The making of the global aspirational class

I think the shared plight of unemployed college grads across the world will eventually manifest in kind of class consciousness

Hello friends. I've been reading E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class. It's an analysis of the political and cultural movements in the late 18th and early 19th century that ultimately created class consciousness in England. It's both Marxist on an ideological level--it is about conflict between classes--and Marxian on the level of method--it is very concerned with the specific mechanisms by which political and technological conflict turn into class consciousness.

The thing I most admire about Marx is his commitment to spelling out, particularly in Capital, the processes through which capitalism operated and the specific ways in which those processes would bring about capitalism's collapse. He didn't want to merely assert that the intensification of labor, the exacerbating of business cycles, the agglomeration of capitals were the natural result of capitalism, he wanted to demonstrate exactly why he thought that was true.

Central to Marx's project was reversing the mystification of capitalism: his main insight was that economic relations are, ultimately, social relations. Everything you buy is only the sum of the labor put into it; you have appropriated that labor just as surely as a medieval knight might make his peasants serve a corvee. But the function of capitalism is to mystify that process, to obscure the social relation, and in doing so, allow one person to gain more and more of that labor without expending an equal amount of time and energy on physically dominating the laborers. For Marx, what mattered about industrial capitalism was not that machines improved per-worker productivity and allowed for the cheaper creation of goods, it was that machines were a way of turning money wealth into a claim on other people's labor. That because you owned machines, and because machines were required for production, and because the circulation of goods was required to create the wages that laborers need, the capitalist now came between the worker and their own reproduction in a way that the knight had never truly managed to. The knight forced the peasant to labor, but the capitalist doesn't need to force the worker to labor--hence, the capitalist is more powerful.

One of the more tedious things about Substack is that people constantly assume they know what side you're on. Any mention of Marx the man and what's in his books leads people to go off half-cocked thinking you want the end of all capitalism. Like I am sure even now someone is furiously typing a comment to me that's like BUT WHAT ABOUT STALIN.¹

I don't desire an end to capitalism (I think). I just want to explain that Marx's work had an admirable clarity about mechanisms; and this clarity was sometimes missing from his followers. In contrast to his economic ideas, Marx's political ideas, re the ways that industrial capitalism would naturally create a revolutionary working class, were under-developed during his life, and subsequent followers often took them as dogma rather than as conjectures that needed to be worked out in a clearer fashion. E.P. Thompson's project is to trace the ways that the logic of capitalism created a working class that conceived of itself as a working class. He looks into the historical to see, what actual movements existed at the dawn of capitalism? Who belonged to those movements? How big were they? How were they affected by class conflict?

I'm only a third of the way through this extremely long book at the comment. In the first part of the book he traces the way that the ideas engendered by Thomas Paine and the American Revolution were taken up by working men's organizations in the 1780s, and the ways those organizations took up or reacted to the French Revolution. In these organizations there were two warring strands of thought. The first situated increased political liberty (particularly expansion of the franchise) as being within the age-old rights of the Englishman, descending from Saxon times--his by right, as an Englishman. The second strand espoused more universal Enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality--it posited a dramatic break with the past. As one political organizer put it:

That one order of society has no right, how many years soever they have been guilty of the pillage, to plunder and oppress the other parts of the community.… These are the principles that I admire, and that cause me, notwithstanding all its excesses, to exult in the French Revolution.

I love the book! I think too often we view human beings as direct reflections of their class interest: this person believes such-and-such because their livelihood puts them into conflict with such-and-such. But that's all very abstract. I think it's useful to think about the concrete ways that people experience that conflict, both in their lives and in the ideas they encounter.

For instance, there's debate about the degree to which the naval mutinies of 1797 were truly revolutionary (i.e. inspired by and in sympathy with the ideals of the French Revolution) and the degree to which they were merely about pay, poor provisions, and bad treatment. But the truth is that that both strands were there. The mutineers' overall objective was to secure better treatment for themselves and some of them did consider joining the French and/or attempting to topple the English government. To say that one cause or one idea predominated is to do a disservice to the numerous forces that were at work.

In E.P. Thompson's telling, it was precisely the reaction to those ordinary discontents that turned them into a revolutionary consciousness. What began as grumbling over lack of suffrage was turned, through the suspension of habeas corpus and the punishment of organizers, into a more revolutionary movement, that became increasingly dangerous to the establishment. In other words, Thompson is tracing the ways that class conflict turns into class consciousness, which in turn creates more class conflict.

It makes me want to be more rigorous in my own thinking! In today's world, the revolutionary class seems to be unemployed or poorly-employed college graduates. They are part of what an eminent demographer (who is also my mom) calls the global aspirational class.² All over the world, the desire for a middle-class life has outpaced opportunities to achieve that life. The result is that all over the world there has been a massive investment, by families, in education. The glut of college graduates means increased competition for white-collar jobs. This is a worldwide phenomenon, not by any means limited to the U.S.

The losers in this game clearly form some kind of social class. But do they perceive of themselves as a class? Do they understand that this class cuts across national barriers? There are unemployed college grads--stuffed full of Shakespeare and calculus--in India, in the USA, in Ghana, and in Egypt. Their education has given them a shared culture, and the global economy has given them a shared plight. But how will that actually manifest in terms of class consciousness? Who the heck knows! Guess it'll become clear in two hundred years...

Karl Marx eating a fish in stained glass

1. If Woman of Letters stands for anything, it’s the idea that you should actually read the books instead of merely reading about the books. Marx remains a readable and important philosopher, even if many of his economic claims have been empirically disproven. Central to Marxism is the idea that workers would have no labor power, no ability to truly act as free economic agents and bargain for better wages—this assertion was contradicted first by the sophisticated economic models of the marginalists and then by the experience of workers in the industrializing nations of the 20th century. But so what? Most philosophers don’t even make empirically provable or disprovable claims in the first place—it’s to Marx’s credit that he was willing to make concrete predictions.

2. I couldn’t find a video online, but my mom’s keynote address on this topic at last year’s Population Association of America meeting in New Orleans was incredible.