While Marxists and others on the Left are correct to point out that many college-educated progressives are themselves part of the working class — even many lawyers and doctors must work for a paycheck to survive, after all — the key to socialist political strategy is uniting the whole working-class around a majoritarian agenda. For a civilizational challenge like shifting away from fossil fuels, only broad-based working-class power is capable of achieving what planetary systems require. To build that power, we need to understand why we are failing to win many workers to our politics, and how we can change that.
The “punk” part ain’t no joke
There is a reason why education of the working class has always been a concern for the left and why it has always been fought by the right.
You don’t change class when you become educated. You may change income brackets though. College education can turn you into a lawyer or into a doctor, but it is very unlikely to turn you into the inheritor of a multi-million company.
The thing is, too often I meet militants who confuse the different meaning of bourgeois, thinking that anyone with a bit more income than the median person is from the dominating class and an enemy of the working class. That’s a self-defeating mentality.
This got me thinking what exactly makes someone a member of the ownership class. I’d agree inheriting a multi-million company would make you a member, but does owning a small business with a few employees? How does debt factor into this? A business owner who’s trying to pay down their startup loans might feel more like working class than ownership.
Who is the ownership class?
There’s a class I think appears more clearly when you are looking at it from the perspective of who needs public infrastructure? How detached are you from the public good? If you are rich enough to have bodyguards, you don’t need police. If you’re rich enough to have private teachers and doctors, you don’t need schools and hospitals. Economy of scale predicts though that the service that you will get is of much lower quality, but many ultra-rich don’t realize that.
I would say you are in a different class when you have no interest in the public services working correctly.
Some people say that you’re not in the working class anymore if you have sufficient income to just stop working.
But to be honest, that’s the core question that made me leave the Marxist ideology. I still remain far left, but I consider myself an anarchist more than a Marxist. Vague undefined enemies is a populist tool and I’ve only seen it used as such, never as the theoretical tool it pretends to be.
I find a clearer tool is to look at exploitation mechanics. You usually have two sides to oppression. You have the oppressor and the oppressed. Problem: It does not draw two clear populations to oppose to each other.
Many employees will receive oppression from other employees who are not necessarily company owners. Poor male workers will often oppress their own wives while being themselves oppressed by their employers. Ethnic minorities receive a lot of racism from other ethnic minorities.
In my perspective, oppression at work starts with any sort of hierarchy. As soon as you have people who have to obey your orders, you are part of the oppressors. The good news is that it’s not really an inescapable class. That’s just a system you’re playing a role in and you can refuse, reject and break.
Desire to oppress the others is a much stronger differentiator in my opinion. I usually walk with Marxists because it is almost impossible to find an ultra-rich that isn’t also an enthusiastic oppressor. But as soon as you get down in the revenue brackets, things get blurrier.
I’d rather be with a rich doctor who thinks that we need to break oppression at work than with a minimal wage worker who has only one desire, it is to climb the hierarchical ladder in order to oppress his fellow workers. And from what I have seen, there is not a very strong correlation between poverty and benevolence. It is a bit random.