While Marxists and others on the Left are correct to point out that many college-educated progressives are themselves part of the working class — even many lawyers and doctors must work for a paycheck to survive, after all — the key to socialist political strategy is uniting the whole working-class around a majoritarian agenda. For a civilizational challenge like shifting away from fossil fuels, only broad-based working-class power is capable of achieving what planetary systems require. To build that power, we need to understand why we are failing to win many workers to our politics, and how we can change that.
The “punk” part ain’t no joke
This is a US centric article but I expect there are similar effects in most “western” countries.
I’m a left-wing indigenous Australian, but find my own political priorities don’t align with most other left indigenous people I meet. I consider the climate crisis the #1 problem in the world, with the potential to cause the literal extinction of humanity. Wage equality and racial issues aren’t going to be a problem if everyone is dead.
I think a useful path to solidarity is that almost all of these things are promoted or exacerbated by the same antagonists and that unifying against that shared enemy is the best tool to counter them. Taking power away from the hyper capitalists advances all these goals. If we get to the point where any one of them isn’t that much of a concern anymore and people who were only in it for that start to peel away we’ll have made pretty good strides towards all of them. And by then hopefully they’ll have come to care deeply about the struggles of the other groups and continue on.
We don’t need to figure out what the #1 problem is when we all have the same villains.
I agree with this in general - it’s the billionaire class that’s causing most of the problems for everyone else. Unfortunately for some activists, their anti-colonialism and anti-authority approach spills over into anti-intellectual, anti-science attitudes like rejecting scientific consensus on climate change, vaccines, infection management etc.
During the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic I was saddened to see many people whom I considered comrades reject science based medical advice, falling into anti-vax conspiracy theories and other nonsense because of their distrust of what they dismissed as “Western Science”. It’s that pathway that worries me about climate change. I’ve seen that happen already, with people who love their V8 petrol cars rejecting EVs and green energy because they see it as being pushed by “the government” which they don’t trust.
The term “professional managerial class” is what comes to mind.
It is the group of $40.000-100.000 in annual income. That is 35-75 percentile of income in the US or if you want to the middle class, if you want to call it that. The professional managerial class are university educated, who are somewhat self employed like doctors, lawyers and the like. They are probably above that group.
It has some interesting stuff in it, even though it’s of course very USA-focused. I remember Ajay Singh Chaudhary destroying Matt Huber for the productivist ideas in his book, which do not respect the material reality of the ecocrisis. The above piece takes no position on questions of reducing consumption and production either. But this bit I’ll try to memorize:
One of the most frustrating aspects of climate politics today is that it is arguably the Right that mobilizes class politics most effectively on this issue. Right-wing politicians consistently argue climate action is a plot of the liberal elite to harm the lives of average working-class families with rising energy costs and lost jobs. On the other hand, liberal activists often make climate change about everything but class — “Believe Science” — and sometimes advocating policies like carbon taxes that would raise the price of energy (affirming precisely what the Right warns against).
I think that the everyday material concerns are indeed key, and there might be some fairly “easy” victories in the fields of affordable energy, housing and public transport. However, I think there is a real clash between the current desire of the working classes to accelerate their consumerist lifestyles, and the ecological boundaries. For all their sins, the predicament is not just the fossil fuel industry being evil, it’s bigger than that. Getting the obvious things sorted out is a beginning in the right direction, but actual sustainability requires a deeper change of orientation.
I don’t believe we’ll get very far in this transition in the next decades unless we begin to break capital’s control on all the essential aspects of our lives. The accumulation of capital would continue to drive the resource allocation, the political system and the meaning we grant our own existence, to the detriment of life upholding earth systems and the majorities of the world. And there will be no political consciousness to break the control of capital in a consumerist society where people are estranged from how life is recreated and upheld, where democracy means just voting in an election and where work is done just in exchange for a paycheck.
How can this begin to change? Heron, Millburn and Russel have one pretty convincing proposal and example in their book Radical Abundance. An intentionally designed institution that brings workers, local communities and the public sector together to deliberate on and control matters of production and consumption that are directly relevant to the participants.
The best part? It does not require prior legislative or electoral victories to start building these kind of institutions. It would directly counter some growth dependencies. Ideological motivations are not assumed to be the driver of participation. The hardest part? To get people involved and organized of course. But it starts from seeing the promise in this kind of action.
While there are so many different tracks of action required, this is one with great promise, that I’ve seen too little discussion and action on.
There is a reason why education of the working class has always been a concern for the left and why it has always been fought by the right.
You don’t change class when you become educated. You may change income brackets though. College education can turn you into a lawyer or into a doctor, but it is very unlikely to turn you into the inheritor of a multi-million company.
The thing is, too often I meet militants who confuse the different meaning of bourgeois, thinking that anyone with a bit more income than the median person is from the dominating class and an enemy of the working class. That’s a self-defeating mentality.
You don’t change class when you become educated. You may change income brackets though. College education can turn you into a lawyer or into a doctor, but it is very unlikely to turn you into the inheritor of a multi-million company.
This got me thinking what exactly makes someone a member of the ownership class. I’d agree inheriting a multi-million company would make you a member, but does owning a small business with a few employees? How does debt factor into this? A business owner who’s trying to pay down their startup loans might feel more like working class than ownership.
Who is the ownership class?
Who is the ownership class?
There’s a class I think appears more clearly when you are looking at it from the perspective of who needs public infrastructure? How detached are you from the public good? If you are rich enough to have bodyguards, you don’t need police. If you’re rich enough to have private teachers and doctors, you don’t need schools and hospitals. Economy of scale predicts though that the service that you will get is of much lower quality, but many ultra-rich don’t realize that.
I would say you are in a different class when you have no interest in the public services working correctly.
Some people say that you’re not in the working class anymore if you have sufficient income to just stop working.
But to be honest, that’s the core question that made me leave the Marxist ideology. I still remain far left, but I consider myself an anarchist more than a Marxist. Vague undefined enemies is a populist tool and I’ve only seen it used as such, never as the theoretical tool it pretends to be.
I find a clearer tool is to look at exploitation mechanics. You usually have two sides to oppression. You have the oppressor and the oppressed. Problem: It does not draw two clear populations to oppose to each other.
Many employees will receive oppression from other employees who are not necessarily company owners. Poor male workers will often oppress their own wives while being themselves oppressed by their employers. Ethnic minorities receive a lot of racism from other ethnic minorities.
In my perspective, oppression at work starts with any sort of hierarchy. As soon as you have people who have to obey your orders, you are part of the oppressors. The good news is that it’s not really an inescapable class. That’s just a system you’re playing a role in and you can refuse, reject and break.
Desire to oppress the others is a much stronger differentiator in my opinion. I usually walk with Marxists because it is almost impossible to find an ultra-rich that isn’t also an enthusiastic oppressor. But as soon as you get down in the revenue brackets, things get blurrier.
I’d rather be with a rich doctor who thinks that we need to break oppression at work than with a minimal wage worker who has only one desire, it is to climb the hierarchical ladder in order to oppress his fellow workers. And from what I have seen, there is not a very strong correlation between poverty and benevolence. It is a bit random.
