Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich
"Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences
(inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their
interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose
interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs." —E.P.
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
The "other men" (and of course women) in the current American class
alignment are those in the top 1 percent of the wealth
distribution—the bankers, hedge-fund managers and CEOs targeted by the
Occupy Wall Street movement. They have been around for a long time in
one form or another, but they began to emerge as a distinct and
visible group, informally called the "superrich," only in recent
years.
This is a joint Nation/TomDispatch article and will appear online at
TomDispatch.com.
About the Author
John Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of Bright-sided: How
the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has...
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Related Topics
Human Interest Religion Social Issues War Extravagant levels of
consumption helped draw attention to them: private jets, multiple
50,000-square-foot mansions, $25,000 frozen hot chocolate embellished
with gold dust. But as long as the middle class could still muster the
credit for college tuition and occasional home improvements, it seemed
churlish to complain. Then came the financial crash of 2007–08,
followed by the Great Recession, and the 1 percent—to whom we had
entrusted our pensions, our economy and our political system—stood
revealed as a band of feckless, greedy narcissists, and possibly
sociopaths.
Still, until a few months ago, the 99 percent was hardly a group
capable of (as Thompson says) "articulat[ing] the identity of their
interests." It contained, and still contains, most "ordinary" rich
people, along with middle-class professionals; factory workers, truck
drivers and miners; and the much poorer people who clean the houses,
manicure the fingernails and maintain the lawns of the affluent. It
was divided not only by these class differences but most visibly by
race and ethnicity—a division that has deepened since 2008.
African-Americans and Latinos of all income levels disproportionately
lost their homes to foreclosures in 2007 and '08, and then
disproportionately lost their jobs in the wave of layoffs that
followed. On the eve of the Occupy movement, the black middle class
had been devastated. In fact, the only movements to have come out of
the 99 percent before Occupy emerged were the Tea Party movement and,
on the other side of the political spectrum, the resistance to
restrictions on collective bargaining in Wisconsin.
But Occupy could not have happened if large swaths of the 99 percent
had not begun to discover some common interests, or at least to put
aside some of the divisions among themselves. For decades, the most
stridently promoted division within the 99 percent was the one between
what the right calls the "liberal elite"—composed of academics,
journalists, media figures, etc.—and pretty much everyone else.
As Harper's columnist Tom Frank has brilliantly explained, the right
earned its spurious claim to populism by targeting that "liberal
elite," which supposedly favors reckless government spending that
requires oppressive levels of taxes, supports "redistributive" social
policies and programs that reduce opportunity for the white middle
class, creates ever more regulations (to, for instance, protect the
environment) that reduce jobs for the working class, and promotes
kinky countercultural innovations like gay marriage. The liberal
elite, insisted conservative intellectuals, looked down on "ordinary"
middle- and working-class Americans, finding them tasteless and
politically incorrect. The "elite" was the enemy, while the superrich
were just like everyone else, only more "focused" and perhaps a bit
better connected.
Of course, the "liberal elite" never made any sociological sense. Not
all academics or media figures are liberal (Newt Gingrich, George
Will, Rupert Murdoch). Many well-educated middle managers and highly
trained engineers may favor latte over Red Bull, but they were never
targets of the right. And how could trial lawyers be members of the
nefarious elite, while their spouses in corporate law firms were not?
"Liberal elite" was always a political category masquerading as a
sociological one. What gave the idea of a liberal elite some traction,
though, at least for a while, was that the great majority of us have
never knowingly encountered a member of the actual elite, the 1
percent, who are for the most part sealed off in their own bubble of
private planes, gated communities and walled estates.
The authority figures most people are likely to encounter in their
daily lives are teachers, doctors, social workers, professors. These
groups (along with middle managers and other white-collar corporate
employees) occupy a much lower position in the class hierarchy. They
make up what we described in a 1976 essay as the "professional
managerial class." As we wrote at the time, on the basis of our
experience of the radical movements of the 1960s and '70s, there have
been real, longstanding resentments between the working-class and
middle-class professionals. These resentments, which the populist
right cleverly deflected toward "liberals," contributed significantly
to the failure of that previous era of rebellion to build a lasting
progressive movement.
As it happened, the idea of the "liberal elite" could not survive the
depredations of the 1 percent in the late 2000s. For one thing, it was
summarily eclipsed by the discovery of the actual, Wall Street–based
elite and their crimes. Compared with them, professionals and
managers, no matter how annoying, were pikers. The doctor or school
principal might be overbearing, the professor and the social worker
might be condescending, but only the 1 percent took your house away.
There was, as well, another inescapable problem embedded in the
right-wing populist strategy: even by 2000, and certainly by 2010, the
class of people who might qualify as part of the "liberal elite" was
in increasingly bad repair. Public sector budget cuts and
corporate-inspired reorganizations were decimating the ranks of
decently paid academics, who were replaced by adjunct professors
working on bare subsistence incomes. Media firms were shrinking their
newsrooms and editorial budgets. Law firms had started outsourcing
their more routine tasks to India. Hospitals beamed X-rays to cheap
foreign radiologists. Funding had dried up for nonprofit ventures in
the arts and public service. Hence the iconic figure of the Occupy
movement: the college graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in
student loan debts and a job paying about $10 a hour, or no job at
all.
These trends were in place even before the financial crash hit, but it
took the crash and its grim economic aftermath, all the "collateral
damage," to awaken the 99 percent to a widespread awareness of shared
danger. In 2008 the intention of "Joe the Plumber" to earn a
quarter-million dollars a year still had some faint sense of
plausibility. But a couple of years into the recession, sudden
downward mobility had become the mainstream American experience, and
even some of the most reliably neoliberal media pundits were beginning
to announce that something had gone awry with the American dream.
Once-affluent people lost their nest eggs as housing prices dropped
off cliffs. Laid-off middle-aged managers and professionals were
staggered to find that their age made them repulsive to potential
employers. Medical debts plunged middle-class households into
bankruptcy. The old conservative dictum—that it was unwise to
criticize (or tax) the rich because you might be one of them
someday—gave way to a new realization that the class you were most
likely to migrate into wasn't the rich but the poor.
And here was another thing many in the middle class were discovering:
the downward plunge into poverty could occur with dizzying speed. One
reason the concept of an economic 99 percent first took root in
America rather than, say, Ireland or Spain is that Americans are
particularly vulnerable to economic dislocation. We have little in the
way of a welfare state to stop a family or an individual in free fall.
Unemployment benefits do not last more than six months or a year,
though in a recession they are sometimes extended by Congress. At
present, even with such an extension, they reach only about half the
jobless. Welfare was all but abolished fifteen years ago, and health
insurance has traditionally been linked to employment.
In fact, once an American starts to slip downward, a variety of forces
kick in to help accelerate the slide. An estimated 60 percent of
American firms now check applicants' credit ratings, and
discrimination against the unemployed is widespread enough to have
begun to warrant Congressional concern. Even bankruptcy is a
prohibitively expensive, often crushingly difficult status to achieve.
Failure to pay government-imposed fines or fees can lead, through a
concatenation of unlucky breaks, to an arrest warrant or a criminal
record. Where other once-wealthy nations have a safety net, America
offers a greased chute, leading down to destitution with alarming
speed.
* * *
The Occupation encampments that enlivened approximately 1,400 cities
this fall provided a vivid template for the 99 percent's growing sense
of unity. Here were thousands of people—we may never know the exact
numbers—from all walks of life, living outdoors in the streets and
parks, very much as the poorest of the poor have always lived: without
electricity, heat, water or toilets. In the process, they managed to
create self-governing communities. General assembly meetings brought
together an unprecedented mix of recent college graduates, young
professionals, elderly people, laid-off blue-collar workers and plenty
of the chronically homeless for what were, for the most part,
constructive and civil exchanges. What started as a diffuse protest
against economic injustice became a vast experiment in class building.
The 99 percent, which might have seemed to be a purely aspirational
category just a few months ago, began to will itself into existence.
Can the unity cultivated in the encampments survive as the Occupy
movement evolves into a more decentralized phase? All sorts of class,
racial and cultural divisions persist within that 99 percent,
including distrust between members of the former "liberal elite" and
those less privileged. It would be surprising if they didn't. The life
experience of a young lawyer or of a social worker is very different
from that of a blue-collar worker whose work life may rarely allow
even for the basic amenities of meal or bathroom breaks. Drum circles,
consensus decision-making and masks remain exotic to at least the 90
percent. "Middle class" prejudice against the homeless, fanned by
decades of right-wing demonization of the poor, retains much of its
grip.
Sometimes these differences led to conflict in Occupy encampments—for
example, over the role of the chronically homeless in Portland or the
use of marijuana in Los Angeles—but amazingly, despite all the
official warnings about health and safety threats, there was no
"Altamont moment": no major fires, and hardly any violence. In fact,
the encampments engendered almost unthinkable convergences: people
from comfortable backgrounds learning about street survival from the
homeless, a distinguished professor of political science discussing
horizontal versus vertical decision-making with a postal worker,
military men in dress uniforms showing up to defend Occupiers from the
police.
Class happens, as Thompson said, but it happens most decisively when
people are prepared to nourish and build it. If the "99 percent" is to
become more than a stylish meme, if it's to become a force to change
the world, eventually we will undoubtedly have to confront some of the
class and racial divisions that lie within it. But we need to do so
patiently, respectfully and always with an eye to the next big
action—the next march, or building occupation, or foreclosure fight,
as the situation demands.
More:
http://www.thenation.com/article/165167/making-99
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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