More than matcha lattes? Marxism and the middle class

Many professions once considered middle class have become “proletarianised” (Photo: WikipediaCommons)

Marxism is the theory and practice of working class self-emancipation. But what about the millions of people who are neither workers nor bosses?

Karl Marx once predicted that society would become increasingly polarised between the capitalists and the workers.

But today there are large and influential social layers that exist between the two major classes. Marx referred to these layers as the “petty bourgeoisie”—small business owners, shopkeepers and artisans. As capitalism developed, the nature of these intermediate classes changed.

Businesses developed into huge corporations. The bosses needed a bureaucracy of administrators and managers to run them. The middle classes became differentiated between these managerial professionals and the traditional petty bourgeoisie.

There is a common sense view that your class is defined by education, culture or accent. It is true that cultural differences are mobilised to reinforce social inequality.

But, for Marxists, class is not defined by culture. And neither is class really about income. Some workers are paid more than lower management or small business owners. There are other important economic realities that shape class.

Workers do not own the means of producing wealth. They have no choice but to work for those that do.

But middle class managers and professionals also work to pay the mortgage. And they don’t own artisan craft pop ups or corner shops. Crucial to the Marxist understanding of class is seeing it as a social relationship to the means of producing wealth and how it relates to other classes.

Working class people have little or no control over how they do their jobs. They are pushed to meet targets and deadlines. That’s why bosses hate the idea of people working from home. It is not about getting the job done—it’s about control.

Managers climb the ladder by bullying people below them to work harder. Working class people have no choice but to organise with others to defend or improve their conditions.

Many professions once considered middle class, such as university lecturers, have become “proletarianised”. Precarious contracts and more heavily disciplined workplaces have driven many to join unions and strike.

The middle class has grown out of the privatisation of the welfare state. Now GP surgeries are businesses and head teachers are CEOs. After the economic crash of 2008, people turned in desperation to setting up small businesses—in nail bars and hairdressers, as Uber drivers and tradespeople.

The fantasy of “being your own boss”, however, is more likely to turn into a nightmare of poverty and insecurity. Some “self-employed” people are actually working in the gig economy on zero hours contracts. The middle classes often feel superior to workers—more educated, more sophisticated and more in control of their lives.

But economic crisis can hit the middle classes hard. They are crushed by bankruptcies and squeezed between the demands of the bosses and the resistance of the workers.

The petty bourgeoisie in particular is torn between the potential of the workers’ movement and reactionary forces promising to restore their security.

Vladimir Lenin described how the “petty bourgeois is driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism”. The “acute and rapid deterioration in their conditions of life” can drive them to revolutionary extremes.

But, Lenin warned, this revolutionary fervour can “turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another”. So the petty bourgeoisie is vulnerable to the pull of fascism, the scapegoating of marginalised groups and promises of smashing workers’ resistance.

But a strong workers’ movement, which demands rents controls and curbs the power of the banks, can win over some middle class people.

The working class can only win by abolishing the whole class system. This is why Marx called it the universal class.