You might have the idea I think and talk a lot about class. It’s true. But I tend to write about class in general. For example, I’ve argued against using ‘class’ as a marker of socioeconomic status (SES) and in favor of using it as a marker of certain relations of economic power. On the other hand, I haven’t written a great deal about specific classes, like the working class. I’ve said a bit about what the working class isn’t, namely Trump’s base. But a bit less about what it is.
Let’s remedy that. Specifically, let’s zoom in on the working class. Who’s in it? Is it smaller than it used to be? Did deindustrialization defeat it? And, if so, do we now use ‘working class’ as a marker of identity rather than economic relations?
I’ll work through some of these questions.
So, What’s the Working Class, Anyway?
I’ve taken a crack at the ‘working class’ question before. Here’s what I said: a working class adult is a person 18 or older who isn’t purposely out of the labor force (e.g., full-time students who don’t work are excluded, stay-at-home parents who aren’t looking for work are excluded), and who works (or is seeking work, or doesn’t work but is married to someone who works, or is retired from working) for a company in a rank-and-file/front-line, non-managerial job.
It’s a mouthful of a definition, but it’s got two basic parts. One, a working class person works or worked. Or they’re married to someone who works, et al. I want to exclude anyone’s who’s independently wealthy or who lives off of rents (e.g., landlords). Many people in these camps have low incomes, but they’re not workers.
I also want to exclude people who don’t work but who aren’t wealthy. For example, some people are disabled, homeless and without work, students who don’t work, people who gave up their job searches because there aren’t any jobs available, et al. People in these camps are disadvantaged, but their class status is different from working class people.
Second, working class people aren’t just any workers. They’re workers who are low on the company hierarchy. They’re not owners or managers. And they usually don’t have authority over things like hiring or firing staff, allocating company resources, et al. A cashier is a working class person, but her manager isn’t.
Controversies and Unclear Aspects
All clear? Fine, but lots of things still aren’t.
First, what about the status of people who are disabled and out of the workforce, gig workers, sex workers, and other people whose status isn’t obvious?
It’s hard to say. For many of the people completely out of the workforce, Marx himself didn’t think especially highly of them and used the very controversial category ‘lumpenproletariat‘. It’s probably a lot more complicated than this in practice. Some people in these camps hold a status like those who Guy Standing described as the ‘precariat‘. But people in these camps with much higher incomes hold a status closer to that of well paid independent contractors or small business owners.
In each case, we’ve got a question of how the person relates to the ownership and control of economic resources.
Second, class status doesn’t always line up with income. Some rank-and-file workers do quite well in terms of income. Personally, I hold a rank-and-file job that pays pretty well. Lots of scientists and engineers make far more in rank-and-file work. By my definition, they’re still working class.
And, on the other side of this, some managers make very low salaries. Sometimes very low salaries. You might have in mind the McDonald’s or Chick-fil-A manager. That’s probably true in some cases. But there’s also the manager at a small non-profit or social service group. Sometimes people in this camp make less money than working class people, despite their higher class standing.
Solutions?
How do I solve these issues?
I prefer to keep my definition and accept any seemingly strange implication. Do some working class people make high incomes? Sure. Why? In lots of cases, because class struggles from the past brought those victories. The auto worker who earns $30 per hour or more doesn’t stop being working class. She’s just a well paid auto worker benefiting from class struggle. And that’s that.
As for contingent workers, gig workers, sex workers, and so on, the question remains the same: How does the person relate to the ownership and control of economic resources? If they have greater control, they’re probably petty bourgeois. And if they don’t, they’re probably working class. Often the answer is clear.
Measuring the Working Class
So, working class people are people who work in rank-and-file jobs and their status puts them into a certain antagonistic relationship to the owners and controllers of economic resources. More or less. Got it.
But as it turns out, it’s tough to measure this group. Why? Because most of the people doing the measuring don’t ask the right questions. Instead, they use proxies (e.g., education or income levels). As a result, we know far less about the working class than we should: how many members it has, how its members vote, et al.
Here’s one example. The Center for American Progress recently concluded that Latina service sector workers make up a disproportionately large segment of the US working class. How did they draw such a conclusion? Here’s the data on service sector work as CityLab presents it:
The information isn’t wrong. But it’s potentially misleading. Why? The graphic defines ‘working class’ as ‘people who didn’t go to college’. Service sector managers who didn’t go to college are included, and people who went to college and work rank-and-file jobs aren’t. The information is useful only if ‘people who didn’t go to college’ is a good proxy for ‘working class’.
In this case, I think it does OK. The US working class probably really is disproportionately Latina. The graphic, however, might somewhat overstate the role of the service sector.
For a second example, there’s voter data. But with voter data, education level is a pretty bad proxy for class status. We know people who didn’t go to college voted for Trump, but most of them aren’t working class. Trump voters had much higher income levels than most working class people. And so, many of his voters were people in managerial roles who didn’t go to college.
Political Implications
So, why should we care about this stuff? Does it matter whether a badly paid manager, or well paid engineer, is part of the working class? Should we care?
It does and we should. At least in the following sense. How we define ‘working class’ impacts how we build leftist coalitions and movements and push for leftist ideas. Lots of people heavily invest in the idea there’s something like a latent working class majority in the US. If there’s such a latent majority, we can build majoritarian movements around it.
I don’t mean to be vague here. Particular segments of the socialist movement in the US hold this banner high. Jacobin premises its advocacy for the rank-and-file strategy on it. I’d say much the same of the DSA caucus Bread and Roses. Jane McAlevey wrote her organizing book No Shortcuts in such a way that I think she largely assumes a latent working class majority. And I’d be remiss not to mention Vivek Chibber’s pamphlets The ABCs of Capitalism, where he explicitly states it as a principle.
Others reject the idea of a latent working class majority. As a result, they have to find different sorts of coalitions to supplement working class politics. Noam Chomsky explored these routes in his 1970s work. In his debate with Foucault, for example, he set aside the term ‘proletariat’ (narrower than ‘working class’?) in favor of ‘productive workers’. He included in that term, e.g., engineers, and he opposed the term to ‘unproductive’ workers like managers or marketers who don’t generate products or services.
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
And then there’s perhaps the elephant in the room: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe‘s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. The book was enormously influential on leftist organizing at the end of the Cold War, and I hardly want to re-litigate all those issues. Even the sparse Wikipedia entry risks saying too much. But what they advocate, basically, is for a turn away from class-based organizing and a turn toward broader notions of identity and cultural affect as central to a socialist politics. Mouffe reeled this all in a bit in her recent book For a Left Populism, but the core of the view remains roughly the same.
For what it’s worth, I think Laclau and Mouffe correctly point out that there’s no working class majority, at least not one around which to reduce a socialist politics. And that’s fine. But this doesn’t entail, as Laclau and Mouffe once thought it did, that we have to reject the notion of an explanatory framework grounded in economic relations. A Marxist framework is perfectly compatible with a broader organizing strategy.
What Should We Make of This?
Here’s where I think we are. In contrasting, say, Jacobin to Chomsky, I see the need for a kind of balancing act. On the one hand, we need a concept of ‘working class’ sharp enough that people under the label share common interests and can struggle together for socialism. This is where Chomsky’s notion of ‘productive workers’ probably fails. He includes under the label lots of well paid professionals, e.g., some engineers and scientists, whose material interests align as well to the ruling classes as to the working classes.
But, on the other hand, we don’t need a concept that’s too sharp. Why? Because if we do that, it includes only a small minority of the population. Essentially a group too small to make meaningful change on behalf of much larger groups. Jacobin and aligned groups sometimes slide into this, though certainly not always.
How do we solve this? I tend to favor somewhat narrower definitions over the really broad ones, as you can see above. But I think Chomsky had the right inclinations in terms of building larger coalitions. One route is a broader coalition of groups marginalized from various kinds of centers of power.
But in addition to the working class, who’s that? For one, tenants. That’s a big reason why I focus much of my own working on housing activism. Other groups include people of color, non-heterosexuals, immigrants, struggling younger (and older) Americans, et al. Many are already included in the working class camp, of course. But some aren’t. There’s plenty of potential to organize all these groups along socialist lines.
