When people think of architects images of a be-wigged Christopher Wren come to mind. Or there is the image of a corrupt businessman like John Poulson. For tens of thousands of workers and their families it is an image of a faceless designer who throughout the fifties and sixties packed them into wind-swept concrete slums many of which are currently being blown up.
However, images aside, there is one characteristic about architects which is generally forgotten, namely, that most are members of the working class. Of course Sunday Telegraph editorials like to portray them as members of a fictional "middle class”, as do the academic textbooks written by sociologists, a sect who are to capitalism what the Schoolmen were to feudalism.
But architects are workers whether they like it or not. because they are employed by those who own and control the architectural practices. These employers buy the architect’s mental and physical abilities to design and supervise the construction of a building exactly in the same way as a contractor buys the labour power of a bricklayer, a carpenter or a ground-worker. So in terms of the production and distribution of commodities architects are just a small constituent in what Marx called the "Collective Labourer". When put to work this collective workforce creates value and, through its exploitation by the capitalist, surplus-value in the form of commodities which are then sold on the market for a profit.
As workers, architects' ability to sell their labour-power to an employer is dependent upon trade conditions. In a boom there is no problem, and workers can obtain higher wages and better working conditions since their employers do not want production disrupted thereby jeopardising profits. But in a trade depression workers are expendable because the employers, in finding that their commodities are not selling, find that it is unprofitable to exploit the workers’ labour. Some workers are lucky in these conditions and retain their job. others are laid-off or made redundant. Such is the precarious existence for workers under capitalism.
The building industry is in a depression at the moment. Irrespective of whether people need houses—being forced to live with parents or friends, or in bed-sits and hostels, or to squat or sleep rough—if developers. whose only concern is profit and capital accumulation, find that they cannot sell the commodities that their houses and flats are they curtail production. They will either invest their capital elsewhere or, if they have over-produced, they will go bankrupt through not being able to meet their creditors' demands on time.
Sacked
As a result of the present depression in the building industry many architectural practices have found work hard to come by, particularly those which were working for large house-builders and speculators in the City or Docklands. Bankrupt developers and capital moving out into sectors with higher rates of profit show that the owners of these businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to exploit their workforce. According to a recent report in the Architect's Journal (September 1990):
The swiftness and severity of downturn in workload has alarmed many. In post-boom London and the South-East some practices are facing oblivion.The report also cites a Department of Environment figure which claims:
an 18 per cent fall in construction orders during the second quarter compared to 1989—the most dramatic decline for a quarter of a century.The Architect's Journal in a telephone poll of 78 architectural practices found that employers had laid-off 133 architects in the last six months. During the next six months it believed that "another 55 redundancies are expected" in these offices. Over at the Royal Institute of British Architects, a business club which represents the class interests of those who own and control architectural practices. Tim Pritchard of the RIBA Appointment Bureau exclaimed:
Some practices simply have no one left to sack. We're hearing now of practices on the ropes: they are down to the partners and the next stop will be to wind-up. Virtually every large firm is sacking: the effects are beginning to ripple North.
Bearing in mind that many architects see themselves divorced from the working class and the "operatives’’ on the building sites, it is tempting to have little sympathy for their current misfortune. Unemployment is a ruthless leveller. Now architects are having to join the ranks of the unemployed. They are in good company because Wren was sacked by his employers too. And, as they go through the humiliating and degrading experience of the Unemployment Office, they might like to reflect upon exactly what class they really belong to. Propertyless and dependent upon a wage or salary they fall fairly and squarely into the working class: the majority within a class-divided society.
With a good deal of humility, rather than aligning their interests with those of a hostile class they might also like to consider, along with the rest of our class, the urgent need for workers to take conscious political action in pursuit of their class interests to abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism.
Socialism will be a society which values design, construction and production for the pleasure these give and the use to which society can put them in meeting men's and women's needs. Architects will find this infinitely more rewarding than the way capitalism currently exploits them for its own profitable ends as disposable commodities on an unpredictable and anarchic world market.
Richard Lloyd
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