The End of Work and the Reactionary Middle Class

Powerful words by Jeremy Rifkin:

"Rising technological unemployment and declining purchasing power will continue to plague the global economy...the middle class, long the voice of reason and moderation in the political life of industrialized nations [as long as the economy is booming, and even then that is questionable], finds itself buffeted on every side by technological changes. Squeezed by reduced wages and rising unemployment, growing numbers of the middle classes are beginning to search for quick solutions and dramatic rescue from the market forces and technological changes that are destroying their former way of life. In virtually every industrial nation, fear of an uncertain future is driving more and more people from the mainstream to the margins of society, where they seek refuge in extremist political and religious movements that promise to restore public order and put people back to work.

Rising levels of worldwide unemployment and the increasing polarization between rich and poor are creating the conditions for social upheaval and open class warfare on a scale never before experienced in the modern age. Crime, random violence, and low-intensity warfare are on the rise and show every sign of increasing dramatically in the years immediately ahead. A new form of barbarism waits just outside the walls of the modern world. Beyond the quiet suburbs, exurbs, and urban enclaves of the rich and near-rich lie millions upon millions of destitute and desperate human beings...

Still our leaders talk of jobs and crime, the two great issues of time, as if they were only marginally related, refusing to acknowledge the growing nexus between technological displacement, job loss, and the rise of an outlaw class for whom crime is the last means to secure a piece of a shrinking economic pie...This much we know for sure: We are entering into a new period in history where machines will increasingly replace human labor in the production of goods and services...The service sector, while slower to automate, will probably approach a nearly automated state by the mid-decades of the next century. The emerging knowledge sector will be able to absorb a small percentage of the displaced labor, but not nearly enough to make a substantial difference in the rising unemployment figures. Hundreds of millions of workers will be permanently idled by the twin forces of globalization and automation. Others, still employed, will work far fewer hours in order to equitably distribute the remaining work and provide adequate purchasing poweer to absorb the increases in production. As machines increasingly replace workers in the coming decades, the labor of millions will be freed from the economic process and the pull of the marketplace. Unused human labor is the central overriding reality of the coming era and the issue that will need to be confronted and addressed head-on by every nation if civilization is to survive the impact of the Third Industrial Revolution (Rifkin 1995[2004]: 289-291)."

As my past few blogs have emphasized, we are seeing a reemergence of Neo-fascism across Western Europe and the United States as the middle class, itself born of collective bargining through powerful unions and Keynesian economics, continues to try and retain its material and economic security under the continual frontal attack by corporate capital under Neoliberal restructuring. Beset by continual wage stagnation or outright decline, increasing cost of living (the inflationary prices of education, housing, health care, energy, etc.) and rising unemployment or underemployment the middle class is begining to lash out at the poor, underclass and minorities who are being blamed for taking 'middle class' or 'native' jobs. These economic occurrences and their 'causes' appear to be a qualitatively new emergence of a problem that flarred up during the early and mid twentith century and lead to the birth of WWI and WWII, will their exacerbation lead to WWIII? Only time will tell.

However, these tendencies of the middle class currently expressed, although qualitative unique, are not in themselves new nor historically undocumented. Writing back in 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of his travels to America and the historic tendencies he foresaw in the emerging democracy. One of the tendencies was America's obsession with individualism and the pursuit of material wealth in the market place would lead to privitization of the individual and the decline of local/community political associations that would check the democratic tendency toward the centralization of power under a federal government. Under the threat of losing their economic standing and power in society the middle class, a byproduct of an emerging industrial democracy will give up its political freedoms, rights and autonomy to a centralized federal/state authority in exchange for economic security. Tocqueville argued that once initiated, this tendency would continue unabated unless citizens understood that political liberty is a precondition for all other freedoms and that economic liberty and security cannot truely exist without a base of political autonomy, an autonomy that is continually eroded under democracy due to a conservative and reactionary middle class. A class that mistakenly aligns itself with the interests of the capialist class rather than asserting their own demands or aligning themselves among the other 'lower' classes - the working class, poor, and underclass.

Even though the middle class continually erodes their political power they still reside in a society referred to as democratic, so the leaders must at least give face value to the democracy and therefore hold elections and gather public support for their policies, no matter how absurd or reactionary they are, but as long as these policies are linked to maintaining the material welfare of the middle class, the later tends to support them. Thus, much like in Germany, France, Italy and the U.S. in the 1920s-1950s and again today in these very same countries you are seeing the reemergence of an authoritarian nationalism fueled by social conservatives and used by corporations to regain or entrench their power while feeding scrapes to the middle class, all in an attempt to by them off and prevent them from actually pursuing not radical but even mere reformest proposals.

As Rifkin addresses in his book, it is time to move past the old welfare state and laissez faire models for society. We need to push forward with a shorter hours higher wages movement and rebuild social capital through moving away from the public and private sectors and enlarging the 'third sector' of the social economy, one not founded on principles of efficiency, the profit motive or the continuous accumulation of capital. It is premised on the building of and strengthening of social relationships between individuals and therefore the community as well. It is designed on reducing the bureacracy of everyday life and the alienation that is born from institutions that are not subject to the everyday control of the people who are directly affected by them. It is also designed to reduce the stranger phenomenon that is a constant problem of everyday life under late capital. Through volunteer work and community organizing the social economy is premised on rebuilding social capital and the relationships necessary for a vibrant and meaningful life. Relations that are not primary nor even necessary under a market economy, where buyer and seller exchange goods so that each can maximize their own personal desires, an exchange that can then somehow create a greater social good.

In a world with increasing technological unemployment, underemployment in the form of part-time contingency labor, or elongated 40+ hour workweeks for those fulltime employees it is crucial that we as a global community organize and push for shorter hours higher wages to spread the work around and ensure everyone an income, but we also need to reprioritize our values and realize them in everyday life. A realization that will only occur through persistence and the repoliticization of everyday life, which means the reduction of institutions that exist over and above the individuals that constitute them or that they are supposed to serve. The increasing productivity brought on by increasing automation and computerization allows humanity to severe the historic tie between labor and income while reducing the work week for everyone. However, an opposite tendency appears to be developing, where fulltime high paid employment exists for only a small perecentage of humanity while the rest is subjected to either unemployment or deskilled parttime contingent labor: fueling the increasing polarization of society between those who can guarantee their children high quality education and for the rest whose educational attainment does not cut the mustard in a post-industrial society premised on intellectual property rights.

Works Cited
Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 1995[2004]), pp. 289-291.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Penguin Books, 2003)