"Middle class" = petty-capitalist owners of one's own "human capital"?

[Comrade-Z]

I've been reading a book on paramilitary groups in Weimar Germany for a history class of mine (Diehl, James M. Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), and one of the implicit arguments in this book is that, regardless of the many factors that distinguished the plethora of right-wing paramilitary groups in the period of 1918-1933, the main uniting factor for right-wing paramilitary organizations was the aim of protecting middle-class interests.

This basic ideological blueprint was already in place by the Kapp Putsch in 1920 among ALL of the right-wing paramilitary groups:
*Establish a "National Dictatorship" to subdue "internal enemies," which meant working-class organizations.
*After having dealt with these "internal enemies," rebuild Germany in preparation for revoking the Treaty of Versailles, expanding Germany's territory (especially in the East), and dealing with the inevitable opposition from Germany's "external enemies" (which primarily meant France at this point).

The Nazis were in no way original in putting forward this basic program. Only some of their organizational methods, symbols, and personalities were unique.

The question that I am left with from reading this book is the same question that I am always left with when thinking about the so-called "middle-class" in American politics: what IS IT that makes these self-perceived members of the "middle-class" view their interests as residing with the imperialist capitalist class rather than the working class.

After all, most of the members of the middle-class do not make their living from capital. Some work for a wage, while some work for a salary, which is essentially the same thing merely enumerated differently. Some might have intermediate decision-making authority in the workplace, and I'll grant that it makes more sense for those to side with capitalists, but even so, they still do not work for themselves.

Only small business owners truly work for themselves, and they are always bound to be a small percentage. Most other middle-class people I would count as wage-slaves, and I would naively pre-suppose that they would do so for themselves as well (except for people in management at any level above the lowest foreman/supervisor level). Why don't these "middle-class" people think of themselves as working-class? (And I'm looking for factors that transcend things like the cultural connotations that the words "working-class" might have in any particular society because it appears to me that this trend is almost universal).

One idea I have had in the past is that people will often settle for being not fully in control of their economic life as long as they have a little petty fiefdom of their own to control. So, a manager has his little petty fiefdom. And you could apply this idea to parents too and argue that having children makes people more conservative partly because the family acts as a compensatory domestic fiefdom in lieu of having political or economic power in public.

Another idea I came up with from glancing at the wikipedia page on the term "middle-class." Wikipedia pointed out that one common aspect of being "middle-class" is having "human capital," meaning education and the like. Presumably, this is an investment in the same way that factory equipment is an investment in terms of giving its owner economic power and economic returns. In this sense, we could say that any, let's say, college-education person has this "capital" and is thus a "petty-capitalist" with interests coinciding with that of the capitalist class.

According to this viewpoint, such members of the "middle-class" are pursuing their self-interests by allying with the capitalist class since in a communist society they would not have the (supposedly) better-than-average economic power and remuneration that they enjoy now. (Even if that were the case, though, I'd think there'd still be other reasons to ally with working-class revolution, such as the removal of the threat of downward mobility, the increased security of one's existence, and the increased political power one would enjoy (since most (non-petty-capitalist) middle-class people have to effectively forfeit any claim to political power under capitalism, just as everyone else not of the capitalist or petty-capitalist class has to do).

It is interesting to note that the rock-solid middle-class consensus in American politics really got going after WWII, when an explosion in college-educated people ensued from the G.I. Bill.

The problem with this "human capital" explanation of the middle-class alliance with the capitalist class is the fact that this "human capital" is really not like other capital.

Like the capitalist, the human-capital petty-capitalist needs labor-power in order to put to use his/her capital. The capitalist can usually exploit the labor-power of a number of workers, whereas the human-capital petty-capitalist can only exploit his/her own labor-power. This makes the college-educated owner of "human-capital" simultaneously a petty-capitalist and a wage-slave.

The petty-capitalist owner of a car wash needs people who want the service that the petty-capitalist is offering (car washes). Likewise, the human-capital petty-capitalist needs people who want the service that the human-capital petty-capitalist is offering (teaching high-schoolers, or filing TPS reports, etc.) But whereas the car wash owner is subject to the preferences of a multitude of customers, and thus is dependent on none of them singly (unless the consumers organize a consumers' union), the human-capital petty-capitalist has only one "customer"--his/her boss--and is in a fundamentally different sort of position of (greatly lessened) power over his/her own fate.

So you'd think that all of these factors would make such human-capital petty-capitalists more predisposed to see themselves as members of the working class...which leads me to conclude that imperialism can be the only thing that could explain why these members of the "middle-class" (as well as many members of the working class in the U.S. currently) ally with the capitalist class and their bourgeois parties.

What if it is not a problem of "false-consciousness"? What if it really is in the interest of the self-described "middle-class" and much of the working-class to ally with capitalist imperialism?

How, specifically, could imperialism make up (at least partially) for the fact that capitalists are still exploiting their surplus value that they produce? Is there a Marxist economic way of explaining how this could be?

I realize that this is the road to Maoist third-worldism, and I don't really want to go there unless the facts lead nowhere else...so, has anyone ever honestly looked at the question of exactly how much imperialism pays off for the average worker (if it does at all)? Has anyone ever tried to calculate, for example, how much poorer the American working-class would be if the American Empire ceased to exist tomorrow? (And by "American Empire," we're not just talking about military bases. We're also talking about investments in foreign countries. If all of those got nationalized, how much poorer would an average worker really be?)
The college-educated petty-capitalist owner of his/her own "human capital" exploits this capital by employing his/her own labor-power.

[bluerev002]

A well analyzed argument and a good question.

I agree with you. I believe that the middle class in the United States places upon itself barriers that stop its own progress. An example:

A "working class" family works in a factory to gain enough wealth to buy a home, and, eventually, send their children off to school. The fact that they do not make enough money guarantees that these children will get some financial aid.

The children graduate and become part of this "middle class" where they make more than their parents but in retrospect not a lot. So when it comes for their children to go to college they make "too much" to qualify for financial aid yet they cannot afford the full load of the tuition payments on their own. They get loans, the children work, etc.

And this process is repeated generation after generation where the middle class family is on the rise economically but then goes into a decline in an attempt to pay for their children's education, and their children go through the same process.

Nevertheless this family has SOME wealth, something to which they can claim ownership and, thus, like you said, a fiefdom they do not want to lose. And therein lies that fear of taking action. They aren't rich but they don't want to lose the little that they have. And in that they won't participate in a full-scale working class revolution.

Until we as humans can understand that the term "middle class" and all of its derivatives "lower middle class", "higher middle class" etc, are just a meaningless set of titles used to feed our own egos that want to be separated from the lower, working classes society has taught us to despise, we won't really be united enough for a revolution.

We need to address these set of crucial questions that you have just presented in order to assure that the conditions are ripe for a movement.

[Die Neue Zeit]

There's already a thread on "human capital":

http://www.revleft.com/vb/debunking-human-capital-t160938/index.html

Also, CPGB comrade Mike Macnair alluded to this briefly:

http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004543


The singer’s skills, which make her performances saleable, are, under capitalism, means of production. They can be used to produce profit. It is for this reason that the IT specialists may be able to exploit their skill to set up independent businesses. But even if they do not do so their wages may include an element of rent: the capitalist who employs them is not only hiring labour-power, but is also hiring the worker’s intellectual property.

[...]

What of humanities students? Where do degrees lead them? They lead to the ‘milk rounds’, the employers’ hiring fairs, and then to managerial, professional or administrative jobs. Being a student sometimes permits you to climb the ladder or the greasy pole to improve your assets as a trader - whether that is simply as a seller of labour-power plus rent for skills, or as a small business operator.

[Hit The North]

Skills aren't capital, they function within the economy more like commodities - as indeed does all labour power irrespective of the tasks and skills it entails.

[Comrade-Z]

Thanks for the links, DNZ. The CPGB article was especially helpful. It seems to argue that "human capital" indeed does exist, that students are essentially purchasing this capital (and thus students and universities are buyers/sellers rather than workers/owners), iand that when capitalists employ professionals, capitalists rent their human-capital out alongside buying the labor-power of a professional worker. So the professional worker earns a wage, but also a little bit of rent on his/her "human capital," making the professional worker a petty-capitalist and thus more predisposed to consider his/her interests as coincident with the maintenance of capitalism in general.

The CPGB article also points the way forward: expand access to higher education.

As more people attain this "human capital," the rent on it will go down, leaving the average professional worker with basically just a wage, and thus the same interests as other workers.

This is pretty much the situation that I and other aspiring professionals in the advanced capitalist countries face now. As I ponder the prospect of finishing my master's degree in history, I often recall the grim warnings of a post-doc teaching assistant I had a few years back: for every 10 history MAs or Ph.D.s, there's maybe 1 position open somewhere in the field. 9 out of 10 will end up as clerical workers or in other positions that completely ignore the cultivated skill of, as the CPGB article put it, "making decisions in situations of uncertainty"...except in the case of revolution, in which those widely-cultivated and disused skills will prove quite useful. :D

From what I hear, the same case holds in France, with the unemployment rate for graduates with master's degrees in the double digits.

That said, I think, before these unemployed students turn to the left, they could turn to the right...by, for example, arguing that access to higher education should become MORE restricted, so as to protect the elite nature of their human-capital and the possibility of deriving rent from it. Students and young professionals could campaign for the slashing of student loans, public-funding of universities, and other social services, so as to make it more difficult for more people to get the education that they are getting/have gotten. And is this not what we see right now, in part? What is the Tea Party Movement, if not in part a reaction of this sort?

As the CPGB article pointed out, because of the fact that students and unversities are not class-antagonistic, students can just as easily go either way: to the extreme left or the extreme right.

It is my impression that students in the humanities want to use these skills of "making decisions in situations of uncertainty." I know I'm itching to. Basically most of this discussion here on Revleft is concerning just that: which policies our groups should follow, given that the success or failure of such policies are uncertain. I feel a bit like a husky champing at the bit before a dogsled race.

I'd be thrilled to exercise this skill in the context of working-class revolution and working-class democracy...but the working-class, by its depoliticization and lethargy, runs the risk of disillusioning its allies who are on the border of the working-class and the middle-class, such as myself...to the point where the prospects for exercising some power and skill appear better by allying with the capitalist class and its institutions designed to mobilize the middle-class.

I think part of the turn towards fascism from middle-class leftists comes from the sentiment of, "If the working-class are going to prove themselves to be totally inept as allies in pursuit of power, then screw that, I'm going to ally with a force that will allow me to achieve at least some degree of power...perhaps even at the further expense of the lethargic working-class, which, judging by its ineptitude during the period when I was allied with it, shouldn't be difficult to subjugate and swindle."

In this sense, middle-class allies of workers (including students such as myself) are bound to be inherently opportunistic, which further reinforces the idea of having working-class organizations be working-class only, or having middle-class members be non-voting, non-office-holding members or members of auxiliaries. Likewise, it would be foolhardy for workers to suddenly decide to organize themselves when approached by a student like me preaching revolution to them, as they have every reason to expect that I will desert them if they cease to appear to be a vehicle for achieving some degree of power.

That doesn't excuse workers from not organizing their own organizations from their own initiative in pursuit of working-class revolution and working-class democracy. Obviously they risk retaliation from employers for doing so, but by not doing so, they risk the abandonment of their erstwhile middle-class allies--allies who can act as important repositories of working-class historical memory and political lessons. Plus, workers don't get any closer to working-class political rule without some sort of revolutionary movement.

It's their call. I'm all for foregoing whatever privileges I might have had in capitalist society and taking my place as a worker in a society ruled by the working-class democratically amongst itself, such that I at least have some power (which is more than I have now)...but I don't have infinite patience, and neither do most students. This is meant more as an expression of exasperation, but I suppose deep-down I halfway mean it as a threat as well...or rather, a not-so-gentle prodding to the working-class to "wake-the-fuck-up."

[Die Neue Zeit]

Thanks for the links, DNZ. The CPGB article was especially helpful. It seems to argue that "human capital" indeed does exist, that students are essentially purchasing this capital (and thus students and universities are buyers/sellers rather than workers/owners), and that when capitalists employ professionals, capitalists rent their human-capital out alongside buying the labor-power of a professional worker. So the professional worker earns a wage, but also a little bit of rent on his/her "human capital," making the professional worker a petty-capitalist and thus more predisposed to consider his/her interests as coincident with the maintenance of capitalism in general.

Actually, I'm a bit skeptical towards comrade Macnair's article. What worries me is not so much any implicit suggestion of "human capital," but the explicit one of rent in labour. The typical surplus arising from IP rights, royalties, isn't profit but rather classical economic rent (like ground rent, monopoly rent up to and including franchise fees, and even interest). However, higher values for variable capital because of skill (http://www.revleft.com/vb/debunking-human-capital-t160938/index.html?p=2230621) are not the same as surpluses derived from property rights.

If they were, then we might as well return to those minority positions within Classical Political Economy which stated that all the costs of labour / wages above a really basic subsistence level are a form of rent extracted by workers from "enterprise," "entrepreneurs," etc.