Class Unconsciousness
Stop Using "Middle Class" to Depict the Labor Movement
By Nelson Lichtenstein
http://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/
George Orwell thought the precise and purposeful
deployment of our language was the key to the kind of
politics we hoped to advance. By that standard,
virtually everyone--from the center to the left, from
Barack Obama to Richard Trumka to the activists of
Occupy Wall Street--has made a hash of the way we name
the most crucial features of our society.
Exhibit A is the suffocating pervasiveness with which
we use the phrase "middle class" as the label we have
come to attach to not just all of those who are
hurting in the current economic slump, but to the
entire stratum that used to be identified as working
class. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka proclaims "it
was the labor movement that built the middle class; it
was the middle class that made America great," while
out in Indiana, when the Republican-dominated state
legislature stood on the verge of enacting a new set
of anti-labor laws, a local unionist declared,
"Fighting right-to-work legislation is about standing
up for our middle-class values."
The Obama administration has raised this conflation of
working class and middle class to a fine art. Vice
President Joe Biden, whose blue-collar roots in the
gritty Pennsylvania coal country are quite genuine,
presided over a "Middle Class Task Force" during his
first couple of years in office; more recently,
President Obama--in an effort to identify his policies
with the Progressive-era social reformism of Teddy
Roosevelt--used the phrase "middle class" twenty-eight
times in his highly-touted Osawatomie, Kansas speech
of early December 2011.
So what's the problem? Who cares what we call
something if we know what it means?
But there is much difficulty with this rhetorical
switcheroo. First, the phrase "middle class" is
virtually indefinable in any fashion other than as a
crude income calculus. To be middle class is to be
comfortable with a certain basket of goods and a heart
full of desires. As Biden's Middle Class Task Force
put it: "middle-class families are defined more by
their aspirations than their income." This is very
much at variance with how we used to define the middle
class. Historians and sociologists once distinguished
between the old middle class and the new. The old
middle class was comprised of self-employed
proprietors and independent professionals who, in the
nineteenth century, carried real social and moral
weight in a society where farmers and craftsmen were
also numerous. Then in the twentieth century, a new
middle class of salaried white-collar workers seemed
to constitute another relatively well-defined class
and cultural cohort. But today, the middle class is
defined entirely in terms of income. That may be
useful for those seeking to push forward a liberal tax
policy. But it's pretty useless when it comes to
virtually anything else. Thus in the summer of 2011,
during a strike of forty-five thousand Verizon
workers, union publicists declared the struggle as a
"fight to defend middle-class jobs." But this
characterization enabled Verizon to run newspaper ads
claiming that the $75,000 a year or more earned by
telephone technicians made them part of the "upper
middle class" and thus, apparently, not worthy of much
public sympathy.
Indeed, the 60 percent of households in the center of
the American income distribution make anywhere from
$28,636 to $79,040 per year. That's family income by
the way, which means that these people are clearly
struggling. By any standard, they compose an American
working class--although most definitions in common
usage today, certainly those put forward by most
liberal Democrats, extend the definition of the middle
class up to about $200,000 a year. At that point, we
are talking about salaried professionals and
moderately successful entrepreneurs whose income puts
them in the top 10 percent of the American population.
And if the 99 percent is taken as any sort of coherent
grouping--and here even my comrades at Labor Notes have
taken to calling for "Solidarity for the 99%"--then we
are linking together the fortunes of those on food
stamps with families whose income tops out at just
over $500,000 a year.
Second, when we focus on the middle class as an object
of concern, we are necessarily marginalizing,
neglecting, and denigrating those who fall below it,
those out of the workforce, those chronically
unemployed, those on welfare, those whose aspirations
are not middle class at all. As Michael Zweig has
pointed out in The Working- Class Majority: America's
Best Kept Secret, when the working class disappears
into an amorphous middle class, the working poor--a
mere forty-six million strong--drops out of the
picture. The right used to champion the middle class
precisely in order to denigrate low-income people of
color who were dependent upon government checks and
services to sustain themselves. Should the left be
doing that as well?
But the main reason to begin using the phrase working
class once again is that the contemporary category of
middle class has no sense of agency, purpose, or
politics--while the idea of a working class is (by
virtual definition) a font of all of this. No need to
sing "Solidarity Forever" here. The essential
difference is that, in the Marxist tradition, working
class is defined not by income, or consumption, or
education, but by the near-universal extent to which
members of that class sell their labor for their
wages. Most members of what we, today, call the middle
class do that as well. Conversely, it is important to
understand what is wrong with a simple demonization of
the 1 percent. It, too, is politically imprecise; some
of those who fall into that income category may be
filthy rich and snobbish, while others may be
personally creative or frugal like, say, Steve Jobs or
Warren Buffet. The "1%" of political significance is
comprised of an active group of capitalists whose
overweening power over central economic and political
institutions is both the cause of our difficulties and
the proper target of all those who work for them,
either directly in the corporations they control or in
a public sector starved by virtue of the political and
financial power wielded by that same elite stratum.
So how did we get tethered to this dysfunctional and
retrograde metric, one not imposed by academic
mandarins or right-wing politicians, but embraced by
most liberals, leftists, and unionists?
When Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives in
1890, his dank portrait of urban poverty emphasized
not just the inadequate income of that population but
the entire ethnic/occupational work life of the
Bohemian cigarmakers, the Italian ragpickers, and the
Jewish garment workers which he studied. This
conflation of poverty, powerlessness, and
working-class occupation continued into the Depression
decade. When FDR delivered his famous "Forgotten Man"
speech in 1932, he did not use the phrase "working
class" to describe those at the "bottom of the economy
pyramid" but he did make clear that they were "the
forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensible units
of economic power" whose rescue and mobilization could
restore prosperity.
Rescuing the "Forgotten Man" entailed empowering
class-based organizations--the labor movement, first of
all--and a government prepared to take its side in the
struggle against that era's "1%." Indeed, it is
precisely for that reason that business conservatives
and others hostile to an activist New Deal strove
mightily to purge "working class" from our common
vocabulary at about the time that the Cold War abroad
and McCarthyism at home made suspect any references to
the "class struggle." Their success proved so great
that liberals and progressives felt constrained to
adopt much of the right-wing discourse. Thus when a
young radical did use the phrase "class struggle" at a
United Automobile Workers' educational camp in the
1950s, ex-socialist Roy Reuther is reported to have
snapped "Don't use that kind of sectarian Marxist crap
in this school."
Moreover, by the time Roy's brother, Walter Reuther,
had emerged as a powerful spokesman for the labor
movement, the conflation of working-class occupations
with dire poverty and dysfunctional family life had
been broken. This did not mean that all those
increasingly well-paid autoworkers and steel workers
were middle class. They still got their hands dirty,
faced recurrent layoffs, and (according to the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics) had just enough income to
buy a used Chevy once every four years and pay the
(government-subsidized) mortgage on an exceedingly
modest house. Their status was rising in these early
postwar years; they constituted an army of "labor,"
organized labor, not yet affluent, but a stratum of
society that was both powerful and, in Reuther's
words, had "fairness and equity and morality on its
side." Here is the way Reuther approached some of the
same themes that animate Occupy Wall Street today: "We
don't begrudge one penny that these corporation
executives are paid. We know that when corporation
management makes a contribution to the economic
well-being of the country . . . they are entitled to a
just reward for their economic contribution. But we
say that when workers make their contribution they,
too, are entitled to just compensation."
What began as the purging of "working class" and
"class conflict" from the postwar political and social
imagination, over time, underwent an even more toxic
evolution. It opened the door to a right-wing
redefinition of the (white) working class and its
conflation with those who constituted the middle
class. Before the late 1960s, conservatives were far
more likely to deny the existence of a class hierarchy
than fetishize one class in preference to another. But
in his search for a seductive new polarization that
would boost Republican electoral fortunes in the early
1970s, President Nixon took possession of the
Rooseveltian language that identified a vast,
underappreciated stratum and turned it on its head. He
singled out for censure a new and alien elite
comprised of those professional, educational, and
governmental elements of the population that had once
given ideological and cultural coherence to the old
Roosevelt coalition.
The liberal New Dealer Senator Paul Douglas had first
coined the term "silent center" as representing all
those millions of working Americans unappreciated and
overlooked by the nation's actual economic elite.
Nixon and his speechwriters took that sense of neglect
and resentment and gave it a sharp cultural thrust by
morphing the New Deal construction into his famous
"silent majority," which Nixon defined as "the
millions of people in the middle of the American
political spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not
picket, or protest loudly." Thus did Time magazine
declare as its 1970 "Man of the Year" the "Middle
Americans," defined as "a state of mind, a morality, a
construct of values and prejudices and a complex of
fears." Within a couple of decades, we'd get one
variation on this right-wing construction after
another: from the moral majority, the Reagan
Democrats, NASCAR Dads, Sam's Club Republicans, and
even the "white working class" which, in the political
imagination of most Republicans (and some Democrats),
constitutes a voting bloc of conservative white males
who have long since abandoned the party of FDR.
Although both conservatives and liberals deploy the
phrase "middle class" to describe low- income people
who work in large organizations, right-wingers--such as
Sarah Palin and Charles Murray--are, today, more apt to
also use the phrase "working class" to describe this
vast stratum, largely because they feel far more
comfortable than most liberals in defining class in an
almost exclusively cultural fashion.
Of course, the Republicans have never been serious
about defending the material interests of those they
denominate "middle class," even as they fed the more
socially conventional among them culture-war red meat.
Liberals and labor should therefore appropriate for
themselves the defense of this stratum, now abandoned
in all but name by the conservatives. But the habit of
loosely referring to an amorphous middle class won't
help mobilize people for the "class warfare" the right
decries but nevertheless wages with a calculated
relentlessness.
Obfuscation of this sort will only mislead and
confuse. We need to reconstruct a sense of class
dignity and destiny for all those whose work fails to
provide social recognition or economic well-being. We
need to restore some definitional precision to those
who truly do constitute America's working-class
majority. Unionists and those who advocate on their
behalf need to use the kind of language whose emotive
power and historic resonance match the political
audacity of those who occupied both the Wisconsin
statehouse and the Wall Street parks. To speak on
behalf of the working class is to begin to educate
millions of Americans to the realization that their
future is linked to their own capacity for
organization and empowerment.