[Pod] Regaining Class Consciousness
Will we develop an awareness of our modern socio-economic classes so that we can critique them and challenge existing power structures?
Some housekeeping:
The podcast is finally available on a number of new platforms including Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts! If you are inclined to use those services, the audio is available there.
I will also be having my first guest on for next week’s episode, so make sure to tune in to that one!
A New Language
Something we don’t really talk about in America is our socio-economic class structure; we don’t really have the language with which to address the stratified nature of our society. Noam Chomsky in Requiem for the American Dream describes the idea of class in quite clear and simple terms.
The notion of class is very simple; who gives the orders, and who follows them?
Even Noam admits its much more nuanced than this, but that’s what this boils down to. Class has always seemed to be tied to one’s function in a society and consequently their power over resources and monetary wealth. Human history is littered with monarchies and empires where often a ‘divine right’ decided who should rule the lands, and those alpha males who were willing to seize power and wealth created the laws and established classes in their societies. Today our myth is the divine and absolute nature of the free market that supposedly endows financiers and bankers with the right to rule. Power in the 21st century lies with the governments of nation-states, and the large multi-national corporations and speculators who have crafted the interconnected global economy, and who in many cases, like in the US, have successfully bought up the elected public representatives.
What we also have to realize, is that as our society progresses and technology alters the workforce and job market, class lines can fluctuate and we have to be ready for ambiguity and a constant assessment of our incomes, function in society, and power over resources.
This week I want to talk about the different classes in our society and introduce some class centered language and a framework with which to place ourselves and the public figures we know in the hierarchy that exists today; understanding this will be essential to challenging the existing social order and for convincing people around the world to embrace new ones.
When we examine Marx’s post-industrial study of class, there are essentially two classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (e.g. the capitalist property owners and business managers who gave the orders and the industrial workers who followed them). Marx, who formed the communist movement in direct response to unfettered industrial capitalism, argued that the bourgeoise was exploitative and perpetuated the existence of an ‘underclass’ which would forever provide the owner class with profits that reinforce their wealth and power.
This is certainly a very crude line to draw and our society and labor markets have changed in numerous ways since the first industrial era a century ago, but the idea was successful enough to grow a movement that would try to challenge global capitalism for nearly 100 years. Ultimately Marx’s vision for a classless society after a revolt of the proletariat, in practice, lent itself very well to authoritarian structures and didn’t deliver on bringing the freedoms it promised. I think the lesson that we learned from that struggle is that it is impossible to have a society without class, someone will end up giving the orders and everyone else will, on some level, end up following them. Marx’s model is very useful for describing the general relationship between the “owners” of society (or as Adam Smith called them the “masters of mankind”) and those who work to create the wealth the managers preside over, but it is time to expand upon his model because there are new dividing lines among people as our institutions, markets, and technologies have advanced.
Economists like University of London Professor Guy Standing have introduced new language to describe in a bit more detail the class stratification in this economy run by multinational corporate plutocrats.
At the top sit the elites who have the most political and monetary power. In our world today these are the billionaires, th e 1%, corporate executives, and the representatives they bribe. In a nutshell, this is the ‘club’ that George Carlin was talking about.
Next, Standing describes the salariat and proficians who both share similar income levels but have very different levels of security in their work. The salariat is described as the group of workers who have “an extensive array of non-wage enterprise benefits such as pensions, paid holidays, and medical leave.” These are frankly professionals like I was, working at large consulting companies or overvalued, venture-backed ‘startups’ who are showered with good benefits and glowing optimism about their missions.
The proficians are “not seeking employment security but frenetically making money, endangered by burn out;” these to me seem to be the growing number of contractors and self-selling entrepreneurs who are able to find thousands of leads with the internet and new social networks.
The “old working class” is comprised of the historically unionized industrial workers and the new term that Standing coined, the precariat, represents what he believes is a distinct class that is defined primarily by the growing precarity in their lives. He maintains that this class has “no occupational identity or narrative to give to their lives” and consequently live with “existential insecurity.”
Standing notes the fact that for the first time in history many people are finding themselves doing jobs that are below the level of education they received and are oftentimes unrelated to what they studied. He goes further and says that those in the precariat have diminished prospects of class mobility and that they have had to increasingly rely on just their money wages without non-wage benefits, or rights-based benefits from the state. The ‘gig-economy’ has played a major role in this as big tech companies claim that because they are creating and supporting a platform where people can sign up to work for them, that they are absolved of classifying them as employees and thus being bound by labor laws; and in a conservative America the there is not much support coming from the state.
The precariat also is living in perpetual, and in many cases, unsustainable debt and they are the most susceptible to what he calls ‘poverty traps’ and ‘precarity traps’ like those created by means-tested programs. These programs often require people to prove their eligibility with tedious forms that might disincentivize actually taking advantage of the welfare state, and the delays in receiving benefits ultimately delay their quest for longer-term stability.
Overall, Standing’s framework does give more clarity and modern context that builds on the notion of a proletariat and bourgeoisie, but I do agree with some of the critics of this unique distinction of the ‘precariat’ who note that there is ‘a growing sense of precariousness among all workers.’ I think Jacobin author Charlie Post was right to point out that our modern job market and the types of jobs that are emerging have introduced new consequences to being laid off and have made it more common for everyone, even people with a defined trade, to continuously shift jobs and move around. Additionally, tools like at-will employment have become more prevalent; this gives power to the employer to be able to terminate an employee with very little if any restrictions which would protect the workers. And of course, we can’t forget that in America, all of us have to live in constant fear because if we do lose our jobs we might not be able to afford to see a doctor. Most workers have very little leverage against the management in their companies and in many cases are pressured into keeping their indentured stability.
The burgeoning tech industry with thousands of smaller companies backed by rich venture capitalists has created a new kind of job market where the new factory worker is the software engineer. Even larger companies are investing heavily in software solutions and automating any process they can. Anyone can learn python, ruby, or javascript and hop into a role at a tech company, so workers have a lot more competition and labor is free to move and work remotely. Furthermore, industries and web technologies are changing so quickly that even workers with a stable job have to continuously re-invent themselves; so it’s really hard for any modern worker to have any consistency in their careers let alone an ‘occupational identity/narrative.’
Another term that has become popular again in recent years is the “professional-managerial class (PMC)” which was coined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in ‘77 to describe an emerging division in the Democratic left as the democratizing political movements of the ‘60s ended and communities began to fracture. This class is defined by their higher education degrees and jobs in management, consulting, and the media, and an overall technocratic culture that is “objectively antagonistic” to the traditional industrial working class; I would contend that those in the ‘PMC’ often fall into the ‘salariat’ and ‘proficians’ categories in Standing’s model. This term is now often used to describe many of the college-educated, mostly white suburban voters who were targetted heavily by pretty much every Democrat in this year’s primary. Those voters were notorious for their shopping around between different flavors of pragmatism offered by candidates like Kamala, Amy, Pete, and Warren, and by a desire to have problems solved by more members of the PMC, people who were ‘smart’ enough to come up with comprehensive solutions and pick the right people to be around them.
I do think that there is evidence that the ‘PMC’ is a distinct class, but I still think we lack nuance in this dialogue and we can go a bit further in our class distinctions. I agree with Barabara and John’s idea that class is about both “a common relation to the economic foundations of society” and more importantly, “actual relations between groups of people, not formal relations between people and objects.” Thus, I believe that we need to be specific in our language describing class and focus our distinctions on people’s function in society.
A person’s function most often determines whether or not they have material or political power, and their incentive structures relative to other classes in the hierarchy. Certain people are reliant on those in classes above them to maintain their standard of living and their current standing in their economic class. If we ignore those incentives we end up blurring class lines and consequently we cannot accurately hold those more powerful than us, to account.
Firstly, let’s break down this ‘elite’ category which has been distorted by the lack of clarity in our class-based rhetoric. The elites with the most power today are those in the ‘capitalist class.’ In this case, I am referring specifically to Wall St bankers, hedge-fund managers, venture capitalists, and multinational corporate executives. Wall St sits behind the entire economy; many large companies cater almost exclusively to their shareholders and are concerned mostly with short term gains and their stock price. Thus these bankers have leverage over the entire economy. Furthermore, we know that they spend millions in lobbying and campaign finance donations in order to exert influence on policy that favors their bottom lines, namely deregulation. This is arguably the most powerful group of people in the world today.
Another segment of the elite is the political class. These are the politicians that are bribed by those in the capitalist class. The two political parties in America have largely structured themselves to continue catering to the interests of their corporate donors and it seems that bureaucracy and social pressure can tame even the most idealistic and fierce representatives.
The elites are the class with the most power in modern America as pretty much all of the policy that structures our public and private institutions are generally controlled by the elites. I think, for the most part, everyone who isn’t in this class is generally is on a level playing field power-wise; we all have very little power, if any at all, compared to the wealthy capitalists.
Under the elites sit the PMC. I do think that this distinction is an accurate one that describes the college-educated professionals who maintain relative stability in their work. The groups I would highlight within the PMC to demonstrate their links to the elites are the pundit class, the consultant class, and the lobbying class.
The pundit class is composed of mainstream news commentators, media personalities and celebrities. I think it’s important to distinctly identify this class because of their incentive for access to the political class, and in many cases, their financial incentives to support the political status quo. Many of the talking-heads on mainstream networks have tight controls over what they can say firstly so they can maintain access to the most powerful people in the country, but also because their networks profit off of advertising dollars from industry and their networks themselves are owned by large multinational corporations. We tend to trust those people in the pundit class who show up on our TV because their networks are traditionally thought of as credible, but they have a lot more of an incentive to be deceitful when it comes to telling us the truth about corporate capture and the corruption and wrongdoing of the capitalist class.
The consultant class has a similar relationship to the capitalist class; the business model of most of these consulting firms is literally to provide services to large multi-national corporations and in some cases large political campaigns. When you have to compete for contracts and work with executives from these corporations or establishment politicians, you have a very clear incentive to hold those organizations and people in a positive light and avoid criticizing them or their behavior and corruption. A tangible example from my life that illustrates this dynamic is a moment from my days working at a large consulting firm; while ISPs like Verizon and ATT were spending millions of dollars lobbying the federal government to kill net neutrality regulation, multiple teams at my firm were staffing engagements for them. People in that situation have very little incentive to call out Verizon and ATT for trying to take away our rights for free and fair internet, let alone taking any activist action, for fear of losing the engagement contract, ruining the relationship with a client, and potentially even getting fired.
As for the lobbyists, we know that they literally exist to influence policy, in many cases on behalf of monied special interests; their incentives are public and out there for us all to see.
Right below the PMC, I think it is appropriate to place the ‘precariat’ as defined by Guy Standing. Often we hear media personalities today referring to a broad category of the ‘working class.’ I don’t think any of those commentators are really specific in who they are referring to, but generally, it seems like they are referencing income levels. I would say that the precariat can include these gig and part-time workers but also the traditional industrial class which is shrinking in America as our federal trade deals have shipped away most of those jobs overseas. Even union representation can’t protect their stability in many cases as these industrial workers are in constant competition with exploited workers in other countries in the world.
Finally, two brand new distinct classes have been recognized recently that we definitely have to define; the Essential Workers, who we now realize are essential because of coronavirus, and what Yuval Harari calls the ‘useless class.’
Essential workers have almost become invisible to us as the machinery behind our economy and supply chains. Delivery people & workers in fulfillment centers, public transport workers, nurses and doctors, grocery workers, food packaging workers, and child-care workers have all had to face the reality that while most of the country is staying home to stave off the pandemic, they provide services that we all depend on that cannot be done from the comfort of their couch. It is unfortunate that it took a global crisis to remind us of their importance but after this, we will always have to be cognizant of their unique role and we need to start embracing policies like the Essential Workers Bill of Rights proposed by Ro Khana and Elizabeth Warren.
The useless class is relevant in the context of automation and AI. We have seen automation ravage the traditional job market and with the pace at which AI and machine learning are developing, we can expect the trend to continue; even a lot of the programming, analyst, and even finance trading jobs will also go away. There will be a class of people that are left behind and might be passed an age where it is easy to reinvent themselves let alone keep up with all the new competition from young professionals. It’s not hard for me to wrap my head around this reality, not everyone can become a programmer and there might not be jobs for everyone. Obviously, in this case, I feel that universal basic income and a federal jobs program could be very helpful to redirect people to important human-based jobs like counseling and coaching and even using their skills to develop public projects that might be relevant to their experience. We might not see a large useless class yet, but we should keep a close eye on the effects of automation on our class structure.
Of course, these labels are not absolute but, again, I think we do need a class-based vocabulary with which to describe our society so that we can effectively challenge power. Without it, we could end up wasting our energy and losing a lot of time and political capital by siding with people who serve their own class interests while lying to us about their intentions. This is most relevant to the class conflict between the elite class and everyone else which has been so common under the neoliberal order; we have seen a direct attack on the tenants in our society that allowed class mobility, but there has not been an effective challenge to restore the prospect of the American Dream.
Part of the American Dream is class mobility. You’re born poor, you work hard, you get rich. It was possible for a worker to get a decent job, buy a home, get a car have his children go to school; its all collapsed.
The Class War
Most people think that the Class War is something that has yet to begin, that it might be incited as an election strategy in the future. The truth is that this is a never-ending war that has been waged before we were born, throughout our lives, and until this very day. The battle is constantly fought between capital and people. The upper classes who have amassed power at a certain point realize they want to keep it. At the moment, this war is very one-sided; listeners of this show will know that the battle is being won by those at the top; the plutocrats of the capitalist class.
The documentary I referenced earlier, Requiem for the American Dream, does a great job of detailing the ebbs and flows of this story in our history. I encourage everyone to follow the link and watch the entire documentary because my overview will not do it justice. The book that the documentary is based on aims to educate readers about the coordinated effort among the elite class to use their money and political power to wage this war against the working class and return us to the dark moments of our history when plutocracy was favored over democracy.
Its important to understand that privileged and powerful sectors have never liked democracy and for very good reasons. Democracy puts power into the hands of the general population and takes it away from them.
Chomsky outlines 10 principles of concentration of wealth and power that were and are still used by monied interests to amass power and tighten their grip over our society. (Reduce Democracy, Shape Ideology, Redesign the Economy, Shift the Burden, Attack Solidarity, Run the Regulators, Engineer Elections, Keep the Rabble in Line, Manufacture Consent, and Marginalize the Population.)
Concentration of wealth yeilds concentration of power. Particularly so as the cost of elections skyrockets which forces the political parties into the pockets of major corporations. And this political power, quickly translates into legislation that increases the concentration of wealth. […] We have this kind of vicious cycle in progress.
The first principle involves reducing democracy. Chomsky details a historical problem with the fundamental tenants of democracy that has been central to the struggle between elite classes and the masses. Philosophers as far back as Aristotle noted that in a free democracy, the majority of the poor could, in theory, band together and vote to take away the property of the wealthy. He notes that Aristotle in his books on politics recognizes this flaw and proposes what we know today as a ‘welfare state,’ in other words use policy to reduce inequality. In America however, our founding fathers structured our constitutional system to protect the ‘opulent minority.’
Now obviously the Senate is no longer appointed from the wealthy as it used to be, but elite classes have always been able to find ways around this. The most relevant moment to examine in our modern history to truly get a grasp of how our society got to where it is today, is the beginning of a business offensive to combat the democratizing forces of the ‘60s which brought forward movements of regular people demanding things like civil rights, an end to war, and environmental protection; these movements were so powerful that they forced the conservative Nixon administration to make relatively radical changes. Chomsky reveals the worry that existed among the elite on the left and the right that they were losing control of the masses.
These papers that Chomsky highlights, the Powell Memorandum, and The Crisis of Democracy were part of the second principle that concerned shaping the ideology of the society. Ideology alone cannot achieve a dominating concentration of wealth and power so the elites had to change to the mechanics of the society directly.
The first relevant functional change is described by the third principle: redesign the economy. This to me is the most harmful part of the business offensive, we are living with the consequences of this new globalized and financialized economy to this very day. The focus was to increase the role of financial institutions and off-shore production. Financial deregulation allowed the increased flow of speculative money and at the same time, the working class of America, after the passage of trade deals like NAFTA and PNTR with China, suddenly had to compete with lower-wage laborers in other countries. In our current system capital is free to move anywhere in the world with complex financial instruments but labor is stuck with very little leverage.
This redesign was paired with tax policy that reduced the tax burden on the wealthiest Americans. Reagen introduced a new tradition of trickle-down-economics which set off reductions in corporate taxes and we continue to see the elite class repeating this strategy; most recently Trump passed a historic trillion-dollar tax cut and Bush had his round of tax cuts that were made permanent by Obama. Consequently, the wealthiest classes have even more capital with which to concentrate more power, and regular people are left with a higher share of the tax burden, and of course, there is less and less revenue available to spend on public programs that would benefit every American.
Corporate Tax Rate in the United States
Elites also need to make sure they attack our basic human instinct to help one another and discourage solidarity. The right-wing in America has been trying its best to dismantle Social Security since the New Deal era, and even Obama’s administration came close to major cuts to the program with his ‘grand bargain.’ We can see it just in these past few weeks too with a new proposal from economic conservatives linked to Biden’s economic advisors, that would undermine social security by offering a chance for people to borrow against their retirement funds instead of receiving stimulus money. There has also been a historical shift in the cost of public college from state funding to student paid tuition. Both of these initiatives are based on solidarity; we are paying taxes to subsidize living costs for older retired Americans, and we pay state taxes to fund the schools even if we don’t have kids in the system anymore, but sadly our politicians have abandoned solidarity with the excuse of needing to balance the budget.
Another important tactic is ‘regulatory capture.’ Often when industrialists want control they use their influence to lobby for specific legislation that reduces regulation on their business practices and sometimes even influence government appointments. Trump, as usual, was brazen in his use of this strategy; we may remember how he staffed administrations like the EPA and the Department of Education with people who were known for opposing those federal departments like Rick Perry, who continuously fought off EPA regulations and Betsy DeVos who was notorious for her support of using taxpayer dollars to give vouchers to for private charter schools. Democrats, however, were more discreet in their cooperation to allow financiers to have oversight over their regulators — Wikileaks revealed that Citigroup executives offered up their desired cabinet appointments to the Obama administration in 2008, and nearly all of the suggestions were taken. With control over who got into power as the Great Recession hit, the banks were able to architect a bailout that allowed them to socialize their losses by arguing they were ‘too big to fail’ and no-one was left to fight for the pubic who was so severely affected by the crash.
And finally, the most consequential functional change that attacked our democracy directly was the effort to allow the engineering of elections with the two most infamous supreme court decisions in modern history, Buckley vs Valeo (1976) and Citizens United (2010). Those decisions allowed corporations to be treated as ‘persons’ under the 14th amendment, considered money a form of free speech, and finally in 2010 removed pretty much all constraints on the use of corporate money as speech.
“The right to free speech of corporations cannot be curtailed.”
Citizens United (2010)
With these changes, average citizens pretty much lost all of their remaining power as electoral politics was taken over by monied elites; bribery is now legal and corporations and financial elites can simply contribute to campaigns in exchange for access to politicians. Corruption has become normal and even today corporatist candidates hold exclusive events those who can afford to donate larger sums of money.
Principle 8, ‘Keep the Rabble in Line’ refers to the coordinated business offensive against workers’ rights and particularly against unions. In America, we have seen the GOP embrace ‘right to work’ laws in many states, and large companies like Amazon and Walmart deploy extensive anti-union propaganda and aggressive anti-union policies. A perfect example of this can be seen recently in this pandemic, as Amazon reportedly fired warehouse worker Chris Smalls who began to speak out for better working conditions for him and his co-workers who were increasingly at risk of contracting Covid-19.
The most interesting tactic for me is principle 9 ‘Manufacture Consent.’ This doesn’t involve any public policy but a more indirect tactic of distracting us from engaging in important debates. As more freedom was won, it became harder for elite classes to control the masses by force so they resorted to turning us into consumers. What’s even more horrifying is how they have applied those nefarious advertising techniques to our elections which often trick many people to vote against their own interests.
The tenth and final principle is ‘marginalizing the population.’ If the elite classes are successful in their use of the other principles, likely the population grows to distrust institutions and public administrations and consequently misdirect their anger toward ‘the other,’ whether that be a minority group in the population of voters from an opposing party. I think it’s pretty clear to all of us at this point, that our elites have succeeded; this is one of the most polarized times in modern American history.
It is very sad to see that even a global pandemic won’t stop this offensive. The richest Americans continue to see their wealth increase, we see a political class that prioritized corporate bailouts and cash injections from the Fed into the financial markets to help Wall St. While we approach unemployment numbers akin to those in the great depression with 10s of millions of people losing their jobs, still the capitalist class has no intention of allowing our representatives to actually represent us, that too would threaten their wealth and power.
It certainly is demoralizing to face the extent to which the deck is stacked against those of us who are not in the capitalist class, but I hope that in this episode I have been able to introduce a framework to understand who has what kind of power and an overview of the tactics being used by capitalists to maintain and increase their control.
We do have the power to combat the capitalist class. Ultimately, Marx was right, those who are not in the elite class are usually the ones who work to produce much the wealth controlled by those at the top. Workers need to realize again that their time is their greatest weapon; if you stop working you hit them where it hurts, their pocketbook. And it does seem like many workers are waking up to this reality. On May Day (May 1st) which is traditionally a day to celebrate labor, workers from Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, and Target went on strike to demand better protection during the pandemic which requires measures like getting more PPE and providing hazard pay. We also hear stories like the one of Yolian Ogbu who’s mother organized with her fellow hospice workers to call in sick together in order to demand hazard pay. And we even saw a VP at Amazon leave the company in solidarity with those employees who organized for better working conditions; even though he was in a completely different part of the organization he could not stay and endorse Amazon’s aggressive and immoral tactics.
There is obviously a long way to go, and these are not the only tactics we have to employ; we have to be involved in the political process and participate in our civic discourse and in our communities. But the lesson these workers can teach us is simple. Together, if we are united and making clear demands, we can win; we just have to make sure we are very clear whose side everyone is on, and exactly what those in power intend to do to try to stop us.