The Working Class Majority

 “The Sinking Middle Class – A Political History” by David Roediger, 2020

This book is a valuable look at one of the key and problematic issues of class theory – the role of the ‘middle class’ in society and politics.  It is mostly a detailed literature review of how the term ‘middle class’ has been used by sociologists, consultants, politicians, economists, the labor movement and Marxists.   He references everyone from C Wright Mills, Erik Olin Wright, Herman Melville, Herbert Hoover to Dale Carnegie. 

Roediger is a leftish writer specializing in analyzing ‘race’ and ‘whiteness.’  Here he tracks how the term middle class is usually interpreted as ‘white’ and as exceptionally ‘American.’  Pro-capitalist politicians still claim the U.S. is a middle class nation.  At one time they said it was the overwhelming majority – 96% as middle-class, making $250K a year on down to the poverty level - encompassing corporate managers and the janitor that emptied their wastebasket.  Roediger begs to differ and even bourgeois academics and journalists are starting to wonder.

Roediger deals with the bourgeois definitions of middle class – as an aspiration and ‘dream,’ as an educational level, an income level, as salaried versus wage-earner or as a cultural trope.  Few except dialectical materialists look at it as the job and role in production a person has.  He looks at the growth of some sections of the middle classes and the shrinking of others as capitalism developed. 

The most valuable section to me is on Marxist theory related to the middle class, which Marx called the petit-bourgeoisie.  This started with mentions in the Communist Manifesto.  This class was usually seen as splitting - siding with the right or as falling into the proletariat.  The petit-bourgeois have changed since Marx and Engels wrote, but the materialist method continues.  Modern Marxists, especially in the U.S. and Germany, have kept pace in looking at the changes, especially the role of the middle class in the development of fascism in the 1920s, on up to now.  Roediger only hints at his own definition of middle-class and working class, sometimes borrowing from accepted definitions in this book.  But he believes the working class is at least 2/3rds of the workforce in the U.S., based on work by Michael Zweig.  This encompasses blue and white collar workers, service workers and precarious gig jobs.

The Modern Middle Class

The vast group of small farmers and peasants have shrunk in developed capitalist economies, while jobs that might have been considered ‘middle class’ at one time – clerks, admins, teachers and nurses – have become proletarianized, leading to concepts like the ‘white collar proletariat.’  A large proletarian ‘service sector’ exploited for its labor has also grown. The professional PHD strata has grown – professors, lawyers, doctors, dentists, engineers, architects, journalists and corporate managers.  this is a strata of the middle-class. Many in this strata own parts or all of businesses, real estate or significant market holdings, so they make money through methods other than work.  Yet everyone with a PHD does not work as one.  Even within these groupings there are proletarianized strata - assistant professors on 1 year contracts making $20+K a year; public defenders making low salaries; architects that are basically software clerks; software coders laboring on programs for cheap.

The small business / shopkeeper / entrepreneur / landlord / farmer groups remain petit-bourgeois/MC, and mostly serve as a prop to the Republican Party.  This while the majority of small businesses still fail or are feeder ramps to large capital.  The self-employed / contractor categories have also grown. Many ‘independent contractors’ are really workers without benefits. Some ‘self-employed’ contractors or businessmen have no employees and exploit themselves, even if they own their own truck or car. Others are ‘peddlers’ – trying to sell their handicrafts, art, jewelry, music, website, produce and writing for a pittance at fairs or on-line.  This category sometimes shares class roles.

Marx had categories of productive and unproductive workers and this still applies.  Most of those employed in security, sales, law or the markets create nothing - they enable capital or protect it.  Even the many health-care paper-pushers would depart in a sane socialist society.   

Stanly Greenberg Selling the Dream

GREENBERG

Roediger pays special attention to Stanley Greenberg, a former professor who wrote approvingly of Marxism, supported the anti-Apartheid struggle and unions, but then became a center-right consultant to the DLC, DCCC and various rightist governments.  Greenberg’s initial start in research was a focus on Macomb County, Michigan, near Detroit, the prototypical ‘Reagan Democrat” territory, doing research for the UAW.  In the 1980s Greenberg interviewed mostly white older men and housewives who voted for Reagan to gain insight into how the Democrats could win, writing a book called “Middle Class Dreams.”  Greenberg still works with James Carville in a consultancy.

Using this ‘data’ Greenberg advised Joe Lieberman, Clinton, Obama and ‘Middle Class Joe’ Biden, among others, telling them to emphasize ‘the middle class.’  Famously, Clinton became the Democrat’s Reagan. To this day union style-sheets, union consultants and union leaders still use the term ‘middle class,’ occasionally the phrase ‘working families,’ but never ‘working class.’  This muddled verbiage arose in the red scare of the 1950s to combat working-class consciousness and socialism, peaked in the 1970s and continued on a plateau in parallel with the development of neo-liberalism.   It is not effective any more, as more and more people now identify as working class … even union members!

SAVING the MIDDLE-CLASS?

Roediger asks if we have to ‘save the middle class’ as so many corporate politicians claim.  In the process he details the misery involved for the real middle classes – the high levels of overwork, debt and stress of ‘salaried’ jobs.  Many of these jobs run long hours, up to 24/7.  Many are burdened with auto, mortgage, educational, credit card and medical debt.  They suffer burnout, personality control, business failures and at-will employment. He contends ‘middle class’ life has become increasingly impossible – the detached house, two cars, full health care, 2 week vacation, money in the bank, a comfortable retirement and college for the kids.  This is why he uses ‘sinking’ in the title of the book.  This misery certainly seems less than the actual working-class but it does show how stagnant and predatory capital is, even impacting ‘white’ suburbanites.

As labor activist Bill Onasch points out, the middle class is becoming as immortal and real as the Holy Ghost.

Roediger argues that use of the term ‘middle class’ actually benefits Republicans more than Democrats … though Trump and Brexit used both phrases in a very smart move.

The actual working class

WWC?

Greenberg’s experiment connects to the myth of the ‘white working class’ – as if African Americans, Latinos and Asians were not working class and in proportionally greater numbers.  The ‘white working class’ usage is a phrasing that only a Brownshirt could love - Roediger cites white supremacist Tom Metzger as one of the first to use it.  But it borrows from the prior idealized image of the middle class created by Greenberg.  Given the media wasn’t aware a working-class existed; or of something outside skin color, gender, nationality or sexual identity, this new phraseology is suspect.  I see it as another ploy to split the whole working-class. 

Roediger does too.  He targets a 2016 book by professor Joan Williams called “White Working Class” as representative of all that is wrong with the analysis. It serves as a fractured response to the Democratic Party’s rampant identity politics, but what I would call using the class analysis of fools.  Greenberg himself now talks about "average Americans," (who?) "real working class" and "blue-collar middle class" – all blurring and making a hash of the actual nature of class.  This in practice accentuates the most backward sections of the class as electoral targets of the Democratic and Republican parties.  It also leads in practice to opposing social-democratic policies like immigration reform, Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, as shown in proposals by ‘white working class’ theorist Ruy Teixeira.

Roediger’s book mostly concerns how the term ‘middle class’ plays in electoral politics.  His real view is that electoral politics is not what the left should focus on – so he has an abstentionist / left-syndicalist position.  As such it is odd why he even wrote this book.  But it is valuable nevertheless for rounding up the discussion on the important meaning of the term middle class, perhaps even perfecting your understanding of the term.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Understanding Class” (Eric Olin Wright); “White Trash,” “Hillbilly Elegy,” “Class Lives,” “Chavs,” “Caste,” “The Worker Elite,” “Rich People Things,” “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “The Precariat,” “In & Out of the Working Class.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 17, 2021