George Kerevan I know as a leftist Scottish economist and nationalist politician in whose tribute to Tom Nairn on the excellent Conter site - Tom Nairn – globalisation and the new middle class - I found this intriguing passage
“The last few decades saw the incorporation of China into the global market and the final victory of commodity production as a world system. But the failure to replace capitalism historically has resulted in a massive excess of surplus value that cannot find investment outlets. One result is the emergence of a super layer of unessential functionaries, pseudo managers, financial service employees, academics and pampered cultural workers, otherwise known as the New Petty Bourgeois or the New Professional Middle Class.
This parasitical layer is funded by the excess surplus value the global capitalist system cannot use productively, hence its massive growth in numbers in the West. At one end (eg computer programmers and IT engineers) it clearly merges into the proletariat. And at the upper end (financial executives) it is clearly bourgeois. But in the mass, this group has all the unstable characteristics of any middle social layer: individualistic, narcissistic and devious.
In Scotland the rise of modern nationalism stems from the 1970s and was (crudely) a working class response to regional economic decay and the failure of the Labour Party to do anything about it. As a result, the SNP has become politically hegemonic. But this very hegemony – including the SNP’s total domination of the local state and civil institutions – has now attracted the attention of the New Petty Bourgeois. Effectively, this social layer has colonised the SNP and the Scottish national movement, serving to align independence with neoliberal values and policies – including uncritical support for EU membership, economic policies fixated on supporting foreign capital, and an emphasis on personal identity politics.
My understanding of class is, I grant you, quite rudimentary.
I know that there are owners (the “ruling class”), workers and managers
that Marx assumed a state of bitter conflict between owners and workers
that the German marxist theory of scientific socialism led to fatalism
Berle and Means set off in the 1930s a profound debate about managers beginning to get the upper hand over owners
which persuaded “revisionists” such a Anthony Crosland in the UK in 1956 that capitalism had reformed itself
but that in the late 1970s Milton Friedmann’s espousal of “shareholder value” transformed thinking dramatically about the purpose of the company
with senior managers often becoming owners
and the development of services and of “financialisation” altering the very nature of the economy
I had been transfixed in the early 1990s by John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards – the Dictatorship of Reason in the West which argued that figures such as Robert McNamara (of Ford, Vietnam, World Bank infamy) revealed the evil embedded in what we knew as western civilisation. But the book somehow seemed too far-fetched to make the necessary connections in my mind to the real world. But I’ll readily confess that I’ve been floundering in the attempts I’ve been making since 2000 to make sense of the new system of capitalism.
Kerevan’s article persuaded me to google the phrase “professional-managerial class” which unearthed a fascinating if motley crew – Barbara Ehrenreich, David Graeber, Chris Hedges, Ralson Saul and Sheldon Wolin. Ehrenreich seems to have been the first to use the phrase – as far back as 1977 which “Dissent” wrote about recently but which hyperlink doesn’t allow me to access https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/on-the-origins-of-the-professional-managerial-class-an-interview-with-barbara-ehrenreich. But it’s the first half of David Graeber’s short 2014 essay Rise of the professional-managerial class which made the most sense to me when I read it yesterday
Job security made it easier for all employees to identify with the company. As a result, both workers and management tended to see financiers and financial interests as outsiders, even interlopers. In the 1970s and 1980s, all this began to change, and the upper echelons essentially shifted their allegiances and realigned with the financial classes. The notorious boom in mergers and acquisitions, and asset-stripping, and the like, so widely remarked on at the time, the abandonment of former guarantees of lifetime employment, the use of stock options to pay executives and increasingly even skilled workers, were all manifestations of this shift of allegiances. But in fact it ran deeper. During this period, financial elites and corporate bureaucrats essentially merged: the two classes began to intermarry; their careers tended to move back and forth between the different sectors; they came to speak the same language, share the same tastes, and see the world in identical terms. This gradually had profound cultural effects, at first in North Atlantic countries, and then among wealthy countries everywhere. Here I will just single out two.
First, it seems to me that the profound bureaucratization of almost every aspect of social life that has marked the neoliberal era (see The Utopia of Rules 2015) - a bureaucracy in which it is increasingly difficult to even distinguish public and private elements - really traces back to this period.
Second, the political dominance of this new financial-bureaucratic class was cemented by bringing on board large sectors of the middle classes (the professionals and managers again: essentially, by encouraging them to see the world from the perspective of investors).
Graeber writes that "As the middle classes are being pulled upward to identify with the perspectives of the financial sector, the actual operations of financialization are pulling down in such a way as to make it increasingly difficult for many to see themselves as middle class at all.
The neoliberal age was initiated, in the 1980s, by an attack on the political place of labor—the breaking of the miner’s strike in the United Kingdom, the air controllers’ strike in the United States, the rail strike in Japan—followed by an eventual purging of any working-class influence over any mainstream political party. This was accompanied by an idea that mass home ownership, access to consumer credit, and the like, would allow the bulk of the population to identify themselves no longer as working class but as middle class. But there is, I think, a catch here. “Middle classness” is not really an economic category at all; it was always more social and political. What being middle class means, first and foremost, is a feeling that the fundamental social institutions that surround one—whether police, schools, social service offices, or financial institutions—ultimately exist for your benefit”.
To be continued
In Capital III, Chapter 27, as well as in Anti-Duhring, Marx and Engels note that the dominant form of capital was now socialised capital, and not privately owned capital. They defined this socialised capital - joint stock companies, cooperatives, nationalised enterprises - as the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism. It was the destruction of capitalist property within the capitalist system itself.
ReplyDeleteSocialised capital, unlike private capital is owned by the associated producers within it, whether its a cooperative, a corporation or a nationalised industry, but its only in the worker cooperative that these objective material conditions are reflected in the political/juridical form. Only there do the collective owners of this socialised capital exercise control over it. Elsewhere, as also Kay and Silbertson have noted, amongst others, it is not the owners that exercise control, but non-owners, i.e. shareholders, who are merely people who lend money to the enterprise, in exchange for interest/dividends, no different than say a bank that lends money to someone to buy a house, but does not own the house, or have any right to control what goes on in it!
In a consumer co-op, its consumer members rather than the workers in the co-op that have control, in a corporation shareholders, in a nationalised enterprise the capitalist state.
As Marx and Engels note, the private capitalist lost their social function, much as the landlords had done, when capitalist framers arose. Their social function was taken on by professional managers, who become functioning capitalists, though they privately own no capital themselves. These are the professional middle class, as I would define them. They are the people I knew when I worked in industry, who were mostly drawn from the working-class, and were often members of white collar unions like my own at the time ASTMS, or else of AUEW (TASS), and so on.
They are themselves a transitional and contradictory class because they are by nature proletarian, but by function bourgeois, determined by their relation to the means of production, i.e. their function remains to act as personification of capital, albeit now this socialised capital,
which is itself transitional and contradictory.
I see it as progressive, precisely because of its relation to the proletariat, and to this mature form of capital. Its why I see it opposing Brexit, because its role is to advance the progressive need of this large-scale capital, which requires ever larger single markets and so on.
I distinguish this progressive middle-class from the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, which is why I think the term middle class is appropriate for the former. The petty-bourgeoisie, consists of the remnants of the old private capitalists, those whose capitals did not grow to become socialised capitals. Its comprised of the self-employed, those exploiting their own family labour, or maybe a small number of wage workers. Its those elements that seek to hold back rational development, including their support for Brexit etc.
I distinguish the professional middle class from the top level executives, the CEO's and so on, appointed by shareholders. They are not day to day functioning capitalists representing the interests of the firm, i.e. the socialised capital, but only representatives of the interests of shareholders, which are antagonistic to the interests of the socialised capital itself. Their interest is to maximise dividends and capital gains etc. Its why the issue has not been surplus value that ould not be invested, but surplus value that was diverted into share buybacks and speculation.