by Tom Wetzel
Class shapes the prospects in life that people have, and how they look at the world around them. A janitor or retail clerk is likely to be more interested in universal free health care than a corporate executive or lawyer who can buy their own private health care services.
When you look for work, do multiple job offers flood in? Unless you’re Michael Jordan, probably not. There are always more job seekers than job openings. Wage-earners have no means of securing their livelihood independent of employers. This can put people in a pretty desperate situation. Owners of economic assets are in a better position to hold out for their terms in hiring than those who don’t own anything.
The best way to understand class is to think of it as a structure of power over workplaces and economic activities. And ownership of assets is the most important structure that divides society into different classes.
There is a tiny but very rich elite who own the bulk of this country's economic assets; they own the banks, big apartment complexes, most of the stocks and bonds of the corporations, and so on. This is the investor or capitalist class.
To make sure their companies are run profitably, the capitalists hire people who can plan and manage the work of everyone else. This role is performed by the techno-managerial class — managers and their top professional advisers. Lawyers who help to break unions, engineers who design work processes to control workers, etc. These people have much less power and money than the capitalists, and sometimes have conflicts with them. The bosses we deal with day-to-day are mostly the techno-managerial class. These people may have some small property holdings but mainly their life prospects are based on their work.
This class grew to prominence with the rise of corporate and state hierarchies in the 20th century. Their class power is based on a relative monopolization of planning and the levers of decision-making. They get their positions from things like university degrees, expertise and connections.
The working class are all those employees who are subordinated in the economy and who don’t manage others.
Class boundary lines are fuzzy and there is some disagreement about exactly who should be included in the working class. In The Working Class Majority, Michael Zweig tallies the working class as 62 percent of the U.S. population. Zweig doesn’t include most lower-echelon professional workers like graphic designers, application programmers and school teachers. Zweig leaves them out because they have more autonomy in their work. However, in the 19th century blue collar craft workers had a lot more autonomy than most workers do today. The lower echelon of professional workers usually don’t participate in management of others. An important question is this, Will they support other workers in struggles against the bosses?
Americans sometimes refer to the better paid part of the working class as the "working middle class." This is because we’re taught to define class in terms of income. So, the "middle class" are those with maybe enough income to buy a house and car — a so-called "middle class lifestyle." But the income people have is really just an effect of how much power they have in the economy. That’s why understanding class as a power structure in the economy is a better picture of how things work. The huge and growing inequality in wealth and income in the U.S. is rooted in differences in power between the classes.
The class system generates constant conflict because people resist being dominated and taken advantage of by the bosses. To make plans and make your own decisions in your life is a human need — it is the need to self-manage your life, to chart your course in cooperation with others around you. But the class system denies to the working class the power to control the decisions that affect us.
It is because workers are a subjugated class that we are ripped-off — forced to sell our time to employers, to work for the profit of the firm.
This exploitation has gotten worse over the past two decades in the U.S. Despite big increases in productivity, the average real hourly wage for non-supervisory workers, adjusted for inflation, fell 12% from 1973 to 1998. This is the longest period of decline in the real wage rate in American history. Job stress has increased for many people, and job injury rates have gone up. More people lack health insurance or have less health coverage. Anger and discontent are now widespread.
The strongest resistance that workers have offered to the class system historically is through unionism. Through collective action, solidarity and organization, workers can enhance their position, and challenge the power of the dominant classes. To do this today, working people face various tasks, such as developing more effective unions, run directly by and for workers; also, developing cross-industry solidarity and links between workplace and community organizations.
Class politics is not limited to the politics of the labor movement but includes the various strands of struggle that emerge in working class communities.
There are class struggles in areas of consumption such as housing. When capital is poured into working class neighborhoods, to build luxury condos for professionals and managers, new office buildings, fancy stores and restaurants, the run-up in rents can push the working class out. Struggles against this, against rising rents, and occupying buildings to have a place to live — these are examples of class struggle over housing.
To be continued...