1 Labor-including elite labor-is inevitably left behind. As long as returns on capital exceed returns on labor, then the largest capital holders benefit the most, inequality rises, and wealth becomes more and more narrowly concentrated.
#The long war journal professional
Unlike the working class, the professional managerial class is still capable of, and required for, wielding political power.Īt bottom, the economy that has been constructed over the last few decades is nothing more than a capital accumulation economy. While the top 5 or 10 percent may not deserve public sympathy, their underperformance relative to the top 0.1 percent will be more politically significant than the hollowing out of the working or lower-middle classes. Much less understood, however, is the more recent reshaping and radicalization of the professional managerial class. It is, after all, decades old, and it was entirely predictable if not exactly intended. As a result, the story of a declining working class is now broadly understood. The last few years have brought about a new “discovery” of working-class immiseration-a media phenomenon arguably provoked by renewed elite anxieties. The real class war is between the 0.1 percent and (at most) the 10 percent-or, more precisely, between elites primarily dependent on capital gains and those primarily dependent on professional labor. The socioeconomic divide that will determine the future of politics, particularly in the United States, is not between the top 30 percent or 10 percent and the rest, nor even between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. But the neoliberal economy has created a profound fracture within the elite, the significance of which is just beginning to be felt. Conventional narratives, including many that are critical of the status quo, paint the elite as a unified block aligned with neoliberalism. While a restive working class might provide fertile ground for political upheavals, any fundamental transformation of Western politics will necessarily be led by increasing numbers of the “elite” who defect from the dominant policy consensus and rethink their allegiance to establishment paradigms. A more organized working class was unable to stop it then it is difficult to imagine a weakened working class reversing it now. The policy agenda that brought about the political and economic marginalization of the working class was adopted between the 1970s and the early 2000s. In countries like France, the working class might still be able to veto certain policies through public demonstrations, but such actions seem unlikely in the United States, and even the most heroic efforts of this kind show little prospect of achieving systemic reforms.įor regimes that style themselves liberal democracies, this situation might be disconcerting, yet it has persisted for some time. At most, working-class voters can cast their ballots for an “unacceptable” candidate, but they can exercise no influence on policy formation or agency personnel, much less on governance areas that have been transferred to technocratic bodies. However one defines the working class, it has scarcely any political agency in the current system and no apparent means for acquiring any. Social mobility has declined, while inequality has widened.īut it is precisely for these reasons that the working class is unlikely to be decisive in shaping politics for the foreseeable future. The working class has experienced economic stagnation and precarity, and even declining life expectancy in the United States, as well as lower family stability and civic engagement. Like most clichés, this one contains elements of truth. All of these glosses effectively track basic economic categories: those who are seen to have enjoyed success in recent decades and those who have been “left behind.” Occasionally, it is given an explicitly moral connotation (“somewheres” versus “anywheres,” “deplorables” versus “cosmopolitans”). This divide has been defined in occupational terms (“blue collar” versus “information workers”), geographic terms (rural and exurban regions versus major urban cores), and meritocratic terms (non-college-educated versus those with elite credentials). Since at least 2016, the divide between the “working class” and the “elite” has been considered a defining issue in American (and Western) politics.