The Middle Class...

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chlamor
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The Middle Class...

Post by chlamor » Thu Nov 23, 2017 4:01 am

Original Thread Here:

http://www.thebellforum.net/Bell2/www.t ... tml?t=9422

The Middle Class...

The original American reference to a "middle class" probably comes from Britain. It referred, as on the continent, to the propertied but untitled yeomanry of the countryside, the rising burghers in the cities, and the mercantile classes as a whole. It was an accurate naming. What was to become the bourgeoisie really did originally stand between the aristocracy and the property-less classes.

The next stage in this evolution was the rise of the absolute monarchies with the former middle class becoming a major, and sometimes equal, pillar of the state, alongside the aristocracy (the "Third Estate" in France, as an example). In Britain, this evolution was stillborn in many ways because the British bourgeoisie came to power much earlier than in many other countries (in the Civil War of 1648). The English bourgeoisie followed regicide with a “restoration” of a slavish monarchy, and then merged the old aristocracy with itself. Large estates became alienable, titles could be bought and sold, and the monarchical institutions became largely ceremonial. In turn, the middle class "gentlemen" of the 18th century really were an income tier - possessing enough property to avoid the coarser trades but lacking the wherewithal to buy title and transcendence. The Americas were colonized by such... or at least the local power descended from such.

At this point, the meaning of middle-class diverges. On the Continent, the middle-class came to be a description of the mass of small property holders, owning their own means of production but typically employing only their own labor or perhaps a handful of others and even that, often seasonally. This is the infamous "petite-bourgeoisie" and it owed its infamy to its instability. Aspiring to raise itself within the ranks of the property owners on the one hand, it was continuously expropriated and diminished in numbers on the other. The story of the next 100 years of European history is precisely that story.

In Britain, a similar process transpired, but with two counteracting influences. Just as in Europe, the lands were "cleared" and the small holders were expropriated, but at the same time the British mercantile monopolies bore fruit. A worldwide colonial empire was transformed into the engine of capital accumulation and its essential product was the industrial revolution. In both cases, it was not just a vast army of proletarians who were created but also a sea of unusually skilled “labor aristocrats”, specialists, managers, colonial officials, minor civil servants, and professionals of every type and description. This was more a new social stratum than a class, but it echoed some of the perspectives of that which came before it, and it was dependent on and wedded to the social system of Empire. It was not so much that the proceeds of Indian labor went to London bank clerks, as it was that Indian banks were located in London… certainly their management and their hierarchy of favored positions was located in London. This is the genesis of the transformation of the British middle-class, from a continental to an Imperial definition.

That British middle-class, the source of endless political stability and social philistinism, lasted as long as the Empire and industrial ascendancy did. The bankruptcy of that Empire after WW2 and its rapid dismantling also ended the rein of middle-class politics. Politics, in turn, was just a reflection of the decomposition of the “class”, itself. While middle-class nostalgia was producing Thatcher Tories, the British standard of living was falling to the same level as that of Italy or Portugal. Today, few such illusions remain, although a “New” Britain has risen in the nexus of EU and American economics.

With this allegory in mind, it is possible to look at America. While, the origin of the term may be British, for most of its history, the American middle-class went by a Continental definition. America was a “middle-class” country from its inception… built on “free” land (in the dual sense… i.e. also “freed” from its former inhabitants). As late as the decades after the Civil War, 70% of the population owned their own means of production, even if it was modest in most cases. The subsequent transformation of that status was partly the operation of the very same forces as we have already described and partly the result of the flood of European immigrants, recently freed from their property. Daveparts has referred to the backwardness of rural America in the 1930s. On this, he is quite right. In approximately 60 years, the population of freeholders fell from 70% to less than 10%. It is less than 5% today, once the various tax schemes and contractor rackets are abstracted away. The story of America before the War is the story of The Grapes of Wrath and in no way could the U.S. be accurately described as a “middle-class country”.

So what has changed, since? Was it FDR, the New Deal, Democrats… a new “Enlightenment” perhaps? In fact, it was a positive outcome to the Second World War. What Britain lost, the U.S. inherited. And among that inheritance was a new definition for “middle-class”, adopted from the English. Social mobility, the movement up the division of labor, a certain level of prosperity, advancement through education… and all of it made possible from industrial ascendancy and the fact that Indian banks were now located in New York. The end of that era comes with globalization. It makes little difference whether the new era produces a new capitalist competition or whether the very success of American Empire relocates Indian banks to India. The inevitable result will be the decomposition of the American middle-class and there is not a single political perspective which promises otherwise. It is the division of misery in the decline that is in question.

I don’t agree with Chlamor that there is a physical shortage of physical material which prevents a generalization of middle-class prosperity worldwide. But, once past that disagreement, the argument is moot because he might as well be right. Capitalism does not elevate… it expropriates and impoverishes. Its urban slums and shanty towns are a step down from the rural, quasi-capitalist material it begins with. Worldwide, it expropriates wealth from the many instead of creating “prosperity”. It is only in microcosm that it appears otherwise.

On PopI, there are some charts on postwar income in the U.S. which I can’t currently find but which I will look for again. They divide U.S. income into a hierarchy of 10 tiers, each representing 10% of the population, and then project that income forward from WW2. For something like 20 years, the top seven or eight of the ten reach upwards… until they stall in the 1960s and 70s. After that, one after another, the next highest tier stagnates… sometimes even falls… until only a couple of tiers continue to advance. Meanwhile, the “lifestyle” is temporarily maintained through two incomes, and then through huge debt and home equity loans, followed by the first general drop in home ownership and the first general reversal of “liquidity” in a generation. The story is straightforward.

All attempts to paint the existence of the middle-class as an aspect of “politics” or policy, positively or negatively, are simply wrong. The "middle-class" is a historically created, changing, and ultimately decomposing social structure which is no more a permanent part of America than Conestoga Wagons or the railroads.

==================

Wasn't the British "middle class" a "middle" class only in some kind of technical, hierarchical sense? The Brit Mid Class really took over the functional position of the "Upper Class", right? And the American upper classes, for political reasons, called themselves "Middle Class", when in actuality they were Upper class. The romance of the American middle class was what Adams and Washington and Hamilton and the like were all about. Jefferson even feigned a middle class sensibility at times (although that sensibility had to eventually be beaten into the Southern aristocracy). I understand your historical breakdown and agree with it, completely, but at least in the USA, there is a real sense of unreality to it all; a "play-acting", both upwards and downwards, that causes a great deal of skepticism from a lot of persons.

This also, in part, holds true for the Brit Mid Class - in that they became the ruling class - which makes their "middle" status at least suspect in a certain light.

On edit: "The "middle-class" is a historically created, changing, and ultimately decomposing social structure which is no more a permanent part of America than Conestoga Wagons or the railroads."

I guess this is what I was getting at. The idea of a "Middle Class" seems so "trumped-up" and utilitarian as a concept that it makes for skepticism.

- Dhal

=====================

Later...

The technical middle class is an artifact of the Victorian Age.

At first, the British bourgeoisie were a despised and oppressed class-let under feudalism. Then they became the source of cash for the monarchy, separate from the proceeds of royal lands (the King had originally been just another Lord). When Britain went to sea, the English bourgeoisie largely displaced the gentry as the military class. Eventually, they took power. The largest of the British capitalists merged with the defeated aristocracy... in many cases, quite literally. One of the first profitable businesses after the Civil War for the unemployed aristocracy was the production of offspring for marriage and the transfer of hereditary title. The smaller bourgeois became the new "middle-class", now supplemented by paid employees (if privileged ones) of the larger capitalists, and these were supplemented in turn by a rising number of specialists. Eventually, after the Industrial Revolution, the term described highly paid employees almost exclusively through the elimination of most independent proprietors, though technical progressions provided some opportunities for moving up the class ladder. The original class had been revolutionary and in competition with their "betters". The reconstructed one, which was mostly not a class at all, was absolutely slavish in its loyalty and was the mainspring of Empire.

The American Brits were "middle-class" in the original sense: landed, propertied, but untitled. So too were the bulk, perhaps even a majority, of the original population, although they held much lesser property. But in America, there was no landed gentry... the term was a nonsensical import, more significant for what you mention than as for anything else.

The unreality of it all is inevitable. A new, faux middle-class is declared just as the old, real one is destroyed.

But the real innovation was the scale of it all... in Britain and America. Such a middle-class exists in every capitalist country. The difference with these two was that it was declared to exist as even a majority of the population. It takes a lot of bodies to administer an Empire, it seems.

- anaxarchos

====================


So the current designation, "Middle Class", in this country means what, at this point in social development? Can we talk about the "real" "middle" group of our current society? Is there an actual, coherent grouping that could be called "the middle"? It seems to my "worm's perspective" that there are only two classes of any real substance. I know people who insist that they are "Middle Class" without being able to define what that means. When I point out to them that even though they live in a "MacMansion", in a stylish subdivision, they are paying a mortgage or if they have managed to pay off their mortgage, their property only has value as a sales item or as collateral for further loans - the payment of which cannot come from any proceeds or profits of said property. This hardly seems "Middle Class" to me. When I point out to them that they, too, are living paycheck to paycheck (even if the paycheck is large and their lifestyle elevated, they do not appreciate my insight. They act as though I had insulted them.

When we talk about "the middle" in this society, at this time, who are we speaking of?

I seem to be having a particularly difficult time with this issue.

OK, so the middle class, historically, first arose, growing in the unoccupied spaces between the titled aristocracy and the bound serfs in late medieval Europe. They found a niche where they could serve the Lords and accrue wealth. But their coherence as a "class" was never of the same kind as either of the other major classes - especially across international boundaries. Correct? Is the middle classes more likely to be "nationalistic" than either of the others? Is that why they "fit" so neatly into imperial service? The "Lower" classes had a certain solidarity of condition and position; the titled classes were connected by marriage and blood, education and position. But the "middle" was less connected to foreign members of the middle - even to middles in their own country because of the competition? Is this even remotely on point? Or have I "wondered off" again?

- Dhal

=======================

You are conflating the two "middle classes"...

The original was quite the opposite of how you describe them. The atomic unit of feudalism was the feudal estate. Within it, there was a largely self-sufficient order based on a perfect hierarchy of Lords, sub-Lords, armed men, squires and overseers - all living by the labor of the largest class in feudal society, the serfs. The serfs owned the land or were owned by it... take your pick. Land was not alienable. It mostly could not be bought and sold. In truth, few things could be bought and sold.

The serfs were obliged to work the land and they owed some part of either their labor or the product of their labor to the Lord. This surplus labor or surplus product was "surplus" in the same way as surplus value... i.e. it was the amount over and above that which it took to reproduce the serfs themselves. As with modern day wages, in part this was set by a physical minimum and in part by historical circumstances. In any case, the whole was largely a closed system. Very little of the product of the feudal estate was bought and sold, and little interaction existed between the estates. Wealth was in land and serfs; not in money. Add continuous warfare and raiding, totally arbitrary rules within each estate, a very complex set of "rights and obligations" negotiated and renegotiated over centuries, a second equivalent hierarchy (the Church) checker-boarded with the first, the complete absence of national "feeling" or loyalty or culture of any type, and we have the rosy dawn of chivalry.

What changed to move this mess was that eventually the feudal wars died down and large scale trade, which had been dormant since the end of Rome, began to reemerge. This trade was the province of "private individuals", merchants and small producers, who were outside of the feudal system, both figuratively and physically. They lived in towns which were not part of any estate and they were allowed to exist because it suited the landed aristocracy. In general, they traded or produced what the estates could not produce for themselves. Trade begat profits, profits begat capital, capital extended both trade and production, a part of the feudal surplus started to be converted into money (sold) so that their Lordships could buy the finer things, which soon became necessary aspects of feudal life. At this point, the towns began to grow, to extend the "rights" that they negotiated for themselves, to govern themselves and to use the money which remained their monopoly to buy armed men of their own.

The people of the towns were self-conscious of their class interests from the beginning... they were "townsmen": "burghers" in German, "bourgeoisie" in French. The rise of the towns and later the cities of Europe IS the rise of the bourgeoisie. At first, they threw their weight behind, not their own right to rule, but behind the monarchy. Prior to this point, the strength of the monarchs had been little greater than any other Lord. It had been confined to the wealth of Crown lands and the power of the King's own armed men ("guards", "gens d'armes", "household troops"). What the relationship with the towns gave to the Monarchy was money. Money, in turn, paid for soldiers (the genesis of national armies) which replaced the feudal levy, a national infrastructure, the breaking of the power of the anarchic landed aristocracy and palaces on a scale never imagined. For the bourgeoisie, the relationship bought national tariffs, national tolls, national commerce and an ever greater portion of the national output which was transformed into money... i.e. which was transformed into commodities and bought and sold.

In this way, national monarchy immensely strengthened the bourgeoisie. Commerce begat mercantile empire, imperial proceeds drove the town shops, then the workshops, then the manufactories and eventually, even industry a century before the first steam engines went into use. As the power of the bourgeoisie increased, the newly invented Monarchies became ever more reactionary, falling back on the now decadent and parasitic nobility, the feudal constitution and whatever remnants of feudalism remained. It is in this context that the bourgeoisie was the "middle class", that class which was the paymaster of every monarchy and the actual power in each country but still lacked the political rights of the aristocracy just as the "people" did. The slogans that were raised by the bourgeoisie are exactly the same ones that they raise today, but their modern incarnations lack the very specific demands against the monarchy from which they were born.

Far from being incoherent, their coherence, as a class, was unique and revolutionary. They invented "nations". No such thing existed before their time. They also invented "education" and the rest. But their greatest invention was their need to "free" the populace in order to free themselves. The snaky Brits were the exception, trying to make their revolution on the sly. On the continent, the only way to get rid of the decayed fungus weighing down society was "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity". Of course, the newly freed citoyens could now also go to work for their new moneyed equals, producing everything in the form of commodities, to be bought and sold on a free market.

That which I describe above was the "real" class, which clearly and openly becomes the ruling class. And the rule of that class is simultaneously the genesis of the modern "free laborer", the proletarian who is free from property (other than personal property) and is immediately subject to conditions (unhealthier, far longer working day, etc.) which are noticeably worse than the bondsmen which precede them. It is only after that transformation that a new "class" rises to occupy the new "middle". In truth, it is not class but a polyglot. It consists of small proprietors who are constantly diminished in number, new "entrepreneurs" propelled by revolutionary changes in industry, highly paid employees of large enterprises, educated professionals and specialists, and even an "aristocracy of labor". This exists in every country. What makes it quite often reactionary is its total dependence on the ruling class.

The point I was making about the new "class" was not that it "fits" into Empire. It doesn't fit any better than Swiss and Scots fit into being mercenaries, yet these two nationalities supplied soldiers-for-hire to nearly every monarchy in Europe. It is merely a historical accident. My point was not that they "fit" but that they exist on such a grand scale, precisely because of Empire. In the 1950s and 1960s, the political population of the U.S. included not only the small businessmen, engineers, and advertising executives of the U.S. but also those of India, and Argentina, and Belgium, and Tunisia... all of whom happened to be American... for the moment.

It is Empire on a grand scale which produces this polyglot on such a grand scale, so as to dominate the political life of a country and drown even proletarian thought in ordinary philistinism. And it is the death of Empire, or its stagnation, which will weaken and ultimately displace that monopoly. How do we know this to be true? The same way as everything else we know... it wasn't always like this.

- anaxarchos

===================

One major contradiction in the middle-class social contract...
...is apparent now, and currently defies solution. The size of the middle-class and its prosperity owe much to imperialism, as has been said above.

The role of the national state in all of this gets confused. Imperial success re-introduces competition among workers across national boundaries. To the degree that globalization actually removes national barriers (by essentially removing the sovereignty of the lesser nations), the out-migration of capital is inevitable. There are two side-effects to this. On the one hand, the old scheme is based on international production but domestic consumption... i.e. the "home market". The reduction of real wages in the developed countries upends this formula. The alternative is to develop domestic consumption in "emerging markets". Certainly this is anarchic and unpredictable (social conditions vary, and nobody is specifically "tasked" with such a "mission"). The larger problem, though, is it sets up a larger contradiction.

The exterior infrastructure of the home country - its military capability, its garrisons, its colonial institutions - are largely funded by internal taxation. The leverage which the national state once had in taxing its own capitalists is somewhat undermined by the new-found mobility of its now truly global entrepreneurs. The irony is that those who are increasingly the only ones benefiting from the success of Empire, become largely exempt from Imperial "responsibilities", even as their entire existence becomes solely dependent on the continuation of that Empire.

On the other hand, working class, and especially middle-class, taxation becomes more and more burdensome as the standard of living stagnates or falls. The irony is that the middle-class is paying for its own demise, but it rarely appears this clearly. What is clear is that domestic consumption which drove domestic revenues and, through them, made the world safe for empire, becomes, in its turn, just another force undermining the middle-class social contract. Suddenly, government becomes "too big".

This peculiar turnabout actually predates the modern state and is visible in virtually all Empires going back to the Romans and before. It is certainly at the center of British politics for more than a century. Still... it all leads to a set of questions:

Does the "middle-class", or do its major component parts, really have a stake in Empire? Do they have a stake only at the beginning and not at the end of the process? What are the political implications of this and are they even felt in the short time-frames that result from this dilemma? All of this fuels reaction and "radicalism" but does it really have the ability to survive even a decade in such a form?

- anaxarchos

================

We're getting into the territory of "the mutual ruin of the contending classes" aren't we?

Which tends to take the forum of some short dude with some kinda complex trying to take over the world..now there's a case of history repeating itself ad nauseam..

- KOBH

=====================

Not so much "the mutual ruin of the contending classes"...

...because classes have no country. They are international. You'll get a "reconfiguration" of the current balance of power between nation states.

But, you're right: metastable decaying social strata with a half life of 20 or 30 years... that's another story. The middle-class is pretty much fucked. The question is, what does it do to politics? Sooner or later, a genuine "anti-imperialism" rises to the surface, either from the Left or from the Right or both. The Army costs too much money... and what do you have left to cut after Medicaid? This "we are in Afghanistan to help womenand say "No" to drugs", bullshit doesn't have a chance...

(BTW, there was something I read on DU about how Afghanistan was about an oil pipeline BUT now the pipeline is going somewhere else SO Bush would have pulled out by now and it is Obama's progressivism that made him escalate instead, cause he wants to now fix the joint.... etc. This shit would make Sophists blush.)

- anaxarchos

==================

A question. Maybe I missed it in the thread.

At what point did the "Middle Class" "Bourgeoisie" cease being the "middle class" and become the "Upper Class"? When we speak of "middle class" now, we are not talking about the "Capitalist" or "Owner" Class. Right? At some point in time "middle class" became the name for the group of working class people who were making enough money to show a lifestyle above the mass of the working class. Right? Or am I off the mark again?

- Dhal

===================

When the previous ruling class was blown into the ether...

i.e... when the monarchy and aristocracy was overthrown at the end of Feudalism: 19th century in most of Europe... earlier in England, Holland, Italy, etc.

- anaxarchos

=================
"We" to the N-th degree...
Mr. Miller is so confused by what he sees in life that he misses the exquisite irony in his own analogy. Consider the game of Monopoly. Through ruthless competition, and a bit of luck, six players are reduced to one. The reduction is a constant: it always happens because that IS the game. Properties are bought and sold, houses are built and destroyed, hotels erected, competitors bankrupted... there is no hint of unemployment or malnutrition or disease or war because it is only a game; yet its operative pathos - to triumph at financial competition and destroy your enemies without regard to any other factors, which in fact , remain largely invisible - that is probably much closer to reality than any description of the current "system" that Mr. Miller might pen. The game is an abstraction that captures a mighty truth.

Now, Mr. Miller, consider a gigantic pyramid of monopoly games, with each level being a continuance of that which came before it. Each beginning at that level is based on the accumulation that occurred at the end of the preceding level. Each level restarts the ruthless concentration and competition with the proceeds of the last.

Starting with perhaps ten million small producers, this game winnows out the many until only a few thousand are left. The Losers are rendered invisible... as invisible as the make-believe maids who make up the make-believe beds in the hotels of monopoly. Should any come late to the game, they are gone before they start: entirely unable to make up the difference.

And, this game never ends...

Now, gazing on this new "game", Mr. Miller is outraged. "This is not fair", he cries, "the game is hopelessly stacked". Actually, a single game of monopoly is "hopelessly" stacked within a few turns. This pyramid game has been stacked for over a hundred years. Mr. Miller is actually protesting that he was not asked to play the game in the 1870s, with the great railroad boom... or perhaps during the Civil War when the first real fortunes were made...

You have over one hundred years of Monopoly games to retrace, Mr. Miller, if it is "fairness" that you are after. And, even if that were possible, it would disappear again within hours or days.

Well then (hands on hips), "Should we even bother playing?"

No one is asking you, Mr. Miller. You will play or you will starve. You have already lost the game of Monopoly, Mr. Miller... or your parents did... or their parents... makes little difference. Now, you will play Employee of Monopoly, Mr. Miller... and, if you lose that, you will play Wanna-be Employee of Monopoly before moving on to Dumpster-Diver. And this will happen to you Mister Miller, regardless of your sense of "fairness".

Because, though it might now seem like you have entered the Twilight Zone, you have actually entered reality.

Welcome to Freedom, Mr. Miller.

- anaxarchos

=============

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blindpig
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Re: The Middle Class...

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 12, 2017 3:06 pm

from the original thread
Take a look at countries which are not warped by being...
...the seat of Empire, and abstract away the obvious. What do you see? I see economic stagnation and an erosion of the middle-class base, with the whole process largely accelerated by this recession. In truth, capitalism happily proceeding towards peace and prosperity with only a handful of social issues to contend with... that is a very new idea.

From the time of the French Revolution through Bonaparte to the complete political rule of the bourgeoisie in Europe is less than 50 years. In the intervening period comes the Industrial Revolution. Within twenty years after that, the whole scheme is in constant crisis with undreamed of political consequences due to competition. Old Empires - the Russian, the Austrian, the Ottomans, the Spanish - struggle to adapt quickly enough. A new Empire, Japan, passes from early Feudalism to modern capitalism in but 30 years, while another, the U.S. is created from whole cloth. Meanwhile, from an odd mixture of cities and small provinces, Hess-Darmstadt, Saxony, Piedmont, etc., two entirely new, modern nations, Germany and Italy, are "unified". Old mercantile empires are transformed into new Colonial ones and as economic crisis deepens, so does political, and eventually military competition. A worldwide naval race and perpetual wars of rivalry deepen into the first World war.

At Agincourt, where the "flower" of the French nobility was cut down, less than 20,000 took the field of battle - such were the capabilities of feudalism. At Leipzig, in the "Battle of the Nations" against Bonaparte, the number had swelled to 600,000. By the battle of Verdun in WWI, that was merely the casualty count in a battle that involved millions.

Ten million died in the First World War, perhaps as many as had died in all of the previous wars in human history... and the result was so inadequate that the world was in the deepest economic crisis yet, 10 years later. Twenty years later, round two - the Second World War began... and did not end until 50 million more had died, one third of the world (eventually) opted out (for socialism), and every participant - "winners" and losers - was demolished or bankrupted.... all save one.

It is not surprising that a "middle-class" and some illusions came out of that for a time. Yet, Capitalism doesn't stop. The whole thing was stagnating again by the seventies and the "collapse of socialism" only bought another two decades.

And, here we are, again... Capitalism is stuck and anyone can say anything they like and it is still pissing in the wind. Everything will be overturned again ("win" or lose) because the fucking thing is a machine - it cannot be stopped... the destroyer of Worlds.

And that puts a slightly different spin on all of this.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

chlamor
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Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: The Middle Class...

Post by chlamor » Fri Nov 23, 2018 4:32 pm

The Middle Class in U.S. Society
A Discussion of the New Book by C. Wright Mills
(September 1951)

From The New International, Vol. XVII No. 5, September–October, pp. 288–294.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).


The mechanization and concentration of production in America has brought with itself a vast increase of the sociological phenomenon which is usually described as the “new middle class.” And with its expansion in numbers has come the inevitable proliferation of theories about the political, economic and social role which this group is likely to play.

C. Wright Mills’ new book [1] is an exceptionally valuable contribution to this discussion. Written in the brisk, readable style to which we have become accustomed in Mills’ work, it is a serious attempt to analyze the historical pattern of the rise of this group in American society, its social, economic and psychological characteristics, and its probable political role.

The difficulty which one encounters in defining “the new middle class” gives a clue to the ambiguous position it holds in the social structure. As Mills points out, it can best be defined not by a description of its own characteristics, but by contrasting it to other, easily definable economic classes. The bourgeoisie is the class whose social role is defined by its ownership of capital. The new middle class, like the proletariat, does not own means of production, although at its apex it may exercise vast administrative powers over masses of private capital, and often supplements its income and bolsters its position through actual ownership.

In their vast majority the office workers, salespeople, teachers, technicians and foremen who make up the rank and file of the new middle class are propertyless. As time goes on they can be distinguished from the industrial proletariat less and less on the basis of income, education, leisure time, security of status, etc. The best criterion which sociologists and statisticians have been able to develop to distinguish them from the classical proletariat is that they perform their work in their street clothes, in “white collars” rather than in blue denims.

The growth of this group in American society over the past seventy years has been tremendous. According to Mills, the old property-owning middle class declined from 33 per cent to 20 per cent of the gainfully employed population between 1870 and 1940. During the same period, wage workers declined from 61 per cent to 55 per cent, while the new middle class increased from 6 per cent to 25 per cent.

Despite their growth, however, they do not represent a “stratum” in capitalist society. Rather, they form a pyramid of income, social power and prestige inside the larger social pyramid. At the top are the big executives and administrators of corporations and government departments. The middle ranges form a broader group of secondary executives, managers, and successful professionals. The broad and deep base is made up of the people who, along with the manual workers, are administered, directed, and manipulated by the higher echelons.


The first section of White Collar is devoted to an analysis of the decline of the classical middle class of small property-owners. The evidence on this is now so overwhelming that only writers of advertising copy have the courage to deny it. There are now four times as many wage and salaried workers as independent entrepreneurs. The farmers, once the backbone of the small property-owning class, have declined to a tenth of the occupied population, and even among them, 2 per cent of the farms had 40 per cent of the land in 1945.

The capitalist class has itself been polarized into the great industrial and commercial corporations on the one hand, and what Mills calls the “lumpen bourgeoisie” on the other. In 1939 1 per cent of the business firms in the United States employed 50 per cent of all people working in business. In the realm of retail trade, the last stronghold of small property, during the same year the bottom 75 per cent of stores accounted for only 25 per cent of retail sales.

Despite its decline in economic and social importance, Mills points out that the remnants of the old middle class still play an important ideological and political role in America. The power of the farm bloc is proverbial. In the name of free enterprise they, and their colleagues of the various business trade associations, seek and are able to obtain government protection and legislation which guarantees their profits. They are often the vanguard in the attack against labor unions. And their continued existence gives substance to the myth of a free enterprise, free market, competitive society, without which the great corporate monopolies would be hard put to find ideological justification for continued existence in private hands.

The old middle class, the petty bourgeoisie, are disintegrating, but their decline has not led to the political consequences which might have been expected on the basis of the old Marxist predictions on this aspect of capitalist development. The reason for this is evident. Only during the years of the great depression was the destruction of the small capitalists so rapid and painful as to produce a conscious feeling of despair and revolt. Except during those years, the expansion of employment opportunities, and the general rise in the standard of living has succeeded in integrating them into the job hierarchy of the new middle class without an acute feeling of loss. The sons and daughters of the little businessman of yesteryear are much more obsessed by the idea of getting ahead in the bureaucratic structure of some corporation than with dreams of reestablishing their old independence, let alone of changing society.

But within the new hierarchy, their dreams of advancement have decreasing chances of realization. For within the white-collar pyramid the same forces have been at work which have shaped our society as a whole: mechanization and concentration.


The industrial revolution has come late to the office, the store and the salesroom, but it is now proceeding at a pace which is made possible only by its previous development in industry.

By World War II the overhead involved in tabulating, coordinating, and directing the vast network of industry, communication, transportation, trade and finance had become a real drag on profits. This is just another way of saying that an increasing portion of the surplus value created at the point of production was being absorbed by the administrative and coordinating functions which are inevitable in any industrial society, but which become monstrous in a society of private industrial monopolies. It was this drag on profits which gave major impetus to the mechanization and rationalization of white collar jobs.

Mills gives a fascinating description of the development and application of office machinery on an unprecedented scale. Along with this came the inevitable reduction in the skill, and responsibility required of the office worker. Assembly-line techniques, once confined to industry, are now transferred to the office. Experts analyze each job, break it down into its simplest elements, reorganize the office physically to ensure a steady flow of production, and the office hierarchy structurally, so as to reduce costs.

The result, as in industry, is the fragmentation and alienation of the worker. Office people are, in any case, removed from the reality of production. By and large they handle the shadows of products. Even the production line worker adds an actual piece to the whole product, and can see it growing into something under his hands. The office worker handles the invoice, the bill, the memorandum, the cost schedule ... the paper reflections of the industrial process. His satisfaction on the job, his feeling of being part of and contributing something of value can be derived chiefly through his knowledge and understanding of the directive or coordinating, or even marketing role performed by his office or firm. And in the smaller, more intimate and personalized office, even the lowly clerk often had a significant range of knowledge about these matters. But as his job is fragmented, his range of knowledge is narrowed. Increasingly his function is on the order of the punch-card operator who transfers coded symbols from schedules to cards without even knowing what the code stands for.

Although the old office is still statistically predominant, the new, rationalized office will soon take its place. And its impact is not confined to the workers with the very lowest skills, although they are the chief ones to be displaced by the new machines. The fragmentation of responsibility and of knowledge tends to go to the very top of the new business bureaucracies.


The modern type of the big businessman is the corporation executive. Only at the very top does he approximate the old captain of industry. Even there, his major decisions are made not as a “free” individual, but as a chairman of a board which works in conjunction with other boards and committees directing the enterprise.

Below him, is the cadre of executives and administrators. They are even less free entrepreneurs looking for the main chance. They are links in a chain of command, taking orders from above, and interpreting, elaborating and transmitting them downward. And in the larger enterprises, there is not a single chain of command, but several, connected at the top. Even the executive’s information is limited. His power is derived from his office, and for his position in the hierarchy he depends more on his relations to those above him in the chain than to any special abilities which he may possess.

The bureaucratization of the new middle class is not confined to the realm of big business. It affects the so- called “free” professions almost as much. The young man who becomes a doctor today knows that the road to success leads through his relationship to and status in a major hospital or clinic. The young lawyer finds his place in a legal factory, in which he is likely to spend his life drawing up briefs in a narrowly specialized field, while the senior partners spend most of their time moving in the circles from which business in large volume may be expected to flow into their factory. Other avenues of success lie through joining the legal staff of some corporation, or some government department. Only the failures hang out a shingle over the shabby office from which they issue forth in pursuit of ambulances ... or as a last resort, there are always the swelling ranks of the FBI ...

This whole process of bureaucratization, institutional rigidity, personal fragmentation and alienation is described by Mills in absorbing detail. As the hope of the white collar worker lies in a successful climb within one of the myriad bureaucracies, his whole personality must be aligned accordingly. Success comes not from superior energy, intelligence, or a capacity for making bold decisions. It comes from his ability to “sell” himself to those above him, to impress them with his cheerfulness, adaptability, “willingness,” and above all, loyalty. This involves the final degree of alienation ... the alienation from self.

Mills is deeply preoccupied with the socio-psychological effects of this whole process on the new middle class. At one time, the white collar workers’ feeling of security was buttressed by his knowledge that he had a formal education, an income and skills which set him above the industrial worker. But all of these factors are losing their former importance. The growth of unions in America has raised the status of the workers to a position at which vast numbers of them have more job security, higher incomes, more assured pensions, sickness benefits, vacations, etc., than a large percentage of the unorganized white collar workers. The spread of high-school education removes the “educational escalator” as a distinctive property of the new middle class.

But people still feel that they must have some status, even if there is no objective basis for it. Mills describes the “status panic” as one of the characteristics of the white collar world.


Mills appears to feel most strongly the dilemma of the “intellectuals” in our society. In his previous book, New Men of Power he showed this same preoccupation. There he set forth the view that if the labor movement is to make its way against the “main drift” it must be informed by “a brace of labor intellectuals,” and tended to ascribe to them a role which seems to us somewhat exaggerated.

In White Collar, when he considers their actual role and position, he is at the point of despair. Instead of critically thinking men, he finds that they are the hired “experts” and “technicians” of the business and political power which dominates the scene. Their talents find a buyers’ market which their integrity cannot resist. The professors become the “non-political” experts who advise government agencies, or the “objective” and “disinterested” handmaidens of business in market research, industrial management, and a personnel psychology. The writers are seduced by the status and income which can be theirs only as hirelings of Luce, of the great advertising firms, or of Hollywood. And often those who do resist the powerful attraction of these mass media of communication find themselves doomed to the relative atrophy of their talents which attends their inability to communicate beyond the narrowest of circles.

But what political significance does the rise of the new middle class have for American society? Are the white collar workers, or some special stratum of them, destined to move along some unique political road of their own?

Mills rejects out of hand the notion that the “managers” may strike out in their own interests, and displace the capitalists as the ruling class.

In the political sphere [he writes] no American manager has taken a stand that is against the interests of private property as an institution. As its chief defender, rhetorically and practically, the manager has a political mind similar to that of any large owner, from whom he derives his power; and in his present form he will last no longer than property as an institution. Thus, although the bureaucratization of property involves a distribution of power among large subordinate staffs, the executives of the modern corporation in America form an utterly reliable committee for managing the affairs and pushing for the common interests of the entire big-property class.

Ever since the decline of the petty bourgeoisie could no longer be disputed as a historical fact, bourgeois sociologists and economists have contended that their traditional role is being taken over by the new middle class. As against the Marxian thesis of the polarization of society, they have maintained that this new group would act as a “balance wheel” in society, as a cushion between capitalists and proletariat, as a stabilizing and moderating influence on the class struggle. Mills finds no evidence, historical or theoretical, for this contention.

In so far as political strength rests upon organized economic power, the white-collar workers can only derive their strength from “business” or from “labor.” Within the whole structure of power, they are dependent variables. Estimates of their political tendencies, therefore, must rest upon larger predictions of the manner and outcome of the struggles of business and labor.

And he continues:

The political question of the new middle classes is, of what bloc or movement will they be most likely to stay at the tail? And the answer is, the bloc or movement that most obviously seems to be winning.

They will not go politically “proletarian,” if for no other reason than the absence of any political proletariat in America. They will not go politically “middle class,” if for no other reason than the absence of middle-class policy or formation, and because they will not be economically able to maintain such a status. They will not go political as an independent bloc or party, if for no other reason than their lack of either the unity or the opportunity. They will not become a political balance-wheel, if for no other reason than their lack of will to choose one bloc or another before it has already shown itself in the ascendant; they will “choose” only after their “choice” has won.


It is at this point that Mills’method, and hence his conclusions, show their major fault. And the fault is not uniquely his: it is endemic to the whole school of sociology of which he is such an outstanding representative.

American sociologists have done a tremendous job in developing and refining techniques for testing the attitudes of various groups in the population. They are very adept at discerning the way in which these attitudes, and the social and political instrumentalities which groups devise to meet their particular problems, change under the impact of changing situations.

Valuable as these techniques are for many purposes, they are adequate only for periods of relative social calm. They test and describe why people are as they are, why they think the way they do, how they react to the given, known conditions in which they find themselves.

But they are grossly inadequate to explain violent, drastic changes in consciousness and behavior. As a matter of fact, both their political prejudices and the very refinement of their technique tends to make them shy away from the consideration of such changes which do not lend themselves so easily to precise measurement and documentation.

Mills notes a tremendous political apathy as the chief political characteristic of American society. He attributes this to a number of factors: The mass media of propaganda, entertainment and communication; the secrecy in which major political decisions are made; the helpless feeling of the individual confronted by the vast, interlocked government, business and labor bureaucracies which seem to grind along their way divorced, almost, from the control of any individual, leave alone of the “little man.” All of these no doubt have their validity.

“There were no plain targets of revolt,” he writes, “and the cold metropolitan manner had so entered the soul of overpowered men that they were made completely private and blase, down deep and for good.”

This appalls Mills, and gives a profoundly pessimistic cast to his book. Here is a society at dead center, drifting toward an ever increasing bureaucratization in structure and privatization, i.e., dehumanization of the individual. And in this situation, the new middle class which he is describing specifically, but also the working class which appears as part of the social matrix in his study, tend to gravitate to the present foci of power. Thus it is, and thus it will continue to be.

With regard to the middle class, there is no historical evidence to indicate that in a situation of social struggle “they will ‘choose’ only after their ‘choice’ has won.” Rather, there is much evidence to indicate that in those critical periods of history when rapid change is taking place, the political apathy of the middle class turns to a frenzy which attaches itself not so much to the dominant power, but rather to the most dynamic, economic class or political movement. It is precisely this tendency of the new middle class which constitutes at the same time one of the greatest opportunities as well as one of the greatest dangers in a time of social upheaval.

In Germany, the new middle class gravitated to the dynamism, the promise of a radical shake-up of society, made by the Nazi movement long before it had won, or was even close to winning. And the very powerful Social-Democratic movement was unable to attract the middle class, and was eventually overwhelmed because its “traditional,” gradualist approach had lost its appeal for the middle class at that juncture. The widespread attraction Stalinism has for sections of the new middle class abroad cannot be explained solely in terms of its inclination toward established power.

In describing the depoliticalization of American society, Mills contrasts the present situation to what happened here during the great depression. His pessimism, it would seem, derives from a feeling that the factors enumerated above which contribute to this apathy are here to stay, and what seems to be an underlying assumption, that nothing appears likely to counteract them in the future.

But the times in which we live, viewed from a platform broader than that offered by the techniques of sociological testing and investigation, can be seen as times which will subject the social fabric of America to tremendous strains. The dominant fact of the past ten years has been the vast, unexampled prosperity of the American people. Such has been the privileged position of the United States that all social and economic dissatisfactions, struggles, frustrations, could be absorbed and directed inside the flow of this all-pervading prosperity.

To believe that American society will continue indefinitely to enjoy this degree of unprecedented physical and economic well-being is to believe in miracles, and in permanent ones at that. And to believe that when the full impact of the permanent war economy, and later of the global war itself, places our society under the most drastic and shocking strains, the working class will fail to respond in the only way it can respond successfully: through a new development of political consciousness, is to permit counsels of despair to overcome the dictates of reason.

And as Mills so ably points out, it is the political reaction of the working class, in one way or another, which will determine the political role of the new middle class, as well as the political future of our whole society.

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/w ... mills.html

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Re: The Middle Class...

Post by blindpig » Tue May 21, 2019 11:20 am

bump
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Re: The Middle Class...

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 06, 2022 4:37 pm

What We Still Refuse to Accept About the Insurrectionists

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It is the rioters’ whiteness, not their ordinariness or naïveté, that’s most predictive of their eventual assault on the Capitol. Brent Stirton/Getty Images

<snip>

Whether we call it populism or nationalism or nativism doesn’t really matter. A subset of Americans, mostly white, vehemently believes the country is being stolen from them by liberal elites and people of color. And their convictions make them uniquely susceptible to manipulation and misdirection. The subscribers to this fabulist notion gather by the millions in chat rooms and on message boards. They share violent memes in Facebook groups. As Howley points out, they meet in living rooms and at barbecues to discuss their woes. Many, as the insurrection shows, refuse to sit idly by as their birthright is pillaged and plundered.

It is their whiteness, not their ordinariness and naïveté, that’s most predictive of their eventual assault on the Capitol. Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, devoted much of the past year to compiling a profile of all 700 rioters arrested by law enforcement. His research has shown that the single most unifying factor among the insurrectionists is living in a county in which the population of white people dramatically declined between 2010 and 2020. This decline has hastened the mainstreaming of a once-fringe notion that white people are at risk of being stripped of their rights. “It’s been around a long time, but what’s special now is that that theory is embraced in full-throated fashion by major political leaders and also by major media figures,” Pape told Slate’s Aymann Ismail. “If you live in an area that’s losing white population, you can start yourself to connect the dots to the spinning that’s going around with these narratives.”

<snip>

...historians have documented, repeatedly, what happens when white people grow discontent with living in an increasingly diverse and pluralistic society. Their collective backlash toppled Reconstruction, created the Tea Party, and fomented an insurrection.

(more...)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... -evil.html

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This is a little dated but I think the numbers pretty much hold up.

The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists
We analyzed 193 people arrested in connection with the January 6 riot—and found a new kind of American radicalism.

By Robert A. Pape and Keven Ruby

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<snip>

...the demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed. Of the earlier far-right-extremist suspects we studied, 61 percent were under 35, 25 percent were unemployed, and almost none worked in white-collar occupations.

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<snip>

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Is there something special about counties that produced the suspected insurrectionists? Remarkably, no. We found that 39 percent of suspected insurrectionists came from battleground counties, where Trump received 40 to 60 percent of the vote; 12 percent came from counties where less than 60 percent of the population is white. In these and many other ways, the mix of counties from which the arrestees hailed was typical of all American counties.

Importantly, our statistics show that the larger the absolute number of Trump voters in a county—regardless of whether he won it—the more likely it was to be home to a Capitol arrestee. Big metropolitan centers where Biden won overwhelmingly, such as the counties that include New York City, San Francisco, and Dallas, still have hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters. A third of suspected insurrectionists come from such counties; another quarter come from suburban counties of large metro areas. This breakdown mirrors the American population as a whole—and that is the point. If you presumed that only the reddest parts of America produce potential insurrectionists, you would be incorrect.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ts/617895/

Gotta say, some of this analysis strikes home: we grew up in an all white 'ethnic'(German, Pole, Bohemian) neighborhood in SE Baltimore. In the early 80s when I fled the local business district had already gone to hell; all the old established business closed, banks moved out, pawnshops where we didn't even know what that was. As people moved out and decent paying jobs disappeared and the housing deteriorated poor people of color took advantage of the cheaper rents in this now undesirable area, especially Spanish speaking folks. And people who had remained in the ancestral digs, like my sister, just looked around and blamed it all on the 'Mexicans' who got all these government handouts...makes me sick and sad.(though on the other hand I do experience a bit of schadenfreude thinking about the underlying racism of the 'hood' and chuckle that the church I attended which once(pre-1917) had the sermons in German now have them in Spanish).

With the class war extant and all of the subterfuges of the bosses you are bound to have some of that. But the reason that 'whiteness' has become the reality behind all of this is the lack of a counter narrative, a Left narrative. Because it all comes down to class war and class collaboration, and the so-called 'official left', the phony left, the Democratic Party, ain't never gonna go there. Like Nancy said, "We are capitalists"(and she surely is, in the 9-figure category). To say it can be difficult to get your average white person to accept a class analysis of our dilemma I have found an understatement. (Perhaps I'm just no good at this...) From left-liberals to libertarians all reject class analysis in a knee-jerk manner, the fruit of life-long exposure to Cold War propaganda. A few years back I tried injecting a little class analysis into a conversation with some blue collar workers( blame the bosses not the workers...) and was brought up short with "No you don't, that's communism!"

We got our work cut out for us...work, work, work, but work is what makes us human and what you got better to do anyway?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Middle Class...

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 09, 2022 3:16 pm

On the essence of petty-bourgeois consciousness
No. 5/69, V.2022

A bit of history

Small-ownership consciousness became widespread in the form of petty-bourgeois consciousness more than two hundred years ago, along with the formation of the capitalist mode of production. Then, along with the flourishing of handicraft production and the spread of the ideals of small-peasant economy, a belief in good and just capitalism was born. This was the first stage in the development of petty-bourgeois consciousness among the masses.

Then the capitalists were still a revolutionary class, fought against the feudal lords, carried out bourgeois revolutions. And in order to attract the exploited, it was necessary to put up reasonable and seemingly reasonable slogans and promises: "Freedom, equality, fraternity" served the French revolution, hope in "natural human rights" and "freedom of speech" became the slogans of other bourgeois revolutions.

However, from the time of the monopolization of capital, when the market ceased to be free, capitalist society, and especially the capitalists, began to rot. The most greedy and cunning made up groups of monopolists who were able to unleash world wars for the redistribution of capital and "spheres of influence", which they did by propagandizing patriotism, fascism or liberalism to the masses. Petty-bourgeois inhabitants fought under fascist or liberal-democratic slogans, prepared bombs for each other in a disciplined manner, while all of them, both the "democratic" and the "possessing the best nationality" masses, were equally exploited. Few people know that a scientific-theoretical conference of military-economic experts and owners of Germany's largest monopolies on preparations for the Second World War took place ... in June 1917, i.e.

And today this process continues, and the petty-bourgeois consciousness continues to evolve and rot. All "concepts of sustainable development" only accelerate this process. The bourgeoisie has not invented anything new. The same patriotism, nationalism and liberalism remained. All these ideologies contribute to the development of petty-bourgeois consciousness. I propose, comrades, to consider the essence of petty-bourgeois consciousness, to understand its influence on the cause of communist construction, and to develop an antipode.

Methodology

In order to cognize the essence of petty-bourgeois consciousness, it is necessary to understand the category of "essence" in general. Most people under the essence understand something important in the subject under study. And since the subject has many aspects, without which it does not exist, each researcher may have purely individual ideas about the main thing. This approach is wrong, because there is only one scientific truth.

For example, if we examine sulfuric acid by the elements of its chemical composition, then we will not see anything harmful in it: sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen are useful to humans in certain quantities. However, the connection of these opposite elements of the periodic table is harmful to humans. Therefore, a much more correct interpretation of the essence of the subject is as follows:

The essence of a phenomenon is the content of the connections of opposites that make up an object (process), which determines the tendencies of its development and relations to other objects (processes).

It is also necessary to analyze the essence of consciousness in general, how it is determined, with what and how it interacts. This point must necessarily be in the diamatic study of a certain form of social consciousness.

Firstly , if we stand on materialistic positions, we must recognize that matter is primary in relation to consciousness. The material world gave rise to consciousness, and not vice versa. Consciousness is a property of highly organized matter, and not vice versa (the world is not a property of some kind of consciousness). Consciousness is a reflection of objective reality, and the brain is the organ of thinking.

SecondlyIf we stand on dialectical positions, we must recognize that the synonym for the development of society is the transition from one mode of production to another, more perfect one. Note that it is not geographic conditions, not questions of population, not instincts, but precisely the development of productive forces and production relations, which constitutes the mode of production, is the progress of society. Why is that? Yes, because in order for a society to exist, it is necessary not only to reproduce biologically, but also to produce material and spiritual benefits for this. Consequently, the relations that develop in production are primary in relation to all other social relations. A change in production relations is preceded by a breakthrough in the development of productive forces, that is, the people themselves, their ability to a certain type of labor and means of production. It follows from this that the mode of production basically determines the social consciousness of each historical epoch. However, this does not mean that when capitalism was established as the ruling system on the entire Earth, the old forms of consciousness disappeared in an instant. They entrenched themselves in religion, literature, philosophy, political doctrines, traditions, foundations, habits, etc., and continued to exist, adapting to new conditions, involuntarily and voluntarily serving the interests and tasks of new classes. The extinction of the old forms of consciousness takes a painfully long time, it is a historically extremely inert process.

One way or another, the phenomena of the superstructure fix the basis of formations, do not allow production relations to change, or can change them, as the Bolsheviks did when they came to power. Therefore, by the way, Lenin said that politics (superstructure) cannot but have primacy over economics (basis). Most often, however, politicians were at the service of the ruling class, propagating special forms of social consciousness that were beneficial to these classes, such as, for example, the petty-bourgeois consciousness that the bourgeoisie is promoting today. About it and will be discussed further.

It should be borne in mind that the capitalist basis not only develops a petty-bourgeois consciousness that is organic to it, but also supports fragments of old consciousnesses, various kinds of religions and idealistic theories. After all, almost all religions originally arose separately from the state, served one or another social movement, but then the ruling classes still directed them to their own benefit. Incidentally, the closer certain theories were to scientific truth, the more difficult it was for the ruling classes to put them to the service. Marxism is the only theory whose propositions cannot be directed to the benefit of the exploiting classes, because these propositions are scientific truths, and consequently serve the tasks of the development of the whole of society, of mankind.

In other words, capitalism is not only characterized by petty-bourgeois consciousness, it also cultivates and generates various reactions to it and even against it (in the latter case, because under capitalism there are antagonistic classes). All these reactions to the capitalist basis (except Marxism) are not fully scientific theories (although some have come quite close to scientific truth), and therefore the exploiting classes are channeling to varying degrees anti-scientific concepts in their favor.

Much and often is said about petty-bourgeois consciousness, but what is bourgeois or big-bourgeois consciousness? The fact is that extreme individualism is organically inherent in the capitalist basis, because the economy is built on private capitalist property, on a system in which the mass of the proletariat works for a handful of capitalists, each of whom is an isolated owner. Therefore, the consciousness of an individual capitalist can be considered simply bourgeois, which means a simple thing: he strives for the growth of his personal capital. Such consciousness does not contain any other motives, values, moral guidelines, it is simple, like an account book, thinking. When it comes to the ideology of the advantages of capitalism, about considering the structure of the whole society, such a worldview comes from the logic of the small owner, who, due to market relations, "fair competition" and democracy achieves well-being. Therefore, the name "petty-bourgeois" is more suitable for such consciousness.

The essence of petty-bourgeois consciousness

Let us proceed to the study of the essence of the petty-bourgeois consciousness directly. Consider its signs and evolution in man.

Firstly, the evolution of petty-bourgeois consciousness in a person in a capitalist environment occurs approximately as follows: people inevitably enter into capitalist production relations, are forced, like prostitutes, to sell the labor power of parts of their bodies (in the case of physical labor, these are hands, and in the case of mental labor, the brain) capitalists and at the same time consume the propaganda of the “happy” life of the oligarchs. They envy their idleness and luxury. Some dutifully seek a master for themselves, and some dream of getting out of this situation by becoming capitalists, but they do not make their way further than the petty bourgeois, because all markets are already occupied by monopolists, and often find themselves in an even worse situation than hired proletarians, along with loans and non-profit-making business. Usually,

Secondly , it should be said that since the petty-bourgeois consciousness, albeit very crookedly, but reflects objective reality, it also generates needs that correspond to this distorted picture of the world. Depending on the fatality of the petty-bourgeois consciousness, such needs may manifest themselves to a lesser or greater extent: the desire only for personal well-being, the senseless accumulation of zeros on accounts, selfishness, all kinds of perversions, including sexual ones, the lack of need for the development of one's own personality. Thus, in the absolutely fatal form of petty-bourgeois consciousness, man is getting closer and closer to an animal in which there is no consciousness at all.

Since all people are immersed in capitalist reality, the petty-bourgeois consciousness can be both a manual worker, who is only interested in drinking, and an aesthetic intellectual, who is only interested in money and the "elegance of everyday life." They are all philistines, victims of capitalist reality.

However, the question arises: where did the philistines come from in the USSR, that is, people with a petty-bourgeois consciousness? After all, it was they who allowed the restoration of capitalism. This was facilitated by the party's policy after 1953, when ignoramuses like Khrushchev or Gorbachev slowly introduced market elements into the Soviet centralized economy, and then they blamed all the troubles on planning, and not on the market or their own ignorance. They also vulgarized theory and art, copying Western models, principles and techniques.

Under Stalin, despite the economy with a minimum of market relations, the economy developed much faster than in any other country for a similar period of time in the history of mankind. Moreover, after Andropov actually allowed the purchase of labor power in 1983, petty-bourgeois consciousness began to grow very quickly, because people entered into market relations and saw the imaginary benefits of money.

Soviet films did not lag behind. At first, Gaidai's films with philistine overtones, then perestroika films with more specific anti-Sovietism ("Loch - the winner of water", "Genius"). Comrade Konstantin Neverov reviewed these films in yet another article on petty-bourgeois consciousness.

Thus, the essence of the petty-bourgeois consciousness is to support capitalism, in which a person can rise above others at the expense of money, life, position . By the way, careerism, which arose long before capitalism, nevertheless, under capitalism, became a kind of petty-bourgeois consciousness. Opposites, the content of the connection of which determines this phenomenon, is a person and society. Without individualism there is no petty-bourgeois consciousness.

It is necessary to consider the influence of petty-bourgeois consciousness on the cause of building communism.

The petty-bourgeois consciousness breeds antagonisms between people, while the communists fight to eliminate all antagonisms between people.

It should be noted that opposition is not the same as antagonism. Antagonism is an extreme opposition that excludes another opposition. Thus, women and men, adults and children, capitalist and proletarian are opposites, but not antagonisms. And two capitalists or capitalists and conscious fighters for communism are antagonists, because they exclude each other.

When selfishness dominates the minds of people in the first phase of communism, they regard each other as rivals. Consequently, secondly, the petty-bourgeois consciousness contradicts the absolute economic law of communism, which is defined as the full development of each member of society and the guarantee of the development of the whole society. Thirdly, the petty-bourgeois consciousness gives rise to needs that are not satisfied physically and objectively harmful, and therefore the communist mode of production is generally not suitable for the philistines. What the opportunists and propagandists of capitalism are playing on.

Therefore, a very educated and competent vanguard of the working class, a party, is needed. And only the method of scientific centralism can provide competence. The staff of the Proryvist newspaper is working on such a game.

M. Novin
8/05/2022 (second edition 17/05/2022)

https://prorivists.org/69_babbittry/

Google Translator

*************

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Re: The Middle Class...

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 29, 2024 4:30 pm

The Idea That the Republicans Can Become “The Party of The Working Class” Is Beyond Absurd
Posted on January 28, 2024
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Readers, I apologize for the clickbait headline, because the ludicrous claim that the Republicans are the party of the working class is so easily disposed of. Where is Republican support for unions? Where is Republican support for a $25 minimum wage? Where is a Republican program for the precariat, especially gig workers? What about occupational health and safety, especially respirator and ventilation requirements for health care workers, and all others who must “meet the public”? How about a single payer health care system, so healthcare coverage is portable across employers? And on and on and on (of course, Democrats aren’t doing much here either, beyond making performative gestures of support to the cowed union leadership in election years, but that’s off point for this post.

So that wraps it up, right? Not exactly. First, the idea that the Republicans can become, or are becoming, or have already become the “party of the working class” has generated an enormous literature since Trump’s victory in 2016, if “literature” is the word I want, which I would at least like the gesture vaguely at. It’s also clear working class voters were abandoned (or, indeed, repelled) by Democrats, and that many gravitates to the Republicans. However, it turns out that there is very little serious thinking being done — at least within the national political class — about what “working class,” and class generally, might mean (the clarification of which is, in fact, my hidden agenda for writing this post). Finally, if we grant that Trump has brought about, or taken advantage of, a shift to the Republicans, can we offer a useful speculative account for this behavior by voters?


Here is my vague gesture toward the literature; I don’t think you, dear reader, being a Naked Capitalism reader, need to dig into them, because you most likely already know what they will say. But here are some headlines, organized by year:

2016

The White Working Class and the 2016 Election (abstract only) Perspectives on Politics

Head of the Class The New Yorker

Trump: GOP will become ‘worker’s party’ under me Politico

2017

The unhappiness of the US working class Brookings Institution

Does the White Working Class Really Vote Against Its Own Interests? Politico

2020

Democrats beware: the Republicans will soon be the party of the working class Guardian

The Day the White Working Class Turned Republican New York Times

2021

The GOP is rapidly becoming the blue-collar party. Here’s what that means. NBC

Top Republicans Work To Rebrand GOP As Party Of Working Class NPR

Republicans Unveil Policies to Match ‘Working-Class Party’ Claim Wall Street Journal

2022

Why Democratic Appeals To The ‘Working Class’ Are Unlikely to Work FiveThirtyEight

Can the GOP Become the Party of the Working Class? The Free Press. The deck: “Marco Rubio is betting on it.”

Republicans want working-class voters — without actually supporting workers Guardian

Democrats Keep Handing Working-Class Voters to Republicans Jacobin

Working-Class Voters or Donor-Class Leadership? The GOP Must Choose Newsweek

Hispanic and minority voters are increasingly shifting to the Republican party NPR

How GOP Is Becoming the Party of the Working Class RealClearPolitics

Latino Voters, Once Solidly Democratic, Split Along Economic Lines Wall Street Journal

How Republicans will keep working-class voters Washington Examiner

2023

What Does The Working Class Really Want? The Atlantic

How Working-Class White Voters Became the GOP’s Foundation The Atlantic

No, the GOP Has Not Become the Party of Workers Jacobin

I Was Wrong: The GOP Will Never Be the Party of the Working Class Newsweek

Biden Aims to Win Back White Working-Class Voters Through Their Wallets New York Times

Can the party of Trump really become a multiracial coalition? Vox

Can the GOP Become a Real Working-Class Party? Wall Street Journal

4 major flaws in calling Republicans the ‘working class’ party WaPo


We now turn to the transition by some “working class” voters from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party. It’s clear from the above reading list that by “The Party of The Working Class” is meant “The Party of The Working Class Voters,” which has the pleasant effect of relieving the Republican Party of delivering any universal concrete material benefits to them, or granting them any agency. This being an oligarchy where the ruling class rules through a governing class (“the investment theory of party competition“) of elected, appointed, and otherwise affiliated officials (“our democracy”) one would expect no less.

It’s clear enough that Democrats abandoned the working class base founded on the success of the New Deal, and transitioned to a narrower base in the Professional Managerial Class (PMC, which we will see The Bearded One having trouble with below). Thomas Frank’s hilarious and coruscating Listen, Liberal is, of course, the canonical text on the one-hopes-final degradation of this process under the Clintons, but Frank was instantly banished from polite society after publishing it, so I’ll have to go with Frank’s mini-me, Ruy Teixiera (he of “coalition of the ascendant” fame, but “Honey, I’ve changed!”). From Ruy Teixeira in 2024, “How the Democrats Lost the Working Class” (transcript):

But Democrats historically had this anchor to working class voters, they were sort of the tribune of these voters, the party of the common man and woman. And that really gets lost in the late 20th century, with the way that industrialization was affecting different areas of the country, you had the Democrats’ embrace of NAFTA, then China’s accession to the WTO, and the big China shock in the early 2000s—these are things that voters reacted very negatively to; that Democrats weren’t on their side and basically didn’t care about them. That didn’t mean that they therefore understood what the Republicans’ economic policies were, and all this stuff, but they definitely felt the Democrats were no longer their party. So this is what happens when a party becomes identified with policies and outcomes that are different from what the voters who historically supported them expected. And they sort of move in the direction of the Republicans.

And Teixiera in 2022, “Democrats’ Long Goodbye to the Working Class“:

America’s historical party of the working class keeps losing working-class support. And not just among white voters. Not only has the emerging Democratic majority I once predicted failed to materialize, but many of the nonwhite voters who were supposed to deliver it are instead voting for Republicans….

From 2012 to 2020, the Democrats not only saw their support among white working-class voters—those without college degrees—crater, they also saw their advantage among nonwhite working-class voters fall by 18 points. And between 2016 and 2020 alone, the Democratic advantage among Hispanic voters declined by 16 points, overwhelmingly driven by the defection of working-class voters. In contrast, Democrats’ advantage among white college-educated voters improved by 16 points from 2012 to 2020, an edge that delivered Joe Biden the White House

Just as a pre-emptive strike:

A rigorous accounting of vote shifts toward Trump, however, shows that they were concentrated among white voters—particularly those without college degrees—with moderate views on race and immigration, and not among white voters with high levels of racial resentment. The political scientists Justin Grimmer and William Marble concluded that racial resentment simply could not explain the shifts that occurred in the 2016 election. In fact, Trump netted fewer votes from white voters with high levels of racial resentment than Mitt Romney did in 2012.

(Teixiera wrote in 2022, a midterms year when the Supreme Court — not looking quite so closely at the electoral calendar as a branch of the Republican Party might have been expected to do — overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing Democrats to exceed expectations. However, the overall trend away from Democrats by working class voters is clear. It is true that Democrats are making the usual performative gestures on abortion in 2024, but I think it’s pardonable to classify 2022 as a “dead cat bounce.” What, after all, have Democrats actually done? Let’s wait and see!)

And from the Desert News, “Perspective: When did the Democratic Party become the party of the upper class?”:

[A] new poll conducted by HarrisX for Deseret News shows exactly how much the Democratic Party has changed: Once proudly the representative of the working man and woman, Democrats are now, by a notable margin, the party of choice of the upper class.

In the poll, respondents were asked to identify as one of seven categories: lower class, working poor, working class, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class or upper class. A majority (39%) made their choice based on income rather than their job (10%) or education (7%), categories which are commonly used by researchers when defining the working class.

(One bucket for the “working class,” and three separate buckets for “the middle class,” which, by exclusion, must be the PMC. Wowsers.) And:

Some findings that stand out:

Many in the upper class seem tone-deaf about how the rest of the country is faring. Large majorities of the middle class and below, for example, say that the working class is being left behind when it comes to economic development, while 80% of the upper class say that everyone is benefiting equally. That finding, in particular, screams “elite.” Similarly, 62% of the upper class thinks the working class “is in a good position.” Only 30% of the working class agree.

And as for Biden:

Perhaps most significantly, 74% of upper class respondents want Biden to run again, in stark contrast to large shares of the middle class and lower who don’t want to see Biden run. Sixty-seven percent of the working class and 68% of the lower class don’t want Biden to be their president again. That is significant, and as the Democratic establishment prepares to again present Joe Biden as the solution to America’s problems, it does so at considerable risk.

If Democrats leave power lying in the street, Republicans will pick it up, however clumsily. Teixeira once more, “The GOP’s working-class tilt is causing havoc in its ranks“:

However, blaming the GOP’s bad situation on Trump overlooks the ways in which he is not just a cause but a symptom of the party’s fundamental problem: its tilt toward the working class.

Since the breakup of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition about half a century ago, the GOP has become steadily more working class and therefore more dependent on appealing to that base. Initially Republicans were able to take advantage of the breakup of postwar Democratic voting blocs by promulgating an anti-welfare, anti-tax agenda that, along with an aggressive cultural conservatism, appealed to many working-class voters.

But this was not a sustainable strategy. Working-class voters, as many of their communities continued to deteriorate, lost faith that lower taxes and less government were really the solution to their problems — however much those principles might appeal to business supporters of the GOP. It was Trump’s genius to break with orthodox Republican economics, particularly on trade, entitlements, deficits and corporate priorities. In other words, he leaned into the working-class tilt of the GOP instead of simply exploiting it when it overlapped with standard GOP priorities.

As a result, Trump has deepened Republicans’ working-class base, first by bringing in even more White working-class voters, particularly in the Midwest, and then by adding non-White working-class voters, especially Hispanics. But that deeper working-class base presents challenges that the GOP appears ill-prepared to handle.

But what is this “working class” of which you speak? (Obviously, Teixeira’s formulation of “the party of the common man and woman” is vacuous and completely unusable. I’ve helpfully underlined the usages, most of them sloppy and vague. You can be sure that none of the articles that use the phrase “working class” actually define it, although the HarrisX poll makes an effort.)

What would a definition of class look like? As I wrote in 2017:

When I think of the concept class, I think of a set, and a set membership function to determine who or what is a member of that set.

(This idea is reinforced in this discussion of Griffin, where the issue is how to “ascertain” that a given individual is a member of the set of “insurrectionists.”) Here is the conventional approach, from Demos: “Understanding the Working Class.” In fact, there are three potentional set membership functions:

Social scientists use 3 common methods to define class—by occupation, income, or education—and there is really no consensus about the “right” way to do it.

Oh. One would think that developing a clear definition of “working class” would be top-of-mind for a putatively left-wing think tank, but perhaps that’s just me. More:

Michael Zweig, a leading scholar in working-class studies, defines the working class as “people who, when they go to work or when they act as citizens, have comparatively little power or authority. They are the people who do their jobs under more or less close supervision, who have little control over the pace or the content of their work, who aren’t the boss of anyone.”

Using occupational data as the defining criteria, Zweig estimated that the working class makes up just over 60 percent of the labor force. The second way of defining class is by income, which has the benefit of being available in both political and economic data sets. Yet defining the working class by income raises complications because of the wide variation in the cost of living in the United States. An annual income of $45,000 results in a very different standard of living in New York City than it does in Omaha, Nebraska. Incomes are also volatile, subject to changes in employment status or the number of hours worked in the household, making it easy for the same household to move in and out of standard income bands in any given year.

The third way to define class is by educational attainment, which is the definition used in this paper. Education level has the benefit of being consistently collected in both economic and political data sets, but, more importantly, education level is strongly associated with job quality. The reality is that the economic outcomes of individuals who hold bachelor’s degrees and those who don’t have diverged considerably since the late 1970s.

I have helpfully underlined the various weasel words (“more or less”), weird methodological assumptions (“standard income bands”) and vague terms (“job quality”). As Nate Silver remarks:

[T]he definition of “working class” and similar terms is fuzzy

So, I think it’s fair to say that all the “literature” I collected above can be tossed out, since there’s no “consensus” on the “common methods to define class” in social science, and the conventional wisdom is “fuzzy.” Could there be an alternative? One that is rooted in actually existing and ascertainable power relations, instead of being fitted to “data sets”? I think there is.

Enter the Old Mole in the cellerage, the Bearded One. Capital, Volume III, p. 652 (PDF):

The first question to be answered is this: What constitutes a class? – and the reply to this follows naturally from the reply to another question, namely: What makes wage-labourers, capitalists and landlords constitute the three great social classes?

At first glance – the identity of revenues and sources of revenue. There are three great social groups whose members, the individuals forming them, live on wages, profit and ground-rent respectively, on the realisation of their labour-power, their capital, and their landed property.

However, from this standpoint, physicians and officials, e.g., would also constitute two classes, for they belong to two distinct social groups, the members of each of these groups receiving their revenue from one and the same source. The same would also be true of the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of social labour splits labourers as well as capitalists and landlords — the latter, e.g., into owners of vineyards, farm owners, owners of forests, mineowners and owners of fisheries.

[Here the manuscript breaks off.]

(“Here the manuscript breaks off” [pounds head on desk]). This holds up pretty well, IMNSHO. We have the set membership function (“the identity of revenues and sources of revenue,” or, in the vulgate, “follow the money”). The Bearded One would be the first to admit that his schema, developed in the UK in the 19th Century, might be usefully modified for the 21st. For example, we might distinguish between international, national, and regional (“local gentry”) subclasses of capitalists (“globalism”). We might also conceptualize the owners of intellectual property (Silicon Valley) as akin to landlords. And interestingly, Marx, hitherto so crisp, goes a bit mushy when he merely alludes to “physicians and officials,” what today we would call the PMC, without attempting to analyze this class? subclass? any further. Finally, the “infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of social labour splits labourers” might usefully be seen as foreshadowing the identity politics of today. We might also wish to think about new forms of wage labor derived from the “sharing economy.” Still, all in all, not too shabby for 1894! In all cases, the same set membership function would apply. So Marx is quite the analyst, and I’m going to put the above quote under a notional magnet on my notional refrigerator.

* * *
Now let’s do a little speculation. Suppose we agree with what seems to be so: That the Republicans are picking up working class votes across the board (“working class” as defined by Marx, not by “social scientists”, feh; not Hispanic voters who happen to be working class, but working class voters who happen to be Hispanic, and so on for the litany of the usual identities). Is there a common factor that unites them, besides their class membership? I think there is.

When I think about the state of the Union, I think about the systems I might need to enter to live (that is, to reproduce my labor power): The health care system, the financial system, the law enforcement system, the judicial system, the educational system, the welfare system, and so on. There is not one of these systems that I would enter without fear or anxiety, or that I would entrust family or friends to. They are one and all infested by administrative caltrops and rental extraction, such that the delivery of actual service to a citizen is the result of luck, as much as anything. They ruin the quality of life and, for that matter, death. And, as I point out here, these are, one and all, institutions controlled and managed by the Professional and Managerial Class. So one might urge that a major factor in Trump’s success is that for the first time, working class voters can give a “gigantic upraised middle finger” to the officious betrayer sitting on the other side of the desk, to their class enemies in the PMC[1]. Trump, in his person, incarnates this gesture, verbally, through his behavior, through the enemies he has made, and in every way. Do note, however, that there is no policy aspect to “giving the bird.” That is, I think, too much to ask.[2] So in that sense, and that sense only, the Republicans are the party of (and not by, or for) the working class.

NOTES

[1] I am laying it on a bit thick, here. There are exceptional, as well as hegemonic, PMC. Nurses who treat their patients humanely, for example, being exceptional. But the tendency of all these systems is hegemonic, and they are as productive of fear and loathing as I have described.

[2] But if that’s what you want from the first Trump administration, it’s there: (1) Trumped nuked a second NAFTA, the TPP, on his first day in office; (2) the CARES Act actually reduced poverty (and Biden promptly took it away); and (3) Trump didn’t start any land wars, and so there were no casualties in the rural and heartland districts that disproportionately fill the ranks of the military. And even though the capitalists got a big tax cut, (4) Trump did away with the Obama mandate penalty, saving me, by a happy coincidence, $600 in taxes.

APPENDIX

I looked at “Republicans” and “working class” in Google Trends:

Image


I guess the moral is that the discussion embodied in this post takes place in a very small segment of the population!

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/01 ... bsurd.html

Years ago we discussed this topic, that the major parties would 'switch' bases. So yeah, sorta, but not really, capitalists still own both parties. It is a dog and pony show, but one motivated by the structure of government and it's relation to capital, not just shabby theatrics. There is no script, just inevitable relationships.

A bit sloppy on Marx despite the accolades: The Old Man was dead well before 1894. The honest economist inevitably comes back to Marx.

Marx foresaw the professional class being reduced to employees, which has indeed happened. And that is all that happened, he didn't miss nothin'.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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