Note: Since LMD seldom puts its more sociological pieces in its English edition, I had to do my own rough translation of the article below. I know of no English equivalent of the French term, “classes” or “milieux populaires”, which is the central term of this article, so I have rendered it “popular classes” despite the awkwardness of the words in English. (It's not a recommendation for college courses.) I think it’s interesting because it looks through fresh eyes at the phenomenon of working- class fragmentation, which Americans have been familiar with for a long time, but which is relatively new in Europe. The piece is particularly relevant to a question not infrequently discussed on this newsgroup: why American workers lack class consciousness and consider themselves “middle class”. The irony is that American workers are not becoming more like European ones (as Marxists expected); rather, European workers are becoming increasingly Americanized —Jim Creegan Will the Economic Crisis Mean a Rebirth of Class Analysis? The “Popular Classes” Between Deception and Defection by Eric Dupin Le Monde Diploimatique, April, 2010
One might think the current economic crisis could have a salutary effect: the unmasking of the capitalist system as the true culprit. It is difficult to attribute current woes to immigrants or delinquent youth. Yet those who are truly responsible are seldom blamed. “At the pinnacle is the financial sphere and its major players, but all that is quite abstract. You can’t demonstrate against an abstraction,” explains the sociologist Alain Mergier. Below the top is a sphere consisting of “ordinary people” in all its diversity. A third sphere includes the “wretched of the earth”, relegated to the inferno of exclusion and poverty. This “third estate” has a presence that is far more concrete to ordinary folk than that of the “masters of the universe.” Hence, the persistence of fear and hostility towards the most deprived. “Prolophobia” of French Elites Maryse Dumas, a former member of the executive of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) observes: “The awareness of inequalities that separate each person from his neighbors has gained ground over the older solidarity among all those who must sell their labor to live.” “We have greater and greater difficulty creating a common consciousness,” she says concerning workers who fight with their backs to the wall in enterprises threatened with closing. They sometimes won’t even fight to save their own jobs, but only for decent severance. It’s fleeing in advance.” Having traveled throughout France to meet and talk to workers, Marcel Grignard, deputy general secretary to the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), also observes that “people are bitter and disabused; they feel aggrieved, even though their expressions of revolt are few and far between.” Grignard sees a great indignation mixed with perplexity in the face of a “system that makes no sense.” The union leader laments the great difficulty in coordinating union actions. “The lower and lower middle classes have few resources for combating the growing precariousenss of social relations,” says Mergier. Certain modifications of the right to work, like the revenue de solidarité active (RSA) [akin to welfare], have helped “institutionalize the divorce between the most precarious workers, overrepresented in the popular classes, and those slightly above them. Generalized insecurity generates individualist refelexes. What does the term “popular classes” really mean? Statistically, things might seem pretty transparent. The category includes manual workers (23.2 percent of the working population, according to the 2006 figures of l’institut nationale de la statistique et des études économiques [Insee]) and clerical employees (28.6 percent). Thus defined, the popular classes remain a majority in France, representing 51.8 percent of those who work. This aggregation is not a purely formal one. The sociologist Olivier Schwartz defines the category by three criteria: low social and professional status, narrowness of economic resources and lack of access to cultural capital. Yet lived realities fragment these statistical categories. Wheter one works full-time or part-time, whether one’s job is precarious or less so, constitute important differences. Skill levels also appear more and more varied. Unskilled workers suffer most from job disastisfaction and instability. Trapped in declining sectors particularly menaced by globalization, a part of the former working class painfully lives out the image of decline society imposes on it. In these milieux, observes the sociologist Serge Paugam, “the internalization of a negative identity is very common.” In an entirely different way, housing divides the popular layers. It is hardly a matter of indifference whether one lives in a downtown housing project or suburban town (cité de banlieue), a suburb close to the city or an isolated rural zone. Geographers Cristophe Guilluy and Christophe Noyé have brought to light the “migration of popular layers toward the great urban and rural peripheries”, a choice that is dictated by things other than the desire to acquire private property. It is rather the rundown condition of urban low-cost housing and real estate prices that drives this new urban exodus, a major factor in the spatial segregation of those of modest means. Gail Brustier and Jean-Philippe Huelin quite rightly insist on the invisibility and misunderstanding produced by the greater distance separating the new proletariat from other classes. “A strange cocktail of stigmatisation and conventional opinion invarably forms the popular image of working-class areas; it is comprised of well-worn clichés: backwardness, racism, alcoholism, rejection of modernity, conservatism and conformism. There is behind these clichés a form of prolophobia among a part of French élites. The spatial separation of the popular classes leads to certain social dynamic. A France of detached houses (bedroom communities) grows up in opposition to suburban slums, in a desperate effort by some at social betterment. It would be wrong to caricature the inhabitants of these “little boxes” too quickly as white people of modest means fleeing social degredation. Families of immigrant origin inhabit these bedroom communitires as well, after fleeing the great suburban concentrations of foreigners and the poor. “In acquiring individual property or assigning great importance to the education of their children, those of modest means expess above all a desire to live like everyone else.” They definitely don’t feel themselves to be “bourgeois”, but have a keen awareness of those beneath them in the social hierarchy. Here can be found the “triangular consciousness” evoked by Schwartz: It’s the idea that there is a “high”, a “low” and “us”, wedged between the two. The “‘high” are the executives, the politicians, the powerful. The “low” are poor families who receive welfare, the immigrants with no desire to integrate themselves, the youth who are part of the riffraff.” Schwartz has studied the attitudes of bus conductors who work for the RATP (public transport). Their jobs are protected and their salaries approach those of middling professionals, although their education is no greater than that of many who are poorer than themselves. “They feel trapped between high and low, but with a much stronger rejection of those on the bottom.” The “low” take their buses far more frequently than the “high”. The dominant representation of a social universe comprised of multiple hierarchical strata feeds status anxiety. Camille Peuguy has observed the phenomenon of downward mobility afflicting 25 percent of the 35-39 age group, as opposed to only 18 percent twenty years ago. “ Many young people are not as well off as their parents and are without the means to conform to the dominant consumerist ethos,” he explains, evoking a “sacrificed generation” that has never been so educated and at the same time so badly integrated into the workforce.” This declassing involves both a rupture with the social position of their parents and failure to attain the social position their education had inclined them to aspire to. All researchers don’t share this analysis. “The prevalence of the theme of middle class drift can be explained by the anxiety of some intellectual circles,” asserts the sociologist Stephanie Vermeersch. “This concerns only a small minority.” A study by the Centre d’analyse stratégique puts things in perspective. In 2003 the upwardly mobile (39.4 percent) remained almost twice as numerous as the downwardly mobile (21.9 percent) among people of ages 30 to 59. Avoidance Rather Than Confrontation However real downward mobility may be, its impact on public debate is a symptom of an undeniable obsession with maintaining caste. It seems that society, while denying class conflict, has an increasingly acute sense of the status of each individual. “Different social strata mix less and less,” declares Ms. Dumas, daughter of a chauffeur-mechanic, and a housemaid who became an executive. The favored layers are the first to expend prodigious energy to protect their own. “The richest and most educated families have never been so active on the education and real estate markets; they have never fled the popular classes with so much determination,” remarks the economist Eric Maurin. Housing and schools have become the terrain of a new class conflict in which avoidance has replaced confrontation. There exists a separatist logic according to which the superior classes seem to lose influence to the extent that the are diffused throughout the social body. “When people move, they make a statement more powerful than a vote for the National Front!”, opines Guilluy, alluding to the families who have left Siene-Saint-Denis for the suburban homes of Siene-et-Marne. School is another major front of social distinction. A rise in the general level of education has undoubtedly produced, in Schwartz’s phrase, a partail “desegregation” of popular layers. But academic competition has never been so sharp. Vermeersch speaks of an “overinvestment in schools” by anxious parents. The idea that everything is at stake in the early years of education is reinforced to by the fact that companies have increasingly abandoned the practice of internal promotion. Hence, the dread of failure that pushes many families to pursue what they consider the most lucrative educational strategies at the expense of social integration. The choice of housing and education reinforce each other in undermining such integration, more celebrated as an ideal than actually desired.
…………. “The traumas of the popular classes are also having a long-term effect on the left,” observes Guilluy. “The Socialist Party is led by élites which are very integrated into the globalized economy and the world of international finance, and thus divorced from low wage earners of the private sector,” echoes Bustier, a former activist of the PS. The presidential elections of 2007 brought to light a political division within the popular classes: the working class suburbs voted against Sarkozy, while the lower middle class bedroom communities voted for him. An in-depth survey in one such bedroom community (Val-d’Oise) shows the movement of “little people” to the right despite the fact that local loyalties still assure a certain left presence. The Peupliers district registered a significant vote for the National Front in the 80s and 90s, before going solidly for Sarkozy in the last presidential election. Sociologist Olivier Masclet underlines the importance of educational institutions in this rightward drift. “The left is represented by professors and teachers, who are considered inaccessible and only concerned with the best students.” For some “little people” the left is also identified with transport unions, who are accused of going on strike as often as teachers. Yet Schwartz has met bus drivers who voted for Sarkozy, even though they won’t acknowledge this in formal interviews. The above voters may be able to recognize themselves in a “law-and-order” left, opines Masclet. In the municipal elections of 2008, the Peupliers district voted for a Socialist mayor who emphasized security issues. Growing disillusionment with Sarkozy, evident in the route for the UMP in the last regional elections, will most likely not translate into a reconciliation between the left and popular layers. The National Front lies in waiting. Its unexpected success in regional elections shows that it can again assume its former role as popular tribune. The pro-Le Pen base that voted for Sarkozy in 2007 out of pragmatism can only be disappointed by the results of their choice. By making life harder, the crisis presents a favorable terrain for the extreme right, as indicated by its high vote in northeast France, particularly affected by deindustrialization. Individualistic Strategies at an Impasse Over-all voter turnout remains low, especially in poorer neighborhoods. This contributes to a “detachment of the political sphere”, according to Guilluy. Vermeersch speaks of a tendency to abstain and Schwartz of a “risk of marginalization”. “The economic crisis will no doubt reinforce the feeling of impotence and abandonment of the popular classes,” adds Schwartz. Sociologist Annie Collovald reminds us that the popular classes still have expectations that their interests will be represented politically. The impasse of individualist strategies may one day create conditions for a return to collective aspirations. Till then, the popular classes, remarks Collovald, suffer from the “realtive absence of political projects seeking to represent them or to speak in their name, and thus to give them, at least symbolically, unity and homogeniety.” Never has the “class in itself” been so far removed from the “class for itself”.