On Class

Back in the day (2011), Occupy Wall Street (OWS) propagated the slogan “We are the 99%” (as opposed to the ruling class, “they,” the 1%, the billionaires, the oligarchs).

Leaving exactitude aside, we in the (admittedly smallish) left blogosphere criticized this slogan, on the grounds that there was an intermediate class that did the work of the 1% in keeping the 99% (implicitly, the working class) divided, distracted, demoralized, and disempowered. We labeled this class the 10%; now we would call the 10% the professional-managerial class (PMC). (Figures may not add due to rounding.)

As it turns out, we were wrong (though OWS was more wrong), for three reasons. Percentages are the wrong model. They are not granular enough, and they are not dynamic. For example, “We are the 99%” cannot give an account of the rise of the precariat (gig work) or the fall of the Silicon Valley labor aristocracy into precarity. Further, because the percentages are fixed, they cannot give an account of the extraordinary, accelerating accumulation of wealth by the oligarchs since 2011, which has led to increasing separation between the classes, economically, culturally, politically, geographically, and demographcally as the rich pull away (if not to their bunkers, then Mars). Handy chart:

(Perhaps I can find a better chart whose vertical axis goes beyond $15 million, couch lint to an oligarch; after all, “the top 400 Americans had net worth of $2 trillion in 2013, more than the bottom 50%. Their average net worth was $5 billion.)

Indeed, it must seem that the Bearded Ones (1848) were and are right:

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

De Tocquevlle wrote (1833) that in America: “The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone studies it and applies it.” One would have expected, therefore…

Well, never mind. Suffice to say that the gravediggers of the bourgeoisie seem to be thin on the ground today, for reasons I find it hard to understand (much as I find the civilizational collapse implicit in our collective response to Covid baffling, despite my actively pursuing a state of non-bafflement[1]).

Perhaps the answer is to be found in a concept of capital — or, possibly, capitals plural — that corresponds more closely to the exploitation(s) of the actually existing working class today, as opposed 1848. We shall see!

NOTES

[1] An Easter egg:

Good thing I trusted my own memory and not Google’s “AI Overview”:

Now, to be fair to Google’s multi-billion dollar autocorrection device, “non bafflement” (my search), “non-bafflement” (AI Overview), and “nonbafflement” (the text) are not identitical. But AI stumbles at a hyphen? How often? And who the heck curated a training set that didn’t include the complete works of Terry Pratchett?