We Have Never Been Middle Class by Hadas Weiss

Author:Hadas Weiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

4

Goodbye Values, So Long Politics

In the previous chapters, I made a case for the middle class being an ideology. It obscures the devaluation of work, and the plight of a population that suffers the consequences of this devaluation, by shifting the limelight to social mobility in the guise of investment-driven self-determination. This ideology is most credible among those who, while having to work for a living, can nevertheless devote some extra work, time and other resources toward the future, expending more than they immediately consume. Being designated “middle class,” they are encouraged to think of these expenditures as choices and of their fortunes as their outcome. In a competitive environment where valuable resources are made scarce and where lasting benefits are hard to come by, such investments and the advantages they give some over others are the go-to explanations for why some people do well while others lag behind. Those who subscribe to them have good reason to redouble their efforts in order to protect what they have, obtain what they don’t and generally look out for number one.

Strikingly, however, scholars who take the global middle classes as their subject matter characterize the groups so identified as the most politically active among the world population.1 This in itself is not surprising: workers with the wherewithal to invest also have the wherewithal to protest. Given social decline and the environmental degradation that follow the exploitation of work and natural resources, there is no shortage of things to protest against. Vulnerabilities vary widely across social groups such that some suffer the injuries of global accumulation much more than others. Still, they afflict most people around the world, crossing divides of race, gender and nationality. There is therefore a strong argument to be made for protests representing an aggrieved 99 percent—a category whose broadness harmonizes with that of the idealized middle class. But what happens when protests are caught up in the ethos of self-determining investment that characterizes this middle class?

In this chapter, I take a closer look at the politics and values that match the middle-class ideology. Touching on protest and civic movements as well as on critical thought about the politics that capitalism gives rise to, I follow several articulations of politics and values in the US, first, and then—by drawing on my own ethnographic research—on their manifestations in Germany and in Israel. These examples will demonstrate various ways in which the middle-class ideology of investment-driven self-determination works against activists’ farthest-reaching goals.

It seems only right to begin with the recent spate of global protest movements, which political scientist Francis Fukuyama analyzed as constituting nothing short of a middle-class revolution.2 He attributed the uprisings in places like Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey and Brazil to the rise of a new global middle class. Most of the protestors in these places were neither wealthy elites nor impoverished underclasses but rather young adults who had already invested in education or the acquisition of employable skills, and in some cases also in property. They resented the political reality whereby their expectations for subsequent employment and material advance had not been met.

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