We Have Never Been Middle Class

How Social Mobility Misleads Us

Hadas Weiss

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781788733915
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788733939
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Social Sciences

Tidings of a shrinking middle class in one part of the world and its expansion in another absorb our attention, but seldom do we question the category itself. We Have Never Been Middle Class proposes that the middle class is an ideology. Tracing this ideology up to the age of financialization, it exposes the fallacy in the belief that we can all ascend or descend as a result of our aspirational and precautionary investments in property and education. Ethnographic accounts from Germany, Israel, the USA and elsewhere illustrate how this belief orients us, in our private lives as much as in our politics, toward accumulation-enhancing yet self-undermining goals. This original meshing of anthropology and critical theory elucidates capitalism by way of its archetypal actors.

1

What We Talk about when We
Talk about the Middle Class

What do we talk about when we talk about the middle class? The critical half of the term is not “class” but “middle.” It evokes a spectrum of gradated positions with people moving to and fro between lower and upper reaches. The middleness of middle class suggests space: we move socially and economically relative to people occupying higher or lower positions, inching closer to some and then to others. It also suggests movement in time: awareness that within the span of our own lifetimes we can ascend or descend. Consecutive generations of our families may do the same, impelling, continuing or altering our greater upward or downward trajectories. Our perpetual movement bespeaks restlessness. The middle class is sometimes spoken about as an aspirational group, drawn by prosperity within reach, and sometimes as an insecure one, haunted by a fear of falling. It is, as social critic Barbara Ehrenreich¹ put it, evanescent: requiring ever-renewed effort to assert and maintain one’s social position.

In contrast to “middle,” which is amplified in the way we talk about the middle class, “class” is toned down. In fact, class is muted to such an extent that, as some theorists have noted, saying “middle class” is almost like saying “no class at all.”² They point out how middle classness summons neither a deeply held sense of identity (just compare it to things like race, religion, nationality, gender or sexual orientation), nor empathic allegiance to members of the same group, if a group is even acknowledged. One reason is that, unlike with slaves and masters, serfs and lords, or even, tellingly, workers and capitalists, there is no class to which the middle class stands in clear opposition. Instead, it replaces cohesive and demarcated groups with an image of multitudes of disconnected individuals. Each comes fully equipped with a personal history, drive and destiny, as if no fixed definition could possibly capture who they are, what they do and how they are likely to fare.

What is more, in recent decades we have come to perceive society as being comprised, quite simply, of middle classes and others. In this perception, “middle class” stands for normality: individuals who stand on their own two feet and progress or decline in a conventional way, which is to say systematically, independently and (barring exceptional occurrences) incrementally, without significant upheaval. This is seen as reflecting the standard nature of their investment and its rewards, or of their inertia and its penalties. Directly above the middle class, per public imagination, lounge elites who are spared the effort of ascension and the danger of decline; while immediately below idle about the welfare-dependent underclasses and other marginal populations if our frame of reference is advanced economies, or destitute masses if we are looking further afield, all of whom appear, in contrast, to be shackled to their misery.

The idea of middle class as a class-neutral norm of individual self-determination is a denial of what “class” stands for. It negates the notion that indirect and impersonal forces might delimit our position in society or preordain the opportunities we will have and the quality of life we will enjoy. Class is stronger in indicating an external determination of our lives than categories like race, gender and religion. This is because social and economic opportunities are inherent in the concept of class (as opposed to, say, a member of a race or gender group being assigned a certain fate through the recognizable influence of place- and time-specific racism or sexism). To reject class or (what amounts to the same thing) to assert middle classness is to spurn the notion that our chances of success in life might be shaped by anything other than our own desires, capacities and, above all, efforts. And the middle class does this in a big way.

The potential to become middle class suggests that social mobility—both rising and falling—is our own doing. Finding the referent for “middle class” is tricky precisely because its boundaries are so fluid. Indeed, they have to be fluid for mobility to work. “Middle class” stands for open-ended meritocracy, holding forth a promise of entry to anyone who invests and the threat of decline over anyone who doesn’t. Delaying gratification, sacrificing some consumption in order to put something aside, taking on the risk and commitment of indebted ownership and investing in education and training, in a home, in a savings plan, in a pension, are all middle-class strategies of rising and of taking precautions against falling. Middle classness implies that anyone can potentially ascend through effort, initiative and sacrifice, just as anyone can descend if they are fickle, lazy or wanting in aspiration. It pronounces us the masters of our destinies and kings of our fortunes. This applies just as forcibly to our image in the eyes of our peers: if we made it, we must have applied ourselves, and if we failed, we probably haven’t and have no one to blame but ourselves.³

If this is what “middle class” means, what purpose does it serve? We might begin to answer this question by looking at its biggest fans, be they politicians or policy experts, corporations or marketing firms, development agencies or financial institutions: all those who intone moralizing proclamations about the middle class being harbingers of democracy, progress and consumption-fueled economic growth. They have markedly different and sometimes conflicting sensibilities and agendas when they seek the expansion of the middle class or speak up for middle-class interests and vulnerabilities. Common to all of them, however, is a de facto if rarely acknowledged attachment to capitalism, if only because they depend on its workings for the accomplishment of their respective goals.

The most erudite apologia for so-called bourgeois virtues has been penned, tome after wordy tome, by economist Deirdre McCloskey, who finds in the middle class everything from honesty, through richer social, emotional and even spiritual lives, to motley identity choices.⁴ Anyone who has ever visited an affluent community whose residents boast that they never lock their doors knows how annoying it is to have privilege name itself morality. But when someone as smart as McCloskey deems a manifold of virtues inextricable from the enormous privilege that is required to exercise them, she speaks in good capitalist faith. These gifts and sensibilities, she believes, are available to all of us as the spoils of economic growth: the more people out there who possess bourgeois virtues, the more whose lives will similarly be enriched as presumed billions already have been.

Literary critic Franco Moretti⁵ reassigns as “middle class” what McCloskey calls “bourgeoisie,” reminding us that by the nineteenth century it has come to replace the earlier, more rigid category because of its greater capacity to connote social mobility. With this in mind, we understand McCloskey to be saying that middle classes are capitalism’s protagonists, actors whose virtues reflect those of capitalism itself, and whose proliferation marks the spread of its riches. Moretti goes on to observe how well the honesty that McCloskey attributes to members of the middle class aligns with the machinations of the capitalist market. An economic system’s ideal typical actors need only play by the rules in order to enjoy its rewards: nothing is gained by trying to game so beneficent a system.

Proceeding from this insight, an obvious entry point to deciphering the category “middle class” lies in examining how capitalism works and the outcomes it promotes. Let me, then, briefly outline some aspects of capitalism that prefigure the purpose of the middle class within it.⁶ McCloskey refuses to commit to a definition of capitalism beyond the trite notion of self-interested action that, let loose in healthy competition, encourages the gumption and enterprise that makes markets grow, with bountiful spillover effects—the famous rising tide lifting all boats. A more instructive starting point is one of capitalism’s hallmarks: its foundation on a production process that, save few exceptions, is not centrally planned or coordinated. Unlike production in alternative or earlier social and economic systems, production in capitalism is not typically designed to generate the goods and services that would satisfy what people determine through democratic procedure or despotic decree to be needed by some or all of them. Instead, everyone is supposed to be free to produce what they will, and competition between producers decides the success or failure of each enterprise.

Proponents of capitalism like to say that this success or failure is ultimately a reflection of how well producers satisfy demand: no goods or services would ever be produced if people didn’t want them enough to buy them. If they were, their producers would go out of business. Desire for goods and services signals to entrepreneurs that they could profit from their production, and these goods are consequently produced according to demand. Despite not being coordinated, then, popular needs and desires are ostensibly met through the free play of market mechanisms. What this line of reasoning elides is that even if popular demand, crucially backed by sufficient buying power, inscribes the ultimate boundaries for what any single enterprise can or cannot sell, it does so only after the fact of production. That is to say, after driving numerous entrepreneurs out of business, after permitting an overabundance of products to go to waste, and after leaving multiple needs unmet.

The crucial point is that these outcomes do not stem from producers’ failure to accurately predict demand. Rather, they manifest the very logic of the capitalist system, which generates chronic overproduction. Producers, to avoid being priced out of business, need to outproduce and undersell their competitors. This competitive pressure is the motor that drives enterprise. Because of it, the things that end up being produced are not meant to satisfy needs or desires. Rather, they are designed to capture slices of the market through their amenability to cost cutting, their conduciveness to price raising, replacing and updating, and their capacity to induce demand for them through minute distinctions rendered personally meaningful. An ensuing excess of commodities—from groceries and entertainment through brands and fashions to a variety of professional services—competes for our wallets. Often, we either have no use for them or, far more commonly, we cannot afford to buy too many of them no matter how aggressively their manufacturers and retailers try to shove them down our throats.

As producers strive to attain a level of productivity that would give them a competitive edge over other producers, the entire production process changes. It incorporates innovative technology that speeds up and diversifies the provision of products, at the same time as it renders a lot of jobs redundant and squeezes as much work as possible out of every remaining employee. This accounts for capitalism’s dynamism, thanks to which less and less overall work time is required to generate the economy’s glut of commodities. It also accounts for the fact that, even as some people work so hard that they barely have time to see their loved ones, there are more people out there with the same skills who are suffering the effects of unemployment, underemployment and poverty. A hallmark of capitalism, when you consider it in its global totality, is the gross disparity between the mind-boggling amount of stuff that is produced and then left to waste, and at the same time the desperate deprivation and widespread struggle to earn basic necessities, or the backbreaking overwork by some alongside the demoralizing unemployment of others.

For the wheels of production to keep turning (and continue employing workers as well as financiers and auxiliary providers of machinery and services who would facilitate the production, circulation and sale of commodities), those who set these wheels in motion have to reinvest in their business to avoid losing it. But they also have to potentially profit from it to encourage the efforts and risks of multiple business endeavors. The economy must therefore have enough readily available and useable physical, material and financial resources to fuel enterprise and to incentivize the competition among various lines of business and industry. To guarantee this availability, there has to be incessant accumulation of a global surplus.

While an inanimate system cannot have a deliberate purpose, it can have a sort of inner dynamic that makes sense in terms of a goal it appears to be advancing. In capitalism, accumulation is this goal. Capitalism’s cumulative excess is called surplus, because the capital that is accumulated globally cannot be invested profitably in the activities from which it stems, or be absorbed back into society in the form of anything the population could use or enjoy. A surplus is nevertheless always generated by overproduction, and the prospects of pocketing some of it as profit incentivizes entrepreneurial risk-taking. The goods and services that people can access and hold onto, in turn, must be limited in order to stimulate surplus-inducing competition among them for these things. Surplus’s embodiment in profit or revenue, or in the expectation of profit or revenue sometime in the future, must likewise be high enough to urge reinvestment in ever more production of ever more commodities.

In a capitalist market, the general rule is for things to be exchanged freely for different things of equal value without force or theft. Under conditions of free and equivalent exchange, surplus can only be generated in one way: by workers producing more value in the form of the products and services to which their work contributes, than the value represented in the pay they receive for it. Karl Marx called this exploitation, because even when no one deliberately sets out to do anyone any harm and even when employers are just as happy or unhappy as their employees, work is not fully remunerated. The contribution in value that workers make to the commodities they help produce is larger than the value of the stuff they can purchase with their paychecks, however lowly or prestigious their jobs. And whatever they earn, even if they are earning good money, they are contributing to the production of more; otherwise no one would employ them and pay them for their work.

Additionally, earnings from work are generally (but with notorious exceptions) not enough to allow workers to ultimately stop working: otherwise there would not be enough workers to produce the economy’s surplus. Finally, earnings from work should (again with exceptions) nevertheless suffice to finance workers’ and their families’ food and shelter, health, education and training at a level that is accepted in their society; otherwise the economy’s workforce would not be up to the task of working and generating a surplus. Capitalism’s accumulation through the extraction of unremunerated value from work and its embodiment as profit and revenue is made invisible when it is euphemized as growth. This gives surplus a positive aura of progress, deflecting attention from its human costs.

Competition between independent producers transforms the entire production process in a way that reduces barriers that might hamper or slow down the profitable production and circulation of goods and services. Small industry either grows to become large industry or disappears. Enterprise is economized through technological sophistication or else the entrepreneur is priced out of business. National economies are (unevenly) integrated into a world market in order to survive and—in the case of more powerful economies—to profit from business with less powerful ones. The subsequent increase in productivity makes it cheaper to produce all of the food, clothing, housing, transportation and other goods and services on which workers spend their paychecks. If they can buy the stuff they want for less money, employers and clients can pay workers less in aggregate and relative value. This, while their work and their services contribute more to the economy’s surplus because they yield greater value than they cost. Capitalism thereby generates extraordinary wealth that is reinvested or concentrated at the top, however slowly or fitfully. It is a jagged trajectory whereby, despite advances and respites that workers in some regions or industries can win through political or personal victories, work loses value and employment conditions become more strenuous and precarious.

If surplus-extracting work was all that capitalism had to offer the people subject to it, however, it is hard to imagine how it could have remained intact for all this time, let alone gathered steam. Work could not always be hard and underpaid, with significant portions of the wealth that workers create escaping their reach, without these workers growing so disgruntled as to struggle constantly to break away or replace capitalism with a more just system of production and distribution. Historically, of course, workers have often tried to do just that. But others eschewed collective struggle, not only for threat of backlash but because they felt they had something to lose by revolting. A major factor entered the considerations of workers when they could finally, in large numbers, accrue a portion of the social surplus that they had themselves created.

It is hard to figure out anyone’s precise contribution to goods and services whose composites are manufactured, combined and circulated by numerous people and machines, in multiple stages, separated from each other in time and space, and then to compare the value of these goods to the buying power represented in each worker’s paycheck. Typically, we just assume that we’re paid the competitive value of our work. We are certainly free—in theory at least, if seldom in practice—to charge a higher price for our services or seek employment elsewhere if we’re unsatisfied. Sure, we might nevertheless recognize our collective disadvantage and organize to resist the system that disadvantages us. But when we are given something extra if we play by the rules—something whose existence and value are independent of our work, something the possession of which might give us leg up on those who do not possess it, and something the loss of which would be a calamity—we have good enough reason to turn a blind eye to our predicament.

When Marx wrote about class in his magnum opus Capital, he wrote about it in the structural sense, as the outcome of the production process being divided between ownership and non-ownership of the material resources it feeds on. He saw this division as generating antagonism between capital and labor: the less that labor is paid, the more resources can be accumulated in the form of a surplus that capital can pocket. And conversely, the greater the power of labor, the more of this surplus it can take back for itself. What Marx did not do in this study was to equate labor and capital with actual working classes and capitalist classes. Important reflections on the living conditions of workers and on aspects of class politics notwithstanding, his approach was more structural than historical, concerned with exposing the opaque logic of the capitalist system. But if we were to take a more historical approach, we would see that workers have indeed been enlisted into agendas associated with capitalists, in a way that has obscured the antagonism between labor and capital that Marx described. This, if you will, is the true purpose of the middle class.

We can have some of the surplus we create and enjoy it, too, despite our vulnerability as people who have to work for a living and despite the exploitation of our work in the creation of surplus. The institution that affords us this benefit is the very institution that has deprived us of the means to secure our livelihoods independently: private property. If we live in a capitalist society, we have no choice but to work under the conditions we are offered. These conditions are exploitative in the sense that our work generates a surplus we do not enjoy. We no longer live off of communal lands or obtain our basic necessities from other common resources. Working for less than the value of our work is therefore the only way for us to earn the money with which we can buy the things we need and want.

From around the seventeenth century onward, shared and common resources have been expropriated and parceled out, most often by force and against immense resistance, in the form of private property, that is, land and other resources that only some people got to own and control. The process was gradual in Europe and then more abrupt in colonial takeovers of other parts of the world. The beginnings of capitalism and its global spread came hand in hand with the violent introduction of private property where it had previously been absent or marginal to the ways in which populations managed their resources. As resources worldwide came to be parceled out in this way, people were left with no choice but to work for a living in whatever conditions the new own...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments: The Middle Class (A Love Story)
• Introduction: We Have Never Been Middle Class
• 1. What We Talk about when We Talk about the Middle Class
• 2. The Discreet Charm of Property
• 3. All Too Human
• 4. Goodbye Values, So Long Politics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index