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This is of course correct. But the fact remains that more privileged workers are more likely to support the system and sell out other workers. As a group, privleged workers display different behaviour than other workers and tend to share similar priorities - which is very similar to a class. It’s a distinction that’s both completely illusory and also meaningful.
As a group, privleged workers display different behaviour than other workers and tend to share similar priorities - which is very similar to a class.
Exactly.
And as the nature of the typical job changed - from industrial and agricultural line work to office, sales, and service sector work - we experienced a boom in the Professional Managerial Class. The advent of the business school, the consultant class, and modern middle management created a workforce whose job revolved around surveilling and expropriating additional labor from ground level workers.
Graeber explorers this more fully in “Bullshit Jobs”. But there’s a real material schism between workers performing real value-add labor and workers who exist largely to steal or extort from one another.
It’s been fascinating seeing tech workers being reminded that they are working class. They still haven’t achieved class consciousness yet, but I remain hopeful…
There is definitely solidarity within profession groups. Class consciousness in a Marxist sense is a myth. Everyone just pulls in its own direction.
They also, plenty of the time, have capital that’s a large part of how they are supporting themselves/lifestyle (or how they will shortly).
Middle class used to be business owners and the upper class were nobility. Most countries had nobility of sorts where wealthy families controlled lots and clubbed together. The whole thing was distorted in the egalitarian push in the last half of the last century where the wealthy aristocratic families lost ground and workers became more wealthy. What we are seeing now is the re-concentration of wealth into fewer hands.
To give powerful ppl a slice or they tend to work against you, using the power at their disposal, jeopardizing the dominance of the upper class. The middle class only came into being because of the destabilizing force of rapid technological changes in the last century and a half that enables non-elites to control resources.
I think this is directed as the wrong audience. You can be proud of being working class as much as you want, but if the working class doesn’t accept you as one of them, it doesn’t matter. David Graeber should be talking to working class people here as they are the ones who actually make the choice.
At this point he’s probably not going to change who he talks to.
In the modern era there’s the Working Class, which is that of people who make most of their income from working and then there’s the Owner Class, which is that of people who make most of their income from owning stuff.
You’ll see this division in a lot of things, not list in the different ways people are taxed (income from work is taxed way more heavily than income from owning stuff plus there are way more legal ways to pay less or no tax at all from the income of owning stuff than from the income of work) as well as, for example, which kinds of people got their incomes saved in the 2008 Crash (Asset Owners) and who got to pay for it (Workers).
As far as I can tell Asset Ownership vs Working seems to be the or one of the greatest and most consistent lines of discriminatory treatment by the Authorities all across the World.
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