Re: <nettime> the middle class doesn't exist

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 05/15/2013 08:56 AM, allan siegel wrote:

> The thesis of the death of the middle class is simple and not
> peculiar to Sweden: every time you try to define the allegedly most
> important contemporary social formation, this "middle class" breaks
> into two, writes Greider; one part that serves the economic power and
> another that has more in common with blue collar workers and
> unemployed, with the sans papiers and the precariat."

This is exactly it. What's happening is massive proletarianization, 
caused by the rapacity of the rich.

In the 1930s, the emergence of the social state and the rise of 
middle-management as a major category of corporate employment created 
that ambiguous social category, the middle class. Clearly its members 
had an interest in the status quo, but to protect themselves from both 
politicians and bosses, they created professional organizations, imposed 
college-degree requirements and built up (so-called) ethical codes which 
made their professional behavior subject to peer review rather than 
outside discipline. Bourdieu described this relative autonomy in his 
theory of fields, a thousand sociologists have described it. It's hardly 
a joke because it structured society for seventy years, cold war, moon 
shot, air-conditioned nightmare and all. And then there's another thing: 
Access to professional status pretty much guaranteed access to assets: 
house, retirement fund, savings and for many, investments. Again, no 
joke, previous generations accumulated them massively.

But now the lower end of the professions - including engineers in 
manufacturing, teachers, legal assistants, mechanics, secretaries, 
accountants, a very lengthy list - have become adjuncts to software and 
robots, when not just redundant because of outsourcing. They whittled 
their (often inherited) assets down over the long period of wage 
stagnation and if they had a house, they "used it as an ATM machine" 
like Nouriel Roubini says, with the result of losing it when sudddenly 
it lost a third of its value and they lost all of their job. 
Proletarianization is when you have no status, no special guarantees and 
no assets. You just have your labor to sell and when you're out of a 
job, you are part of the industrial reseve army that strikes fear into 
everyone else's heart. Exactly this is situation is what now confronts 
students graduating with a huge debt-overhang from the universities that 
were supposed to gurantee their middle-class status.

But wait a minute: Yesterday everything was different! Abundance is 
everywhere! Basic goods cost almost nothing! I've still got an internet 
connection! I studied philosophy, political science, medicine, physics, 
nuclear engineering! I understand what's going on! They can't do this to me!

The perfect recipe for revolution - masdsive poverty amidst overwhelming 
abundance - already produced the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Occupy. 
What's it gonna produce next? I guess our story isn't over. Stay tuned 
for the next episode of your life.

Brian





#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org