A Functional Class Framework for Modern Western Leftists

 

A Functional Class Framework for Modern Western Leftists

 

Looking over my notes for the upcoming theory journals I’d like to eventually publish here on my Patreon blog, it’s clear that many of these planned discussions are deeply rooted in the concept of class; the economics of class, the relationship between class and race, the shockingly cohesive display of class solidarity exhibited by the wealthy in what we charitably call “western society”, and so on. Collectively, these issues all fall under the umbrella of what I argue amounts to an undeniable and yet largely undeclared class war being waged not just in Pig Empire nations, but across a global battleground.

If you’re going to adequately understand the class war it helps to have some working concept of what exactly class is, what causes class tensions, and in plain terms, which “side” you happen to be on. This is especially important if you’ve grown up someplace heavily influenced by Anglo-American ideas (United States, Canada, Britain, etc.) because the terminology used to describe class has been purposely distorted as part of a larger societal project to obscure the reality of this ongoing and long-running class war. This is particularly true in North America where the common conception of class in the consciousness of “the masses” has largely been reduced to a question of yearly annual income. This in turn makes even openly discussing class in North America a convenient bit of social faux pas; after all there are very few cultures where it isn’t considered impolite to ask about other people’s money.

Naturally, you don’t need to learn about class theory from me if you’ve had the time to do some formal reading and extrapolate the concepts to our modern hierarchy. The question of course is what to read and how to extrapolate it; if you’re not careful it’s very easy to stumble down a rabbit-hole with slumming liberal missionaries, pro-Empire historians and establishment propagandists discussing things like the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War. Furthermore, while I simply wouldn’t be able to have this discussion with you if I hadn’t read brilliant scholars like Marx & Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, and so forth – not everyone has the time for all that reading, and the vast difference between contemporary and historical class terminology can present a real barrier to the novice observer. Can you have an aristocracy if you live in a country where there are no noble titles? What does the term “industrial proletariat” really mean in places where we don’t have factories anymore because we’ve shipped all of our production to the developing world to make rich men richer? If bourgeoisie means “middle class” and I’m “middle class” because I work hard, make about fifty-thousand bucks a year and have a mortgage, does that make me the enemy of the labor classes? Answering these questions isn’t rocket science (after all, I did it) and indeed, the more you read the easier it is to translate those ideas to a working framework for our modern times. Or, someone could make you a crib sheet:

 

 

 

As noted above, this is definitely a simplified class framework and you could certainly find ways to further stratify the categories within each class grouping – using terms like “upper middle class” or perhaps even the ludicrous sounding “upper-upper middle class.” For the most part these sub-labels are largely about annual income and do almost nothing to inform class tensions. By contrast, the chart above is designed primarily to highlight those same class tensions, and so there’s really no need to muck around with what I call the “aspirational terminology” of the American middle classes. I should also take a moment to point out that the term “Mayflower Families” in the above chart does not necessarily refer to direct descendants of the Mayflower pilgrims in America. It’s simply a catch all term for people who are important, influential and have easy access to capital, primarily because they’re from “the right sort of families” that form the aristocratic class in America and throughout the Pig Empire. Whether we’re talking about a Kennedy, a Hilton or an actual descendent of Mayflower passengers like the Bush Family, these people retain a tremendous amount of power and influence in our society simply because of their family origins.

While the exact percentage composition of each of the categories in the above chart isn’t truly important to our discussion, I’ve found that in the post-Occupy Wall Street era being able to pin a rough number to each category is helpful for some observers. In this case, the Upper Classes on this diagram would basically equate to the much-discussed “One Percent”, with the elites making up only the top 0.1% at best, and the rest falling largely in the category of the Aristocracy. The actual middle classes on our chart (as opposed to the deceptive Americanized term “middle class”) comprise roughly an additional ten percent of most countries in the Pig Empire; the exact breakdown isn’t very easy to work out but there are certainly more Petite Bourgeoisie than there are Bourgeoisie. Finally, the remaining eighty-nine percent of the population falls somewhere in the lower classes; either labor or the poor – who are themselves essentially just a part of the “labor class” that has been more thoroughly victimized by capitalism than their employed brethren. Indeed, identifying the real difference between labor and the poor even in purely economic terms is pretty much a function of how you cook the books; most honest observers will readily agree that at least a third of the population in America is living in poverty, or near poverty. Ultimately however, those numbers are almost meaningless because of the tremendous amount of fluidity between the labor class and the poor; after all, today’s non-unionized laborer can become tomorrow’s victim of poverty at the whims of his rich employer, and vice versa.

This is a reoccurring theme in most modern “western democracies” – it’s relatively easy to move up or down a category within your own class grouping through hard work, the accumulation of wealth or simple circumstance. It is much harder to transcend your own class grouping and move up into a higher class, and the lower you go on the chart, the harder it is to break through those class barriers and progress up the hierarchy. Should you want to progress up the hierarchy anyway? Well, I certainly don’t but from a theoretical standpoint, life in a capitalist society is entirely about the accumulation of capital. This is aptly demonstrated by the fact we’re still fighting multiple “wars” (more properly considered battles in a larger imperialist enterprise) for the right to pump oil out of the ground and destroy most life on earth in the process; in light of this, it’s simply not reasonable to suggest alternate motivations within the dominant socioeconomic framework of our society. Well, these class barriers also act as structural barriers towards the accumulation of capital, so if you’re trying to “get ahead” in a capitalist country like all the Madison Avenue bigshots are telling you to do, this is going to have a tremendous effect on your life whether or not you understand the workings of class in modern organizational hierarchies. It’s possible for a guy like Elon Musk to rise out of the Bourgeoisie and into the Upper Classes due to the amount of social gravity tremendous wealth has created for him, but for most people this simply isn’t a realistic goal. The type of “casino lottery” and Hortio Alger stories that have kept capitalists in power throughout history in the Pig Empire are now largely nonexistent – and as we’ll discuss in future talks, there’s a pretty solid body of evidence that suggests such rags to riches stories were never statistically relevant to begin with.

All of which leaves us with:

You Are Probably Not Middle Class

The simple truth is that if you’re reading about class theory on a pinko anarchist’s blog right now, there’s a pretty good chance you’re part of the eighty-nine or so percent of the population who make up the labor class and the poor; the difference between which, it needs to be repeated, is largely a matter of pure circumstance no matter what the bootstrap mythologists in Western capitalist media tell you. For some of you, reading that is going to come as quite a shock because you’ve been told all your life that you’re part of the middle class; by the government, by the media, perhaps even by your own parents. My father was a union representative in a stamping plant, lost his job to globalized trade agreements, went back to community college and ended up working in the delivery service industry; until the day he died, he would have swore up and down that we were “middle class” – and yet anyone looking at the employment profile I just described to you would clearly agree that my family is part of the labor class.

Sure, maybe you’ve got a good job with healthcare coverage and an affordable mortgage; you might even be fortunate and earn enough through wage labor to live among the outer fringes of the professional class and get your child into a decent school – but you’d be up the creek without a paddle in no time at all if your employer took off to Brazil and you lost your paycheck. If you get paid wages, instead of a salary, there’s a pretty damn good chance you’re part of the labor class and it has almost nothing to do with your annual income. You might work in an office, but that just makes you white collar labor and when it comes time to fatten the bottom line for the investor class, you’ll be out the door at the company you work for just as quickly as Joe Hardhat will when the oil pipeline is finished.

Furthermore, this is really only looking at the structural barriers between the labor class and the middle classes, there are further, socially enforced barriers involved as well. For the most part, there simply is no shared living experience between the labor class and the middle classes – both classes live in different neighborhoods, attend different schools, move through entirely separate social networks and most importantly, have access to entirely different opportunities under capitalism.

For example, you may be the smartest guy on your block, but you aren’t getting into the important professional class associations for lawyers, doctors or even architects unless you’ve got the right degrees from the right universities and it will be extremely challenging for you to even qualify for those opportunities if you aren’t already part of the middle classes. You might be a great local journalist with your night-school degree from Northwestern, but you’re not getting on my TV screen unless you went to Harvard or some other equivalent institution. Even something as seemingly meritocratic as the entertainment industry or professional sports tends to break along these same class lines. You’d be surprised to discover how many of your favorite celebrities and music stars come from affluent or above backgrounds. Is your kid the next Conner McDavid, Lionel Messi or Tom Brady? Well it might not matter unless you’re fairly well off because ice time, soccer coaching and quarterback camps don’t come for free – without them, your pride and joy is going to be at a massive disadvantage going forward when competing against the affluent kids who are getting that higher level of support; and that advantage is only going to be magnified as he or she ages and gets closer to the elite levels of their chosen athletic endeavor.

All of this barely scratches the surface of the way wealth, class and opportunity interact inside the so-called “western democracies” in the Pig Empire. There are an almost infinite number of examples we could talk about that demonstrate the absolute absurdity of reducing class analysis in modern society to a simple numerical calculation that somehow defines any random jabroni who lucks into a twenty dollar an hour job as “middle class.” What about college and mortgage debt? If you’re living paycheck to paycheck with two hundred thousand dollars of debt, what happens to you and your family if you should somehow lose that twenty dollar an hour job? Well, if you were a middle class professional or an upper management executive in private industry, you wouldn’t have to worry about any of that – your cardiologist probably isn’t going to fire herself, and members of the corporate business class can typically change jobs at will. If you’re a member of the labor class however, losing your source of income is probably going to ruin you financially in fairly short order.

This begs the obvious question then – why the distortion? What purpose does promoting a definition of “middle class” that objectively ignores even modern class dynamics actually serve inside the power structure?

From a macro perspective it’s fairly obvious that lowering the bar for middle class status cooks the numbers in all sorts of convenient ways for elite capital in our society. Why does the Heritage Foundation keep releasing studies on the “global poor” instead of “poverty in America?” Well because when you include a global average that features people making twenty-nine cents an hour to make underwear in Haiti, it makes being a working poor Amazon warehouse employee in a western “economic development zone” seem positively idyllic. Through some dark combination of the threat of poverty, mythologizing “the middle class” in the media, and encouraging a significant portion of the labor class to settle for whatever you say is a happy, middle class sort of life, elite capital is able to keep the labor class in line the vast majority of the time. After all, if the middle class is what makes American capitalism uniquely amazing, and basically everyone is already middle class unless they’re living out of a rusted-out car – then why are you bitching about class when you could be working harder or obtaining more credit instead?

Additionally, reducing the term “middle class” to a simple calculation of what is essentially median average income has the effect of strongly discouraging class solidarity, or even recognition of the existence of class tensions, among the labor class. The insidious beauty of this technique is that it actually works on two levels that are wholly beneficial to elite capital and the classes that reside above labor in our hierarchy; it alienates well off members of the labor class from their comrades who are less well compensated and it encourages those same people to adopt the attitudes, desires and struggles of the true middle class, as their own.

This is how you convince millions of people to support tax cuts, right to work legislation and international trade agreements that are all objectively against their best interests. Why should you care about welfare if you’ve got a decent paying job? Why do school lunch programs matter to you if you’re making enough to provide your kids with their own lunch? Why should you have to pay for assisted living programs for seniors; after all, you’re not old yet and hopefully your retirement plan won’t go bust in the next financial crisis right? You see, if you can trick folks with a decent job into believing that “labor” means the lady washing dishes at your local diner, or the guy breaking his back to landscape your yard at twelve bucks an hour, then there’s a pretty good chance they’re simply going to tune discussions about class solidarity and labor rights out entirely; after all, they’re not talking about you, you’re “middle class.” This also works in the opposite direction – by painting a scenario where both you and your landlord are “middle class” there is an implicit suggestion that you have a shared class interest; in reality however the only real shared interest you have is the rent money you’re going to owe him at the start of next month. Your landlord might not be a rich man, but he sure as shit isn’t labor; in fact, he makes his living by indirectly profiting from your labor in the form of rents. In short, stripping the real class dynamics out of the term “middle class” actively works to divert the labor class away from class solidarity and towards objectives that benefit the classes above labor on our chart.

Finally, I think it’s important to note that there is literally nothing wrong with being a part of the labor class. Being poor is far more of a profound reflection on the inadequacies of western capitalist society than it is about effort and responsibility. The lower classes certainly aren’t the people running a global ponzi scheme based on oil, murder and bombs; nor are we the landlords, bosses and bankers grinding up people just like ourselves to make a few extra pennies per share before the world dies painfully around us. It quite obviously serves the purposes of elite capital to make us ashamed of working for a living, force us to compete with each other for sustenance and to divert our attention towards an aspirational, consumer credit based lifestyle that destroys the bonds of compassion and solidarity among the so-called “masses” – indeed, one could scarcely imagine how you’d end up living in the globalized neofeudalist hellhole we’re all living in today, without promoting ideas that encourage most people to work against their own class interests for a variety of reasons. If, like me, you wish to imagine a better and more egalitarian world in which we’re not forced to knife fight each other for whatever scraps fall off the table as our “betters” gorge themselves on the finite resources of our shared planet, it starts by asking yourself which side you’re really on – and answering that question with honesty, pride and conviction.

Working, poor, or working poor – together, we are the labor class; and we’re here for our fucking bread and roses.

 

– nina illingworth