What is Class Politics?

What follows is an attempt to define class politics for people looking for a way for it to make sense. I want to assert that class is a category of political concern — not competition to identity politics in the binary we’re falsely sold in modern left wing discourse. We need both. We need more than both.

I hope you feel it’s worth your time.

-Peter

Rich’s beard wasn’t grown out due to his own personal taste. He had no interest in (or, for that matter, knowledge of) the fashionable or what is “in,” so I’d suggest he wasn’t aware that the beard was just on the cusp of “making its big comeback.” Rich had a beard — no shit — because he didn’t have enough money for running water. He didn’t buy razors or shaving cream because the small amount of money he made was gone immediately.

When I spoke with him, Rich usually concentrated on what he was unable to do because of his financial situation. I talked to him quite a bit, actually; I was Rich’s co-worker. I also got paid the same amount that he did — minimum wage — so I knew a lot of what he was talking about.

Neither Rich or myself at this point had seen a doctor in several years. Neither of us had health insurance, because it seemed an extravagance. Rich had a lot of debt collectors calling him and was unable to secure housing anywhere reputable, a problem I would have down the line as well. Instead, he rented what would be fashionably called a “tiny house” on HGTV today, further reminding people that hipsters are essentially imitating poverty, except in comfort and safety. Rich’s rental was in disrepair, though.

His meals cost just about $2 a piece and I can’t imagine they were particularly filling. 2 packs of Bumblebee Tuna only goes so far. He spent very little on leisure, instead attending free local events with friends.

I come from a rural area, but this job was in the closest thing to an urban area around. But driving three miles in any direction put you back into country. Rich’s options for his time outside work often revolved around some contraption a rando-done-good who didn’t need a full-time job had modified all-to-hell and its own ability to fling mud. I never found that kind of thing to be particularly interesting myself, but he would fondly talk about all the mud a quad or snowmobile would fling up when they all went boggin’.

At the time, I wasn’t exactly living it up, but I had some advantages he did not. I had just moved back in with my parents after a bad life event that left me in debt, though they also had no money, and was trying to take control of a personal situation that had spiraled from me. I had no rent, though, and that helped me get through that time. I sympathized with Rich, but in truth I wouldn’t entirely grasp his situation until I after many ups (I briefly did very well) and downs (I said “briefly”), mine had gotten to a very similar state. Rich wasn’t rich. Also, that wasn’t his real name. I try to respect people’s privacy and I thought the irony of “Rich” might make this all stick just a bit better.

When I worked with Rich, he wasn’t alone; he took care of an older aunt of his who lived with him. In my life, I paid mainly for food and auto insurance and barely had anything left from that. Rich didn’t have auto insurance because it was too costly. From time to time he would get a ticket and had to pay steeper fines each time. This is another situation I became familiar with later. I had not yet ruined my credit and was able to get a small mortgage because I had started making a little money. That didn’t last, though, and I lost that house. I ended up in almost the same situation Rich was in, except I was still fighting — with all of myself — to get out. I have a wife and a child. I’d do anything to make sure they never have to be where I was at that time.

Rich was past that. He was just trying to survive. Unless you have some stroke of luck, that’s where you end up.

This is the working class. You’re waking up every day knowing you have to give at least eight hours of your day (likely more) to something that you know isn’t going to fix the cocktail of regret, shame, and dread you feel basically all the time. You’re disgusted at all the empty promises your superiors make about advancement and “talking about a raise eventually.” You’re eventually just disgusted at the idea of superiors. If you weren’t hard-wired to be a cynic, you’re experiencing psychological conditioning that will lead you there.

Working class struggle is profoundly sad. It’s the story of people who have been continually told that “The American Dream” was going to manifest for them if they just worked a little harder — and did it on Christmas Eve. Don’t worry! Not a full day.

Working class people are placed in an environment where discussion is discouraged because there is work to be done. If they work really hard, they’re going to come out on top, so discussion about things like “pay” and “working conditions” are supposedly not productive.

These folks who do the dirty, boring, unsatisfying, shitty work that keeps the country’s systems from bursting at the seams are often just flat-out lied to. The thing is, people aren’t stupid. They know their lives are being mined like a precious resource. People can tell that when they’re told they may get a raise after a full 3 years of not getting one that it’s bullshit.

That’s just one class, too. There are other classes. The working class are the people who are supposedly out of poverty. Supposedly this isn’t poverty!

You have a job, so that means you can’t be impoverished, right? Poverty is shameful; only the lazy are impoverished. You are working, that means you’re better than them! This implication is ever-present but inside we know it’s bullshit. That being said, the shame we would feel for every day we took off for being sick, knowing those hours would make the budget tighter when the electric bill is already two weeks late and you don’t know if they will grant another extension this quarter because they already did two months ago.

When the wealth ratios are like they are, it’s amazing anyone would have the gall to shame someone who works 40–60 hours a week.

You’ve probably heard that 0.1% of the US population holds more wealth than the bottom 90%. There is something fundamentally wrong when that happens in a system that is purported to give everyone a chance. If it “takes money to make money,” then most of us are just never gonna make any money.

Many people look to Karl Marx for definition of class. Marx derived his definition of class from the ownership of property and it’s not wrong, per se. I find it a bit limiting, though, in a world where physical products aren’t necessarily the drivers of the economy — the one we’ve come to live in long after his death.

Manufacturing comes in fourth place in the “largest sectors of the economy” race. Before it come state/local government, the finance sector, and the health sector. The lines between product and customer are often very blurry in modern industry, and the means of production is just as often totally abstract. How does one define the bourgeoisie and the proletariat when we all share the same platforms? If you own the means of production but it exists virtually on rented rackspace somewhere you’ll never visit in Iceland… do you really own it? Is it really the means of production?

The world is too complex to divide into two classes. Or four. Or six. Or seventy-three. There are many different ways to make a living and they all create wildly different results. Your place in the economy is neither entirely unique or a generic tick on a list of characteristics. Despite the fluidity of the situation, we all share a lot of problems that can be solved with a social safety net, benefits programs, worker protections, and a serious commitment to human rights.

When someone says “the working class,” assumptions should not be made about what exactly that means. Lots of people do many different kinds of work. When people talk about “the middle class” or “poor people,” that these aren’t people who make choices to be poor or not to excel. What people should care about is this: “are people being treated fairly?”

Personally, I think the boundaries are a bit more fluid than a lot of people like the idea of. Class is too general to just nail down the way many try to. One can slot into a “working” or “middle” income bracket and have the same standard of living as people who are much worse off by the numbers. Similarly, being poor is not one specific thing — and it’s certainly not stable. It can get much worse very quickly. There is no bottom — especially when you own nothing.

People don’t own a lot when the environment has been centered around debt. The lower your income, the bigger banks’ target is on your back.

What is important is working so that those not in power are treated fairly by those who are. Much like there is no bottom, there’s always someone with more money and power, as well.

So why does everyone concentrate on “the working class” and not the impoverished? What is “the working class?” What is poverty? Why do we talk about a social safety net while prioritizing workers — people who are supposed to not need one?

These questions, I think, are massive issues in class politics. A century ago, it was easy to divide the country into three classes: lower, middle and upper. This made some degree of sense because there were only so many types of jobs.

Wealth meant “this white man has money and land.” It involved none of the complex variations on financial planning for those with “the means.” “Intellectual property” was not a common term until the late 20th century. Joining the middle class was attainable by working for a few decades, and purchasing traditional property. One could spend time accumulating property and capital as a functional path upward through the classes. More importantly, it was possible.

Upward mobility is still purported to be the same thing, essentially. The problem is that wealth doesn’t mean “owns property and/or has money” anymore. Money is but one of many currencies that exist in the United States and wealth could refer to any one of them or an intersection of more. Not only does the financial sector have thousands of different “products” to own a part of or “get in on” — all of which exist only in the abstract — but there’s also a massive number of economies that deal in “social capital,” which can mean any number of different things depending on the context. Something I can’t stress enough: I believe framing credibility and various other social constructs as currencies fundamentally changes the way we interact.

When one looks at social capital as something to attain in the way one might with fiat currency, one starts looking at conversations as transactions. One starts to see debates as prize fights and commentary as a competition. When one looks at many kinds of wealth built in an environment where physical money is one of many currencies, one should probably understand that traditional class model isn’t enough.

The modern American class models I’ve read divide the country up into at least five classes, often more. It begins to sound silly, because you hear terms like “underclass” which sounds like people who just started college, and “upper lower” which is just a flat-out contradiction. Ridiculous as it may sound, though, five classes is just nowhere nearly enough.

Over time, jobs have become something that defies categorization. In the noughties, I read a lot of articles about an emerging “creative class,” which is interesting because it segments class further by type of work. It failed to acknowledge that of the creative class, people ranged from legitimately rich to desperately impoverished. In that respect, there’s a creative working class, a creative middle class, and so on.

Following this logic, there’s an industrial working class, a retail working class, a corporate working class, and a large number of other classes. Class is not simple. Is it worth it to look at it with more segmentation like this? Should we be generalizing out or narrowing in? Should we be doing both?

We need to be engaging in significantly more class analysis — and that means academically, through grants made to social science departments at universities. This needs to also happen in government research centers well as private ones.

But what about all of us who live and work outside that ecosystem? You, me, and everyone who gives a damn about people being treated fairly in regards to food, shelter, and their health needs to get together and talk. We need to talk at family gatherings, in commons at universities, on break at work, in articles on news sites, in blog posts, on CNN panels, and on Twitter.

If you use Google Trends to compare the terms “social class,” “class politics,” “stratification,” or any similar terms to the search volume for “Donald Trump,” it’s as if no one has ever spoken of class. Given Trump’s “working class appeal,” you’d think these would be related terms and follow similar search patterns, but that just isn’t the case.

Because class — the working class, the impoverished class, or literally any class — isn’t enough of a part of the national conversation, look what a billionaire with no understanding of what it’s like to have ever been poor or worked in a factory can do by simply saying a few magic words politicians typically don’t: I’m listening.

It took less than a week after November 8th for it to be very clear he wasn’t actually listening — hell, it was clear from the get-go for many. His cabinet and administration were quickly filled with corporate interests. Among his first actions was misrepresenting a deal with Carrier Corporation brokered by Governor Mike Pence, claiming he had delivered on a promise to stop the company from exporting around 2200 jobs to Mexico by stiff threats of import tariffs. Instead, less than 1/3 of those jobs will remain in Indiana and Carrier gets a $7 million tax credit. The deal will actually net them around $330 million over the next 10 years.

With automation speeding into a quickly adopted reality, who knows if there even will be any manufacturing jobs — in the US or Mexico — in 10 years?

People who are talking about class in a legitimate fashion are not pointing fingers at Mexicans or Muslims for the country’s ills. That’s scapegoating and nothing more. In the case of Donald Trump and his cronies, it’s also called dogwhistling. There’s no group of people out there that just flat out doesn’t hold a place in the class structure, so acting like “the working class” just means “white men” is not only bigoted, but it’s foolish. It’s uninformed.

Imagine if class was a legitimate concern for the Democrats. If they spent time when campaigning bringing up people living in poverty as well as people working their ass off. Imagine Democrats talking about unemployed and underemployed people’s lives instead of as a percentage point to prove how good the Democrats are at their jobs. Think about hearing Democrats pledge to no longer take money from companies that continually actually do screw over working or impoverished people — and start pointing some fingers their way

It’d be pretty hard to tell people that the cause of their problems is other people with a lot of the same problems. Trump voters weren’t all explicitly bigots. Many people, I think, voted for Trump while thinking they’re not harming anyone — or that their economic concerns took precedence over “the social issues.” We’re not talking about people who have been exposed to deep social or political theory regarding class or identity, though. We’re talking about people in areas of the country where there may be 70 miles between towns — places that might not have the internet.

Is that an excuse? No. Is that absolution? Hell no. But you can’t tell me that if a fair amount of these people honestly understood that not only is every single so-called “cause” Trump points his finger at is simply a diversion but also that they are harming people they think they have no qualms with… that they would act differently?

This is not to say “all we need to do is prove it to them;” just showing proof is not enough in a narrative-driven environment. But if, over time, more people understood what class actually is and what actions actually help as pointed to by a wealth of studies and observational material, no one would be able to just say a few buzzwords and be taken as a hero.

Income inequality in the United States is at unacceptable levels. It’s exceedingly clear that the few are taking advantage of the many. Those among us who have seen it the hardest are angry, and for good reason.

Trump saw that his competition wasn’t talking about class, jobs, or the concerns of a lot of people who reside in states where there are less people per electoral vote. Those people’s votes are flat-out worth more. He knew people hadn’t heard a Democrat talk about that stuff in a long time. He knew people hadn’t heard a Republican talk about that stuff in a long time. He knew that if he did, he would not have to get into much depth — and that’s a big plus for Donald Trump — to be considered “the only one talking about me” for a lot of people. He also knew the group most likely to feel left behind would probably be the one traditionally catered to.

Thing is, Donald Trump didn’t talk class politics. Not for a minute.

Since the beginning of this country, white, male identity has been conflated with “the working class.” White men have been the providers, those who get up and go to work. Even up to and past the 1950s, father has always known best — and we should thank him for what he does for us.

Many white men are in metaphysical crisis. Many believe that a focus that has been recently afforded to other groups — from white cis women to trans black women — that takes focus away from white men. At least, that’s what all these damn books about it say.

By using exclusive (read: bigoted) language while talking about the working class, Donald Trump is engaging in white male identity politics. Because of his exclusion by identity and limitation to the working class, it’s just absolutely not class politics. For one, to only talk about the working class is not truly engaging in class politics. On top of that, the working class has a ton of people who aren’t white and a ton of people who aren’t male.

Class needs to be an ongoing, mainstream political discussion. We all have to have some idea what it is, what needs to be done about it, and why “class politics” doesn’t mean “white men with jobs.” To ignore class as an outdated or unnecessary discussion doesn’t just reinforce the idea whoever is speaking is some kind of elitist — it outright confirms it.

We can’t keep pretending that somehow this is a compassionate strategy — or one that can win.