The “Working Class” or “the 99%”?
Time for Linguistic Renewal
An open office space. One of the many workplaces of the contemporary working class (image by kate.sade on unsplash).
Estimated reading time 3-4 minutes.
Among recent political neologisms, there are few as brilliant as “the 99%”. While the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is known for coining the term, had unfortunately little impact, I believe that “the 99%” will outlast and outshine the movement for decades to come.
Importantly, “the 99%” comes at a time when the term “working class” has lost both meaning and attraction for the general population. In the following I highlight the advantages of “the 99%” over “working class”.
Before I do so, I want to make clear that I do not suggest that the term “working class” has no theoretical value or that I disagree with the best ideas that the term comes to express.
I myself use “working class” so that it is quasi-coreferential with the “the 99%”, referring to all people who do not own somewhat significant means of production, have to work to make a comfortable living, do not possess the means to live a good life, and are in an important sense economically dependent on “market fluctuations” within capitalist market society.[1]
Yet, my concern here is not with a particular theoretical definition—and for political purposes, theoretical definitions do not matter anyway, as long as they are not common knowledge or have the chance to become common knowledge in a relevant timeframe. Rather, I discuss in the following problems with how I believe that “working class” is used and perceived in popular discourse.
Scope
“The 99%” makes clear that left-wing and socialist politics naturally aim at addressing and benefiting roughly 99% of the population of a given country. That is, “the 99%” shows that left-wing parties are mass movements that forward popular policies that aim at the overwhelming majority of the population. The same is not clear for “working class”.
We can see this by reference to the claim by many leftists that right-wing parties are not supported by working class members. For instance, according to many leftists, working class members did not vote in numbers for Donald Trump. Yet, if that were the case, for instance in the US, it would mean that at least 48-50% of the electorate are not working class.
Similarly, if working class members would not vote conservative, liberal, green, and so forth, we face the odd phenomenon, that seemingly the significant majority of voters in many countries with relatively free elections are not working-class members.
However, that is prima facie absurd, since it would entail, for instance, that these people own somewhat significant means of production, do not have to work to make an income that allows them to have a good life at least relative to society norms or are not economically dependent on “market fluctuations”.
Similarly, it seems that many on the left treat the term “working class” as if it were referring to manual laborers, the working poor, everyone who has income or wealth below the “middle class”, and so forth. Reversely, it seems that the term “working class” is not supposed to refer to the “middle class”, well-earning people who do not own means of production (wider professional-managerial class), socially conservative voters, liberals, people who require a wage to live comfortably, but who have no “class consciousness”, and so forth.
That is, the contemporary, popular use of the term “working class” appears to exclude most of the population—and, according to some conceptions, it seems as if only a minority of people were to be addressed and liberated by socialist politics. That is obviously absurd and not in the interest of socialist politics.
Therefore, “the 99%” clearly expresses the reach and ambition of socialist politics, and it makes unambiguously clear that nearly everybody is or can be part of the movement, part of the beneficiaries of socialist politics.
Anachronism
I believe that many classic socialist terms seem anachronistic to the wide majority of the population. While these socialist terms were popular in the past, they are unfit to be used as such anymore, in the same way in which marketing or advertising terms who had their popular heyday in the 1920s or 1960s would seem ridiculous if they were used today in ad campaigns or commercials.
That counts for “working class”, as it counts for “comrade”, “bourgeoisie”, “international solidarity” or “world proletariat”, and so many other terms, which seem like relics from a past time. Importantly, I do not want to claim that these terms have no meaning or refer to something undesirable.
Here I only want to make the case that these particular terms, not necessarily the ideas expressed by these terms, are associated with things such as Soviet-style communism or the radical aesthetics of left-wing counterculture movements of the 1960 and 1970, which nobody other than radical minorities appreciate today. Compared to that, “the 99%” fits into contemporary mass culture.
Similarly, even if “working class” has a positive connotation, the term seems to refer, at least in the West, to a unique social milieu of manual laborers and their class-conscious worker culture that unfortunately does not exist anymore, or at least not in relevant numbers.[2] Here too, “the 99%” is not confined to the past, but is a term still open to the future.
Good politics share to a significant degree relevant aspects with art, design, or advertising. They are about finding ways to formulate ideas so that they resonate with the Zeitgeist and popular aesthetics. While “working class” was a brilliant linguistic invention of its age, I think the time has come to make way for the “99%”.
[1] A plethora of problems relate to the term “working class”. It has extremely slippery conceptual boundaries and is riddled with inconsistencies. Even defining criteria such as ‘has to own means of production’ are underdetermined, because they may apply to every shareholder, including those whose stock is basically worthless.
Similarly, it requires at least some wealth to not having to work to make an income, but, for instance, a small landlord or financially savvy hobby investor could achieve this goal in the confines of a moderately comfortable lifestyle. Whether we want to exclude these people from the goals of socialist politics is of course open to debate, but I at least do not find such an exclusion desirable or politically plausible.
[2] The classic popular use of “working class”, particularly in the US and many European countries, was unfortunate in the sense that it excluded already back then massive numbers of people, in particular people working in agriculture, who at times made up a bigger part of the population than industrial workers.
While of course people working in agriculture were difficult to organize and while many of these people had no right to vote (depending on the country that we analyze), socialists still excluded significant numbers of people without good reason from “the working class”, which definitely seemed to have played in the hands of conservative factions and parties all over the 19th and 20th century. Of course, for Marx, for instance, classic agricultural laborers and farmers, if they had to work under quasi-feudal, and not market conditions, were not satisfying his concept of working class, embedded in his theory of history, yet, whether this conception of history is justified in general and was politically fortunate in the past, let alone today, is open to debate.