What I used to think: Class is how much money you make
How class analysis helps us to understand the world, especially during crisis
More on things I’ve changed my mind about since becoming a socialist. This week I’ll talk about a definition of class that I find useful, and that I think is quite relevant to questions of how our society navigates exiting the quarantine. I’ll jump right in:
I used to think that class is about how much money you made, but then I learned about class as a relationship within a system of production, so now I think of class more as who owns stuff and who doesn’t.
In popular media, we hear about the middle class, the lower class, and the upper class. You probably have some ballpark figures in your head for what those words mean, and quite possibly those figures are expressed in yearly income. I’ve come to think of that frame as un-useful, so much so that I think it’s actually intended to confuse.
Think about power
Here’s a problem with it: it doesn’t say much about power except maybe in terms of spending power. The lower class has less power because, what, they can’t buy as much? The upper class has more power because, why, they have more money? That skips over the actual mechanisms of their power.
Here’s a more useful formulation for considering power: A business owner has power over an employee because the owner can fire the worker, denying them a wage they need to survive. A landlord has power over a tenant because the landlord can evict the tenant, denying them the housing they need to survive. These are relationships of ownership that imbue some people with power over others. It’s a small step then to view owners and workers or tenants as comprising separate classes with disparate interests between them and similar interests within them. The owners tend to become rich because they can use their class position to take a portion of everyone else’s labor as profit or rent. But it is the relationship that forms the class and then wins the wealth, not the other way around.
The workers and tenants have power, too. A worker has power over the boss because they can choose to not sell their labor power, thus harming the boss’s profits. Tenants can withhold their rent or move out. There is an asymmetry as one boss employs many workers and one landlord (increasingly) rents to many tenants. This means that workers only truly have power as a class; this is why socialists emphasize solidarity so much.
Who goes back to work when?
There is an ongoing debate about reopening the economy. On one side, Democratic governors who seem comfortable keeping businesses closed for much longer than Republicans in the name of public health. On the other side, what seems to be a grassroots movement of common people demanding to go back to work and restore our normal lives.
Protests have been held in a few dozen American cities over the past week. A “grassroots” video was also posted by a Minnesota state representative featuring Minnesotans pleading with their governor to reopen businesses. The representative has locked her account, but the video, which features 17 women telling their stories and pleading for the economy to reopen, was reposted.
It would be easy to believe the “Liberate Michigan” protesters are useful idiots, begging to go back to work even though they will risk themselves getting sick. I certainly see that message on social media.
Let’s try, though, to use these two models of class: income and relation within production, and understand the behavior of these protesters. And let’s prefer to not see them as useful idiots but rational, if imperfectly-informed, actors.
The income model of class says that everyone wants to get back to work because they need their incomes. People with lower incomes might need it more than those with higher incomes, but everyone will look at their situation and balance their health against their desire to earn an income. The social relation model says that business owners need other people to get back to work so the owners can continue to garner workers’ wages, so owners will demand a general reopening of the economy. This model tells us to be suspicious of people demanding we reopen the economy; they might want something that is bad for us but good for them.
A little bit of analysis shows that most of the people in this video are not workers who need their wages restored; they’re actually owners who want to reopen their businesses. They don’t want to get back to work, they want you to get back to work.
The “back to work” protest movement turns out to be massively astroturfed in the same way the Tea Party’s public protests were. The protests across the country are coordinated from a central location, and funding for the operations flows from an organization associated with Betsy DeVos. The protesters demanding to reopen the economy aren’t stupid; they’re business owners acting in their own self-interest, which is opposed to your interests if you are a worker.
Capitalists, that is, business owners and landlords, need us to get back to work, because if we don’t work, they don’t get paid. Therefore capitalists are willing to spend money on a campaign to end the quarantine, regardless of what experts think or workers want. We were right to be suspicious.
This is the explanatory power of class analysis, and if you do not have access to it then you never see the whole picture. The media we watch seems more than happy to focus on class-as-income and completely ignore class-as-social-relation, but that leads to a shallow analysis.
Hey Jason, thanks for the clearly written post! I think (and this is supported by the list above as well as my anecdotal observations) you may be missing more messy cross-class alliances here that instead reflect differences in sector/industry. Specifically, note that there are hairdressers and stylists at that protest, presumably alongside their bosses. Salons being uniformly closed is against their mutual interest as members of the personal-service industry.
The missing piece of this puzzle (IMO) in relating it back to the fundamental class interests is to observe that there is no viable labor union organization and little state power that is organizing or providing for those hairdressers. Without an alternative to wage labor, their interest in wages for survival are adhered to their employers' interests for profit. This is likely more true for skilled/semi-skilled laborers, or those who have comparatively nice bosses, or whatever who view going to work for Amazon right now as a significant step down from their status quo.
Zooming out, this is the consequence in miniature of the collapse of social-democracy/the welfare state in the U.S. and Europe. The alliance with bosses on display is similarly characteristic of the structure of the "right-wing populist" movements that have been gaining steam.
Oh btw great article—forgot to say that!