My most recent book is titled They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy. It details the deadly social, economic, political, and environmental costs of the nation’s corporate and financial aristocracy and the numerous interrelated ways in which that economic super-elite rules American “democracy” – with horrific consequences at home and abroad.
Still, I can’t escape the sense that many U.S. left progressives let “lesser” elites – professionals, managers, administrators and other “coordinator class” Americans – off the hook of our critique of class inequality. Whether it’s the non-electoral Occupy Movement speaking for “the 99%” against “the 1%” in 2011 or presidential candidate Bernie Sanders railing against “the billionaire class” in Iowa and New Hampshire this year, we pay far too little attention to privileged elites beneath the ranks of the super-rich.
In the wake of Occupy’s emergence, the U.S. left writers Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich called the top U.S. income hundredth “the actual, Wall Street-based elite” and referred to the professionals and managers as merely “annoying pikers” in comparison to “the 1 percent.”
There were three basic problems with the Ehrenreichs’ formulation. First, leaving aside the fact that the top hundredth income percentile includes no small number of managers and professionals, the real “Wall Street-based elite” is more accurately placed in the 0.1 and .01 percentiles. As Sanders has been saying, the “top tenth of the top [U.S.] 1 percent” owns nearly as much wealth as the bottom U.S. 90 percent. Six Wal-Mart heirs possess as more as the poorest 42 percent.
Second, the privilege and power of the coordinator class is no less “true,” “real,” substantive, or vital to contemporary hierarchy than that of the financial super-elite. In the U.S. as across the world capitalist system and even in non- and even anti-capitalist workplaces and bureaucracies, ordinary working people suffer not just from the private, profit-seeking capitalist ownership of the workplace. They also confront what ZNet founder Mike Albert calls the “corporate division of labor” – an alienating, de-humanizing, and hierarchical subdivision of tasks “in which a few workers have excellent conditions and empowering circumstances, many fall well below that, and most workers have essentially no power at all.” The inequalities between these jobs are not merely about money and benefits. They also reflect vast differences in the autonomy and pleasure of work, along with differences in information, status, training, knowledge, confidence, and voice on the job. Over time, this pecking order hardens “into a broad and pervasive class division” whereby one class – roughly the top fifth of the workforce – “controls its own circumstances and the circumstances of others below,” while another (the rest, the working class super-majority) “obeys orders and gets what its members can eke out.” The “coordinator class…looks down on workers as instruments with which to get jobs done. It engages workers paternally, seeing them as needing guidance and oversight and as lacking the finer human qualities that justify both autonomous input and the higher incomes needed to support more expensive tastes.”
The problem is not limited to capitalism. A shift in ownership from private to public does not undo the problem of hierarchical labor processes and workplaces. In centrally planned state-socialist economies like that which prevailed in the old Soviet Union, this coordinator class ruled without capitalists. Members drawn from its elite ranks became the authoritarian ruling class of “really existing socialist” nations. And coordinators reign without capitalists (though within the broader framework of capitalism) in numerous public bureaucracies and large non-profit institutions in the U.S. and other nations today
Third, the power of the super-wealthy corporate and financial few depends on the system-sustaining roles played by the “annoying pikers” beneath the “actual elite.” It is true that the coordinators “occupy a much lower position in the class hierarchy” (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich) than “the 1%.” But without the managers and professionals (those the late U.S. working class journalist Joe Bageant called “the catering classes”), the “1%”s system could not work (which is “why,” Bageant noted “they must be purchased at a higher rate than the proles”). Among the many services they provide the super-rich, they are the elite that most ordinary working-, lower-, and lower middle-class Americans come into contact with in the workplace, school, and local community. They are a potent buffeting force, keeping the most fortunate and powerful members of the privileged classes – the Ehrenreichs’ “genuine elite” – off the popular radar screen except in extraordinary circumstances like when Occupy broke out.
Three years and three months ago I joined a crowd of radical and populist Occupy protesters who chanted “We are the 99 Percent” as they marched past the Iowa City Farmers’ Market on the way to a downtown rally. Hundreds of liberal white middle- and upper-middle- class people (including many strong supporters of Barack Obama) were shopping for pricey local and organic foods at the Saturday market. They glanced warily and wearily at our ragged procession. They offered no shouts of encouragement or applause. They made no raised fists or thumbs up signs. None of them joined in, despite friendly invitations. There was no love for a populist movement in the streets from a very liberal campus town’s mostly university-based professionals, consistent with skeptical and cynical chatter I’d been hearing from those elites about Occupy local middle-class coffee shops and the natural foods coop. The Farmers’ Market crowd clearly did not feel one with us as part of “the 99%.”
This lack of solidarity was unsurprising. It made perfect sense. Most of the Farmers’ Market shoppers probably came from the nation’s top 25%. Some of them were certainly from Iowa City’s top 10 percent. Tenured professors at a major research university (Iowa), doctors and administrators at the university’s prestigious research hospital, and principals and senior teachers at elementary and high schools may not be “masters of the universe” like Jamie Dimon (or even masters of the Iowa City real estate market like the prosperous local millionaire developer Mark Moen). Still, they inhabit a very different world, a very different slice of U.S. society, than do the marginally and precariously situated people – the members of the “precariat” – I was marching with in the streets in the fall of 2011.
Many from the Farmers’ Market crowd are now part of the Bernie Sanders crowd. They are visible at rallies for the populist Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. They cheer when Sanders denounces “the billionaire class” and tells the loathsome Koch brothers and the Waltons (the Wal-Mart heirs) “Enough, you can’t have it all!” Marching with people in the streets and occupying public space in opposition to the nation’s savage class inequalities and richly bipartisan plutocracy (deeply entrenched in the Obama White House) did not strike them as a meaningful, reasoned, or proper form of politics. Supporting a presidential candidate who is running for the nomination of one of the two reigning Wall Street-captive U.S. political parties and who is very careful to tailor his campaign speech to middle class sensibilities is another matter. (The “democratic socialist” Sanders never says “socialism” and never directly criticizes capitalism or US imperialism, preferring to attack the Republicans, the Koch brothers, the Citizens United decision, and those nasty billionaires). The Farmers’ Market people feel safe with that. I have little doubt that most of them will fall dutifully into line when Sanders tells them to give their support to his “good friend” the militantly corporatist military hawk Hillary Clinton.
Citizens and activists who know that “the future is in the streets” (to quote the 88-year-old environmental activist David Brower as he watched the great anti-WTO protests in Seattle in November of 1999) would do well to always remember that “the 1%” does not rule alone any more than it relies only on the Republican Party to advance its agenda.
Paul Street is an anti-capitalist author and coordinator class defector in Iowa City, IA
Postscript (July 16, 11 AM): In some ways, the coordinators are the worst to deal with. You can often have a decent argument, debate, or conversation with a real 1-percenter (or .1 or .01 percenter) because he commonly doesn’t mind all that much if you are right…he’s still rich as Hell and can buy you 20 times over! When you dare call a coordinator class member’s wisdom and authority into question, watch out because you are challenging their whole claim to privilege and position. The results can be quite unpleasant.
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24 Comments
A most excellent article Mr Street. No bullshit, no complicated arguments, no frills, just straight to the point and all too true. It is strange that the Ehrenreich’s said what they said in the wake of Occupy considering it was their articles in the 70’s about the professional managerial class that helped inspire the notion of Albert and Hahnel’s coordinator class?
But anyway, more articles like this, regularly presented, that mention this obvious class could lead to serious discussions elsewhere and at Z about say, remuneration and how it actually works in a market capitalist society. Constant discussion regarding these two things could lead to regular discussion about market allocation, its inefficiencies and anti-social biases, and how it undermines democratic participatory decision making processes, thereby leading to discussions about new well crafted coherent easy to understand economic institutional structures that could replace capitalism.
Regular articles and essays containing such information could elicit new awareness surrounding real capitalist alternatives that could also elicit further interest among many still not totally convinced such alternatives are possible. Particularly among those outside the revolutionary left choir.
Discussions that follow from articles that increase awareness about the existence of coherent vision would only enrich the left and its relentless effort spent writing and highlighting present day system atrocities and the need for change, while rarely offering up solutions or alternatives that are much more than vague notions or at best versions of a green new deal.
If Naomi Klein’s book was to really be an important addition to left literature it SHOULD have devoted major space to post capitalist alternative visions. Some are out there and deserve far greater visibility, the most coherent and well crafted being Parecon (now I’ve done it!)
Bageant is interesting regarding class. His exasperation at the Appalachian underclasses reluctance to embrace the left, in fact its tendency to reject it vehemently, kind of lends some credence to the notion that class hatred is often sticky. It gives people a sense of community and helps to create “stories” that attest to one’s ability to overcome hardship and challenges that in turn give life meaning. That kind of tension, a reluctance to give up the hard life, the fight, the argument even, because it helps to create a sense of identity, community and meaning, (or it could be just plain entertaining and fun-the fight that is) may be a hard one to budge. Bageant was at a loss to understand the underclasses’ attitude to the left, a class he himself came from.
Paul D. CC allies for popular movements are urgently needed. Also welcome are giant movement-building contributions from 1% class defectors. No, you don’t have to quit your job, which presumably grants you some freedom and resources for resistance. Sorry, but class is rooted in labor process as well as in property ownership/assets. Nothing new there. Not my fault.
And to the comment I just made (listed above or below [I can’t tell where this will go] at 4:56 pm) I will add that denial of class inequality’s significant rooting in the labor process ( as well as in property ownership) is negatively correlated (for good reasons) with sentiment and action in support of democratic mobilization.
Are you suggesting that there is no such thing as skills and qualifications? That, even if pay is equitable and based solely on effort and sacrifice, then, say, the building maintenance person must be allowed to be a structural engineer or surgeon without going to (free to all who qualify) school and getting training in the field first? Would they even want to do such tasks? Even after all these years since the whole Parecon theory was rolled out I still cannot see how the “balanced job complex” concept accords with the physical-organizational reality of any kind of complex enterprise.
People go a little off the deep end here. I’m not sure how anyone could see me suggesting that there’s no such thing as skill and qualifications…so that, Homer Simpson is free to conduct brain surgery. I mean, really. BTW Parecon’s founders Albert and Hahnel hardly invented the notion that class has significant rooting in the labor process (among many places where this has been discussed is in Marx’s German Ideology and (more than a century later) Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital….
…see also Milovan Dilas’ the New Class (1957?) and Rudolf Bahro’s the Alternative in Eastern Europe. As for thinking that the labor process is “shallow roots,”…..I just have to shake my head.
It is time to start shaking the outdated Marxist conception of class from our heads. Its not so much that class is not rooted in economics, that is obvious. From an anarchist perspective, the economy is itself rooted in politics, i..e. the political economy. As long as we continue to look at the roots of class as just economic they will remain ideologically shallow. It is way past time to go off the deep end and look for the roots of class in the infrastructure of state and hierarchy. If we are to find a way forward in the 21st Century we need to move away from rehashing the ideological constructs of the 19th & 20th Centuries and look at key concepts such as class in new and fresh ways.
Hi Paul – I was wondering if you could clarify.
You say that the notion that class has significant rooting in the labor process has been discussed by Marx.
In my experience Marxists never talk about things like dismantling the corporate division of labour as a necessity for classlessness. Rather their analysis focuses on doing away with private ownership.
Is your experience different to mine? If not, are you suggesting that Marxists don’t understand Marx?
If class is rooted in the labor process, then it has shallow roots. I don’t see the economy as being autonomous, rather its a part of the political economy, i.e. the State. As I said in an earlier comment (which appears to be stuck in moderation) a contemporary view of class finds it firmly rooted in the State:
Taking a fresh look at “class” and updating the concept from historical Marxism is an essential part of creating a new politics. While a valuable contribution and good start, the “coordinator” class doesn’t go quite far enough, it is too narrow. The Marxist working and bourgeoisie (middle class) similarly need to be redefined in light of modern end-stage financial capitalism.
From an anarchist perspective – an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice (Graeber) – we need to look at class in terms of the modern State. I would propose three classes based on an anarchist understanding of the State:
On top of the hierarchy, is what we might call the oligarchic (or plutocratic) class – roughly corresponds to the billionaire or capitalist ownership class.
The rest of society is divided into:
The non-coerced class – the agents of the hierarchical top class. These are the voluntary agents of the State whose conformity and obedience is in exchange for rewards and privilege. This class is broader than Albert’s coordinator class and includes large parts of the middle class, and some of the old working class
The coerced class – the remainder of society whose conformity and obedience to the State is involuntary and primarily coerced. This includes the large number of wage-slaves who are for all intents and purposes fully incorporated into the State, but also the large number of people who live more or less autonomously in stateless sub-societies.
Hi Ed –
From what you have said here, it seems to me that you are confusing, or mixing up, class issues that relate to organisational structure, on the one hand, and consciousness on the other.
For example, you talk about the “oligarchic class” which, as you say, corresponds to the capitalist ownership class. So nothing new there.
You also talk about the “agents of the hierarchical top class”, claiming that this is broader than the coordinator class. But this category seems to be based on the criteria of “conformity and obedience” which, strictly speaking, has nothing to do with organisational sources of class power and more to do with consciousness. So yes, there may be those who are “voluntary agents” from both the coordinator and working class but this has to do with levels of class consciousness and not organisational sources of class power.
So when we introduce levels of class consciousness into the picture it does get more complicated – but again, I don’t think there is anything new here.
The one thing that I don’t understand that you talk about is the “large number of people who live more or less autonomously in stateless sub-societies”. I am not sure to what you are referring here…
Mark,
Let me try to first clarify why obedience and conformity are about both organizational structure and consciousness. First, the social organization is hierarchical, more specifically patriarchal. The organizational structure is the State. What I’m assuming here is that under later-stage financial capitalism there is a virtual identity between the oligarchic class and the State. Thus, the object of obedience and conformity is to both the hierarchy and the State.
Regarding consciousness, what are obedience and conformity other than a state of mind. A state of mind that is fundamental to the functioning of both the hierarchy and State. There is really no confusion here on my part, except that I really don’t understand why you think there is some sort of duality between organizational structure (the State) and class consciousness?
I think that what you, and Paul Street, are missing is the connection between the economy, class consciousness and the State, what I’m also calling the political economy. When I say that the economy is not autonomous, I am referring to is the anarchist anthropological critique (Pierre Clastres) that the economy is the product of – dependent on – the political economy, the State. Class consciousness is thus not primarily derived from economic function (coordinator class) as it from the political economy, i.e. the State.
What I’m saying is that I strongly disagree with your statement, “So yes, there may be those who are “voluntary agents” from both the coordinator and working class but this has to do with levels of class consciousness and not organisational sources of class power.” I am arguing that the organizational sources of class power (the hierarchy and its primary structure the State) are what primarily determine class consciousness, not vice versa. I’m afraid it is you who are confused. That is exactly why I think looking at class and class consciousness in terms of coercion and non-coercion makes a lot more sense in trying to understand 21st Century capitalist society.
Regarding, the large number of people who live more or (mostly) less in stateless sub-societies, I would highly recommend taking Andrej Grubacic’s course “Pirates, maroons and Zapatistas” – all good examples of the above – in Z-school. I have found the course readings so far to be quite stimulating and they have had a profound influence on my thinking on the above. Particularly important is David Graeber’s “Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology” and Pierre Clastres seminal work “Society Against the State: essays in political anthropology” as well as the work current under discussion, James C. Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia.”
Thanks for clarifying what you mean by people who live more or less autonomously in stateless sub-societies.
I would be interesting in exploring the difference we have here – especially the difference between the coordinator class and the non-coerced class – but I don’t think that this is the place to do it. Perhaps you will write something on it so that we, along with others, can explore it more fully.
PS. glad to here that you are enjoying ZSchool!
A good idea, perhaps I’ll give it a whirl when the current Z School session is done. In a nut shell, I see the coordinator class as a sub-set of the broader non-coerced class. For me the defining feature of class is not economic but political – and a defining feature of class consciousness It’s not so much how they make a living (although that is important) but why and for whom. I see power as collective action. In that regard the coordinator class plays a key role by organizing collective action for the hierarchy, i.e. oligarchic class. In exchange for this valuable service, the coordinator class receives rewards and privilege, e.g. better jobs. But, the non-coerced class includes a lot of people who work indirectly for the capitalist economy, i.e. politicians, media, educators, police, soldiers, bureaucrats etc. In advanced stage finance capitalism, there are now large numbers of people, e.g. stock traders, who don’t really have any tangible connection to the economy, their whole purpose is to manipulate the financial system to make money for the oligarch class. Together many of these non-coordinator class folks have what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.” In fact we might well say that large segments of the non-coerced class work in the bullshit economy. In other words, I find it more valuable to look at class from a political rather economic perspective.
Personally Ed, I don’t reckon your non-coerced class, the agents of the hierarchical top class, is really any different than the coordinator class. I shrug my shoulders really, yeah, pretty much the same.
Are your three classes based on an anarchist understanding of the state or your understanding of the state and you happen to be an anarchist?
Taking a fresh look at “class” and updating the concept from historical Marxism is an essential part of creating a new politics. While a valuable contribution and good start, the “coordinator” class doesn’t go quite far enough, it is too narrow. The Marxist working and bourgeoisie (middle class) similarly need to be redefined in light of modern end-stage financial capitalism.
From an anarchist perspective – an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice (Graeber) – we need to look at class in terms of the modern State. I would propose three classes based on an anarchist understanding of the State:
On top of the hierarchy, is what we might call the oligarchic (or plutocratic) class – roughly corresponds to the billionaire or capitalist ownership class.
The rest of society is divided into:
The non-coerced class – the agents of the hierarchical top class. These are the voluntary agents of the State whose conformity and obedience is in exchange for rewards and privilege. This class is broader than Albert’s coordinator class and includes large parts of the middle class, and some of the old working class
The coerced class – the remainder of society whose conformity and obedience to the State is involuntary and primarily coerced. This includes the large number of wage-slaves who are for all intents and purposes fully incorporated into the State, but also the large number of people who live more or less autonomously in stateless sub-societies.
P.S. Thanks to Michael for posting the article “Urban gardening in Greece – A new form of protest” a good example of the kind of new politics that the re-evaluation of the Marxist concept of class engenders. That issue of Green European Journal had some other interesting articles in it, e.g. Chantal Mouffe’s “Transforming political consciousness” http://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/transforming-political-consciousness/ and the opening editorial “Connecting the struggles” which talks about “reclaiming power: the politics of anti-politics.” http://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/connecting-the-struggles-editorial-board-introduction/
Yes, yes, yes. We see it every day. Those who have privilege, let’s say the top 20%, are comfortable and are not seeking change. Security, yes, keeping things generally as they are, yes, living relatively distanced and protected in their privilege, without a doubt.
But if we take a look at the whole world society, not only at the U.S. (and the privileged throughout the world who view things in much the same way), this 20% is entrenched.
Focusing only on the 1% or .1% misses the dynamic factor of the management class. Many who are not in these categories still aspire and believe they can get there one day. I don’t believe this is so.
Are those in the lower 80% seeking seeking change either? I only wish those in the low-wage occupations were engaged in strong-class-conscious activism. Every working-class corner bar here in Pittsburgh would be a hotbed of radical organizing. I occasionally drop by such bars – including ones frequented by Pennsylvania fracking employees who have absolutely no clue nor care about their basic FLSA rights – as every one of them are violated by their bosses.
Aren’t most engaged activists coming, from, if not the upper 20% than at least the upper two or rhree income quintiles, with very little representation coming from the bottom tow quintiles?
Paul,
Might the farmers market-going, food co-op shopping, Nissan LEAF-driving, people you are describing be better characterized, as they have going back at least to Marx, as the “bourgeois liberal class”?
Regarding this “coordinator class”, I find that defining class by work occupation rather than asset ownership take us in a problematic direction. So is merely having a education and a technical skill going to make me the enemy? Am I supposed to quit my job and deliberately join the ranks of the poor in order to be taken seriously as a leftist? Are you suggesting that merely having some specialized job skills make me a class enemy?
Paul D.
Civil engineer and presumably a member of the Coordinator Class
Hi Paul D,
The claim is that the source of class power is different for the capitalist class and coordinator class. With the former it is via ownership whereas with the latter it is via the monopolisation of empowering tasks. In a capitalist economy it is the institutions of private ownership and the corporate division of labour (respectively) that facilitates this arrangement.
If this analysis is correct – as I think it is – then those organising for a just economy/society cannot afford to ignore it. However, if correct, this does not make members of the coordinator class the enemy (and the same holds for members of the capitalist class). The “enemy” – if there are any – are the institutions that this analysis brings to our attention – which I highlighted above – and the arguments that are used to justify them.
At the individual level, what matters is how those in positions of class privilege use their power. So, from the perspective being presented here, to be taken seriously, members of the coordinator class, who are interested in economic justice, would not only be organising with others to replace private ownership, but also the corporate division of labour. For example, they would be using their advanced skills and knowledge to present counter-arguments to those being presented to maintain these classist institutions, whilst also developing alternative institutional proposals that result in the permanent removal of these forms of social injustice.
Mark,
Can you define “empowering tasks?”.
Doing calculations and preparing drawings at a desk confers no “power” compared to the person who use other, more physical, manual skills to build the thing on the drawing – and if the latter is a member of a union, they probably have more power over the conditions of his work than the guy at the desk – who usually has no chance at union representation (although as a US government engineer (Dept. of Labor) I do belong to a union.)
Now, if by “coordinator class” you mean the managers and bosses, I’m all for that concept. No everyone with an occupation that falls under that (annoying) term “professional” does any kind of management or supervision or has much of a say over their work conditions – most don’t. It seem to be that this judgment of the Pareconists that there is something disempowering about trade work versus desk work is itself some kind of class bias.
Paul D –
I cannot comment on your workplace because I have never worked there. However, your point about unions is true enough – at least one would hope so!
The coordinator class have been defined as “Planners, administrators, technocrats, and other conceptual workers who monopolise the information and decision-making authority necessary to determine economic outcomes. An intermediate class in capitalism; the ruling class in coordinator economies…”
From this definition we can see that the notion of “empowering tasks” relates to jobs that monopolise information and decision-making authority. Now, such jobs do tend to include lots of “desk work” – as you put it – but I don’t think that anyone is saying that all desk work is automatically more empowering than trade work.
And I would add Mark, that empowering tasks confer on those who do them, confidence, skill sets, knowledge, information understanding, decision making abilities, etc., attributes that diminish as one goes down the rungs towards solely order takers.
This is a major problem when it comes to participatory democracy, or self-management with those disempowered workers often withdrawing from decision making processes and disappearing into the ether (a what’s the point syndrome) and leaving such tasks to those with the confidence, information understanding and know how.
Hence, balanced job complexes.
I really don’t want to put myself in a quarrelsome position with black folks that support Obama, but white folks, that’s another story. Back here in WVa. we said a collective no to Reagan in 1980, as well as to Obama in 2008 and 2012. I think that this was a positive movement against an emerging orthodoxy,’which in both instances paralyzed the country. Reagan, who Obama speaks highly of, was a white backlash president.
The fact that us Hillbillies, and rural whites in general bristle at our role as the foil in this inch deep mile wide form of multiculturalism could have positive outcomes. Gays and white radicals are hardly uniform in their acceptance of this sudden emergence of gay rights victories and the first black president. For that matter, the black youth that I work with, hardly seem to be basking in the glow. It will be interesting to see how our community responds to the movement to change the name of Stonewall Jackson Middle Scool. As Custer was part of the Union force that carried the battle against the Sioux uprising of 1862 into the Plains War, and the subsequent Filapino War, I say curse on both your house.
Manage the chaos would seem to be an appropriate mantra. It certainly describes our approach to the foreign policy. I think it applies at home as well. A very large part of the enabling group are those who manage domestic chaos: law enforcement, corrections, the I.N.S., the information managers in media, the surveillance, intelligence, security network, the thousands of companies with federal contracts that comprise the military in civilian clothes. It’s been written that more than half the economy is either directly or indirectly dependent on military spending.
Work has been done on there being a genetic component to compassion. Most people just don’t have a great deal of it or limit it’s application to the immediate.