumers; we are not just the subject of the algorithm; we’ve got a part to play in the way that the world works, and I believe we can build a better world than the one we’ve got and I think the future’s in our hands. (Merthyl Tydfil Memorial Lecture, Wales, 4 November 2024)

Above Lynch uses traditional trade union slogans such as ‘unity’ and ‘solidarity’ but recognises he must add a fresh interpretation of what these mean in contemporary contexts. He recognises the need to initiate a move away from neoliberalist identifications as passive ‘consumers’ and as a powerless ‘subject of the algorithm’. He instils the audience’s belief in the agency of the collective identity by explicitly indicating instrumentality (‘we’ve got a part to play’), efficacy (‘I believe we can’), purpose (‘we can build a better world’) and an invitation to act (‘the future’s in our hands’).

Second, rather than leave ambiguity and uncertainty about how the collective should act, Lynch moves an audience from inertia to action. He sympathises and acknowledges an audience may be uncertain and draws them inside the dialogue with a rhetorical question, ‘So what do we do?’ As soon as an audience member recognises this question is aimed at them, they acknowledge being addressed as the working-class. Here he gives explicit calls to action:

So what do we do? . . . it’s no good just coming to these rallies on a nice day. We have to keep working at this every day. It starts in your workplace. Every single one of you. If you’re not in a union, join a union today. When you’re in the union, get everyone in your workplace in that union. Bring all of those workers into activity, bring that activity into campaigning, and bring that campaigning into industrial action, if we need it, right across our society in every nation and every sector of our industries. Let’s bring it on and let’s show them that we’re here. We are the working-class and we are back as a force in this society. (EiE Rally, London, 10 January 2022)

Lynch depicts the working-class not as a state or an identity to be called on periodically but as a movement and everyday act of being. Again, using the collective pronoun ‘we’, he specifies that the working-class is a collective identity and a necessary part of that identity is to join trade unions, evangelise, campaign and participate in industrial action, all things possible and achievable in the real world. The phrase ‘we are back as a force in this society’ confirms a pre-existent historical collective identity, ascribes power and agency to that identity and generates belief that if they were a force before they can be again. Altogether, this serves to generate self-efficacy for an audience but also rebounds to further prescribe what it means to be the working-class: for Lynch, it means to be part of the trade union movement.

Speaking before the UCU, which Ackers (2015) might categorise as a professional association, Lynch identifies the working-class, instilling a sense of urgency for re-politicisation:

And it’s also clear that the agents of that change are the organised working-class. We cannot wait for somebody else to deliver for us, we cannot wait for policy makers, professional politicians, the people that have put us here in the first place, to come and save us . . . We are the people and we are going to fight back. (UCU Rally, London, 30 November 2022)

Using the collective pronoun ‘we’, he is clear that trade union members are the ‘organised working-class’ and that the working-class must present as a political actor. Lynch confirms:

When we were out campaigning, this is Enough is Enough, we were trying to provoke the idea of class politics. (A Celtic State of Mind, 24 October 2024)

The idea that political struggle is separated from Trade union struggle has got to end. (Novara Media, 19 June 2024)

The idea that ‘class politics’ needs to be provoked signals dissensus. Indeed, he strives to move trade union audiences away from a self-conception that they should be limited to a market-oriented outlook. He engenders sustainable motivation by setting aspirational goals. He prescribes actionable instructions for trade unions to campaign for a ‘working-class agenda’ (Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union, Ireland, 22 November 2023). In the UK he states this involves lobbying for legislative change for the enhancement of collective employment rights; for example, union recognition, recruitment and the right to strike, and the repeal of anti-trade union legislation. However, he also constitutes the working-class as in international movement: ‘I believe that the trade union movement . . . as an international body, as an independent working-class movement, fighting for progress, fighting for peace, fighting for justice in the world, can play its part’ (SIPTU, Ireland, 22 November 2023).

Ultimately then, to be working-class means to move beyond the everyday lived experience of the employment relationship. It means to be a force of power within a struggle for global social justice: to be an active, agentic, political, progressive and international class.

Concluding discussion

This article contributes to literature on how working-class identity can be reconstituted through activist rhetoric by refocusing our attention on ideology as ‘the study of language in the social world’ (Thompson, 1983: 163). Althusser (1971: 162) argues that ideology is distortive as it represents ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’. Laclau (2005, 2014) further specifies that rhetoric is utilised to continually construct identities and that these identities are unstable and contingent; ‘class’ is an empty signifier imposing a cognitive structure that belies reality.

Arguably, Lynch’s constitution of the working-class (the exploited collective within an economic relationship but also an agentic cooperative of different professions and social identities with a shared interest in challenging structural inequality) is an empty signifier. The Marxist interpretation of economic and relational class has been critiqued as inaccurately depicting contemporary socio-economic relations (Harrits and Pedersen, 2018). In Bourdieuan approaches, primacy is given to classed experiences and habitus, while contemporary workers may identify more readily with socio-cultural or occupational identities (Carstensen et al., 2022). Nonetheless, findings confirm that Lynch uses all three ideological effects of Charland’s (1987) constitutive rhetoric and thereby presents the audience’s working-class identity as extra-rhetorical. The audience is not explicitly ‘persuaded to be a subject but rather one is “always already” the collective subject’ (Charland, 1987: 141).

The analysis identifies specific rhetorical techniques Lynch used to produce the three ideological effects, thereby contributing to our understanding of how contemporary constitutive rhetoric is employed in practice. While constitutive rhetoric was originally theorised in relation to new identities, this study extends the concept to show how it can be utilised to motivate identification with a desirable, reimagined, ‘lost’ identity within contemporary contexts. Lynch’s use of transhistoricity to narrativise historical episodes and synthesise disparate events over time and space allows him to evidence a continuing class identity over past and present. The restored concept of class is made desirable because it enables people to interpret inequalities as resultant from structural injustice rather than personal failings (Skeggs and Loveday, 2012), countering neoliberal individualisation. Lynch rejects the inheritance of negative values and reconstitutes the working-class as an inclusive movement but also endows this present-day working-class with desirable qualities from historical working-classes: agency, power and purpose. These qualities counter political rhetoric, which positions the working-class as a ‘white blockage to modernity’ and ‘literally useless, as a group as inept as they are dysfunctional’ (Skeggs, 2003: 94).

Resultantly, the findings contribute to literature on resistance and dissensus against neoliberal hegemony. Bourdieu (2000: 198) argues that symbolic violence is most effective when the dominant and dominated share an understanding of superior and inferior positionalities based on lived realities rather than a conscious subjection to ideology; submission happens without ‘deliberation and decision’. Symbolic violence therefore largely remains a form of ‘hidden persuasion’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 168). Bourdieu’s work, however, can be critiqued as overly deterministic and pessimistic (Sayer, 2017). The dominated accept their inferior position with little reflexivity and reproduce it in their habitus. Yet Bourdieu (1993: 14) recognises that symbolic violence is a form of power that can rest on ‘misrecognition of the mechanisms on which it is based’ where we accept the dominant group’s classification as legitimate and ignore the social and economic structures of inequality. Resistance can therefore be formed through an awakening of this misrecognition where political discourse involves a struggle to maintain or transform both the vision and objective reality of the social world. Following Bourdieu, this might arise where an oppositional discourse refers to an objective crisis (e.g. the Cost-of-Living Crisis) and when people perceive the crisis not as individual misfortune but resulting from social processes.

The question then is how such a perception can be generated. In answer, findings here affirm what Seitz and Tennant (2016: 110) call ‘Rancièrian constitutive rhetoric’. For Rancière, Bourdieuan fatalism underestimates the ability of the dominated to engage in critical reflection and for new meanings and worldviews to arise through discourse. It indicates, but underestimates, how oppositional discourse can itself generate moral emotions to motivate reflexivity (Sayer, 2017). Accordingly, it underestimates the extent of ideological conflict and how rhetoric is the purposeful linguistic medium by which the contestation of ideas takes place (Billig, 1996). Sayer (2017) argues oppositional political discourse and naming are important in breaking the doxa to ‘create a new commonsense’. I demonstrate that Rancièrian constitutive rhetoric is a key mechanism for naming and reconstructing working-class identity. To be emancipatory, dissensus includes both identification and disidentification, where the illegitimate shake off their prescribed role as the silent and invisible to emerge as a legitimate political identity that cannot be ignored (Rancière, 2010; Seitz and Tennant, 2016). This is critical because for political action to be a possibility, it first requires identity positions to be authored within a discourse (Althusser, 1971).

Relatedly, this study then answers calls to ‘bring unions back into the analytical focus’ in relation to ideational power (Refslund and Arnholtz, 2022: 1970). Labour power resources incorporate structural, institutional, associational and ideational or discursive power (Refslund and Arnholtz, 2022; Schmalz et al., 2018). The findings demonstrate that trade unions can act as agents of dissensus, re-politicising the workplace and authoring political identities to be enacted in the real world. For Lynch, the working-class has both a material and ideological reality. Thus, the ability to organise (associative power) and mobilise collective action (structural power) is present, yet it is through rhetoric (discursive or ideational power) that misrecognition is overcome, hegemony contested and a shared sense of comradeship can be formed as the prerequisite for organisation and mobilisation. Through the telos, he constitutes achievable acts of being to affirm this identity in the social world: join trade unions, evangelise and campaign as political agents.

Nevertheless, his rhetorical appeals were contextually situated in a period when workers from various industries were striking concurrently alongside public demonstrations against the Cost-of-Living and the run-up to a general election, all with high levels of media coverage. This enabled him to connect the experiences of his own union members to a heterogeneous audience; for his narratives to be disseminated to the wider public with high resonance. Without trade unions continuing to actively create shared spaces in the material world for different elements of the working-class (various professions, unions and socio-cultural backgrounds) to coexist, communicate and engage in collective action in future, Lynch’s working-class may become a contingent reality.