Читать книгу We Have Never Been Middle Class - Hadas Weiss - Страница 7

The middle class does not exist. For all the time we spend talking about it, much of what we say is contradictory. We worry about its decline or squeeze: that there are fewer people today who can consider themselves middle class than there were a mere decade ago and that, the way things are going, those who are on the brink will soon fall over the edge. But we are also cheered by headlines suggesting that if we only think globally, we will discover that the middle class is actually on the rise, its ranks swelling with go-getting pursuers of happiness in places like China, India, Brazil and South Africa. In one of those old tricks of language, at the same time that we question the numbers of people who are middle class, we affirm the notion that there is a middle class out there for people to climb into or drop out of.

There isn’t. One way to tell is by looking at studies conducted over the years to identify members of the middle class. Flip through research and analysis papers published by policy and consulting firms, think tanks, development agencies, marketing agencies, government agencies and central banks, and you find as many criteria as outcomes. Statisticians are particularly hard pressed to come up with universally applicable measurements. People in wealthy countries enjoy standards of living, work and consumption that the vast majority of the world population can only dream of, including those most likely to be identified as among the brave new global middle classes. What possible classification can encompass them all?

There are many possible groupings. Occupation is one: counting as middle class all manner of skilled professionals, managers and experts, and just about anyone else who performs nonmanual labor. It is temptingly intuitive until you think about the multitudes of underemployed and struggling white-collar professionals or, conversely, about high-earning nonprofessionals who just as intuitively defy the classification. Another popular criterion is relative immunity to poverty: deeming middle class those people who have sufficient resources to protect them against imminent hunger or want. But here again, we have all heard horror stories of upstanding members of the middle class abruptly toppled from riches to rags by personal, national and global market crises. Some analysts look at levels of disposable income, reading as middle class any earners whose incomes exceed, by a fixed measure, what would be required for the daily upkeep of their household and who can therefore buy nonnecessities. This definition misleadingly assumes steady incomes from which expenses can be computed and fixed portions parceled out in a world in which money actually flows in and out of households in highly irregular fashion. Other analysts define middle classes by absolute income levels. They face similar problems and then some, even when adjusting for national price indexes. The relative value of money is one thing; quite another is what people can do with it given the local material and social infrastructure and the political circumstances with which they contend. People enjoying comparable income levels in different countries have living standards so radically different from one another that it is hard to imagine them belonging to the same group. Still others define the middle class as middle income: those occupying the median of a country’s income brackets. This makes cross-country comparisons impossible, and besides, in each country there is too little variance between middle and somewhat lower income brackets to convincingly distinguish their members from one another. The most interesting criterion is what hard-nosed quantitative analysts call the subjective one: simply asking people to label themselves. It always trips analysts up because, by and large, many more people self-identify as middle class than would be so identified by any of the other criteria. This is true just about everywhere in the world and applies to those who would otherwise be considered both above and below the designated middle.¹

If analysts are diffident about defining the middle class, representatives of the public and business sectors have no such qualms. Pundits exhibit broad consensus in finding the middle class to be a really good thing, invariably deploring its squeeze and celebrating its growth. The so-called middle class is also the darling of politicians left and right, conservative and liberal, all claiming to represent middle-class interests with the policies they promote. Think tanks and consulting firms help political actors appeal to self-identified or aspirational middle classes. While they come up with strategies to expand the middle class, marketers guide corporate executives on how to cater to middle-class fantasies. Joining forces with professional literature and reportage, these actors associate the middle class with a host of social and economic desirables. In particular, they single out security, consumerism, entrepreneurship and democracy as middle-class mainstays. They further represent these attributes as interconnected, one leading naturally to the other in a virtuous cycle of economic growth, modernization and collective well-being.²

Meanwhile, social scientists who have bothered to examine the lives of people who are presumed to be part of the new global middle classes cast serious doubt on each of these attributes. They describe populations united not by prosperity but by nagging insecurity, indebted ownership and compulsive overwork. They report on the inclination of these people to hoard what extra cash they have or to invest it toward things like a home or insurance rather than spending their disposable income on consumer goods. They identify their preferences for regular wages, whenever they can find them, over risky entrepreneurial profits, the pursuit of which is more often a forced adjustment to the absence of steady employment. And they underline their political pragmatism in backing whatever parties and policies might protect their interests rather than offering blanket support for democracy: something that is easy to spot in the recent history of Latin America and in present-day China.³

This is to say that “middle class” is an exceptionally nebulous category, neither clearly demarcated nor convincingly positive. Yet its vagueness in no way stops it from being mobilized across the board. The concept holds immense transnational popularity expressed not only in pronouncements by political and economic leaders about middle-class interests, virtues and aspirations, but also in the eagerness of people from all walks of life, all over the world, to identify themselves as members of the middle class. Now, when an anthropologist comes across a category so highly esteemed yet so poorly defined, and when she sees this category nevertheless deployed so vigorously by politicians, development agencies, corporate actors and marketing experts, she is likely to think of one thing: ideology.

In studying a host of issues popularly associated with the middle class in Israel and Germany while taking occasional sidelong glances at their global counterparts, I found this ideology everywhere. It prompted me to become more direct in questioning how the people I was observing were identified. If in fact the middle class is an ideology, I asked myself, what does it mean? What purpose does it serve? How did it come about and what makes it so compelling? This book is my way of answering these questions and exploring their implications.

I address the arguments in it, idiosyncratically enough, to an implicated readership. This calls for explanation. In this day and age, the pronoun “we” is suspect and almost always calls forth a defiant “not-me.” All manner of politicians, bosses, pastors and activists bandy it about to rally heterogeneous publics for causes they declare to be common. “We” is pronounced more spontaneously in opposition to the “not-we,” whether a powerful 1 percent to our 99 or a counterpublic perceived as threatening who we are and what we have. What I have in mind here is inclusiveness of a different kind, neither superimposed nor collectively proclaimed for strategic purposes or against a supposed opposition. It is rather a quiet, self-congratulatory “we,” which underscores a conceit of ours.

Sociologist Bruno Latour wrote We Have Never Been Modern to counter one such conceit: the view we have of ourselves as modern, or not primitive, in touting an objectivity based on separating the human from the nonhuman, the social world from the natural one. Latour claimed that such separation never really existed and considered hybrids like global warming, data banks and biotechnology as defying the belief that it ever has. Salient as this presumption is, he argued, it is a Western scientific and industrial construct. He proceeded to relativize it by elaborating on a prehistory and a posterity in which its absence is evident.

Thanks to Latour’s trailblazing work, I never questioned whether I could argue similarly against the conceit of the middle class. I believe the category to be false in that it suggests powers that we do not possess. I also believe it to be ideological in that it invokes these powers for purposes that are not our own and whose consequences are not to our benefit. But I did struggle with addressing this argument to an implicated readership. If there is one thing that an anthropologist is allergic to, it is universalizing: assuming all too easily that the way I imagine myself to be right now is the way we all are and always have been by gift of nature, decree of god or the manifestation of some innate instinct. Anthropologists have traditionally studied not “us” but “them,” that is, people who do things differently and whose otherness resists knee-jerk generalizations. A book written for and about us is therefore counterintuitive for an anthropologist.

But I made this choice deliberately, because one thing that does fall squarely within the domain of anthropology is critique. Anthropology’s fascination with all things remote and foreign does not normally feign a neutral, scientific or objective gaze as in the likes of National Geographic. To the contrary, it has often been a means through which to make some meaningful intervention in the distinctions and attributes people take to be universal, all those mundane assumptions that are nearby and familiar, whether about the nature and veracity of race and ethnic distinctions; the sources and consequences of gender roles and sexual preferences; the boundaries and peculiarities of childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age; the social uses of beliefs, rituals, emotions and scientific reasoning; the patterns and functions of eating, working, leisure and sleep; the definitions and significance of health and pathology; the relations that make up families, tribes and nation states—and the list goes on.

The logic goes something like this. If somewhere out there people behave in ways that are, for example, neither egoistic nor self-serving, then people’s self-serving behaviors in the advanced capitalist economies that most anthropologists come from and in which they disseminate their findings must stem from something other than an innate human disposition. Or if people elsewhere in the world succeed, for example, in satisfying their needs and desires with more egalitarian or collectively managed organizations for the production and distribution of goods and services, there are imaginable alternatives to our own economic and political systems.

The challenge of critique has grown more complicated, however, with the contraction of anthropology’s traditional terrain. The far reaches of the world are no longer so distant, and societies once foreign and exotic have long been drawn into the global networks of market and media. Critically minded anthropologists find themselves at an impasse. On the one hand, they are motivated to upend overhasty assumptions, debunk complacent generalizations and trouble entrenched structures of domination. On the other, they are just as entangled as the people they study in an elaborate and comprehensive social and economic web that—in the competitive pressures it imposes, the self-concern it generates and the penalties and incentives it introduces into everyone’s work, consumption and relationships—is all but universal. This leaves them hard pressed to find a standpoint from which to criticize forces that affect them as much as their subjects.

Anthropologists who have done so successfully have mostly focused on populations of the global peripheries that, while being subject to the pressures of global capitalism, lead lives that are partly removed from it. Yet even these populations are now fully entangled in the global production and circulation of money and commodities, regulated through institutions established or updated to channel their flow. These institutions include nation-states, the nuclear family, the free market, credit and debt, private property, human capital, investment and insurance. Each possesses its own rationale, which—because it is insuperably entwined with all others in the world we have created—seems so essential that it is hard to think of it as something that people have developed and tweaked at certain points in time to contend with or manipulate the conditions in which they found themselves. Such institutions appear wherever capitalism takes hold. They shape the way people understand themselves, whether as employees, investors, debtors, citizens, family members, property owners or members of a social class. The universalizing thrust implied by “we” is therefore neither whimsical nor presumptuous but a by-product of the ubiquity of capitalism itself.

Capitalism’s universalization is most conspicuous with respect to the category of the middle class because this category is extensive and inclusive to the core: it projects an image of every human being as a self-determining investor of money, time or effort, if not at this very moment then in potential and aspiration. It imagines society to be a composite of multiple interacting individuals who are willing to exert more effort than they are immediately rewarded for, shoulder a greater debt burden than they absolutely must, and scale back on expenses whenever they can, in order to build reserves for their future and for that of their families. The fortunes of all but those who are deprived of the means to invest in this way due to various social and geographical barriers that these people are presumably in the process of overcoming, are thereupon considered the outcome of their personal investments.

The image of an expansive and increasingly global middle class that everyone could join does away with such divisive categories as workers vs. capitalists, unless it implies that deep down everyone is a quasi-capitalist go-getter. It also softens the edges of other potentially divisive categories like gender, ethnicity, race, nationality and religion, to the extent that middle-class alliances and competitions are designed to cut through and transcend the boundaries that these divisions lay down, inviting people to redefine their place in society according to their private interests.⁴ It embraces diversity insofar as manifold distinctions are validated and identities made to flourish through the range of consumer items that more and more people can access. At the same time, it exacerbates inequality by encouraging competitive consumption, lifestyle and investment to signal advantages for some over others and to guard against disadvantages relative to others.

Middle classness implies that we take responsibility over our fortunes by working as best as we can while forgoing some immediate enjoyment as we cut back on our expenses (and while sacrificing some peace of mind as we borrow to finance the purchase of durable assets) in order to be rewarded for these forfeitures in the future. It implies that our misfortunes are consequently a result of our having made poor or insufficient use of the time, energy and resources at our disposal; that society is nothing but a plethora of individuals implicated in each others’ self-serving investments, sometimes as allies and sometimes as competitors; and that its institutions are realizations of working investors’ respective or combined powers and preferences.

If we identify with these ideas, or if, more commonly, we express them unreflectingly in our behaviors and sensibilities, it is because they are built into the very rhythms of our lives, into the instruments we deploy and into the institutions through which our activities are organized. It is also because sometimes they are in fact affirmed by provisional and relative rewards when larger investors acquire advantages over lesser ones, as do, for example, landlords over tenants. But if we have misgivings, they likely awaken when the instruments we use and the institutions we operate within no longer function quite so smoothly, and when the rewards suggested by investment-driven self-determination are not forthcoming. Philosopher G. W. F. Hegel famously wrote that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings with the falling of dusk, by which he meant that we are prone to understand things only after the fact. In this case, the hour of critique chimes at the dusk of the middle-class ideal, when a chorus of voices laments its decline. The timing, as I will explain in this book, has everything to do with the growing dominance in recent decades of global finance. Finance’s dominance exports middle-class identifications into newly liberalized economies while at the same time squeezing household resources in countries whose populations have long been considered predominantly middle class.

I hope, then, that my decision to address an inclusive “we” in this book will not be taken as a sign of my ignorance of or disrespect for real differences between people. I know and appreciate that there are many people who live under vastly different conditions, people unable to command resources and lacking the potential to fare better (or worse) as the result of their investments, people who share none of the premises upon which this book is based. Rather, this form of address emerges out of my determination to take seriously the structural forces that have generated and popularized the image of a porous and expansive middle class and rendered it plausible. My intention is to pick apart this plausibility for those to whom it applies, for example those who are inclined to read this book. I do assume that, like me, you are products of some investment in education, if in nothing else—that you dedicate time and money to learn more and that you implicitly believe in the long-term significance of these endeavors. Speaking directly to a readership that makes investments of this kind, I hope to tap into something else we have in common: the proclivity to reflect on our received wisdoms.

With more of us out there insecure and struggling despite the prudent investments we have made and continue to make for our future, the promises of the middle class no longer seem so credible, and the time is ripe to start doubting as, indeed, many already do. Yet doubters come in different forms. Some respond by rejoicing in the fact that through popular access to global financial markets and their instruments, we can now escape the straitjacket of middle-class renunciations, outgrow expectations for security and piecemeal progress that would issue from our judicious consumption and incremental accretion of property and education, and instead get A Piece of the Action.⁵

Financial advice books encourage us to take the plunge, none with more spectacular success than Robert Kiyosaki’s bestseller from the turn of the twenty-first century: Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money—That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! Kiyosaki compares the advice he received from his two fathers. The first, a university professor, considered his home his largest asset and was always fretting about pay raises, retirement plans, medical benefits, sick leave, vacation days and other perks. He loved the university tenure system with its promise of steady employment. He wanted his son to study hard so that he could find a good company to work for. And he struggled financially all of his life and died leaving bills to be paid. The second was an entrepreneur who had barely finished the eighth grade but went on to become the richest man in Hawaii. He likened the person who would follow middle-class dad’s advice to a cow ready for the milking. Rich dad recommended learning how money works, buying and selling assets frequently and with savvy, and always being on the lookout for new moneymaking opportunities. He is the undeclared hero whose voice is channeled in the book to wean readers from middle-class reticence and rouse them toward financial risks and fortunes.

Such books are evidently not written for a critical “we” but for the ambitious “I” who picks up on the failings of the middle-class ideology and wants to rise above the madding crowd that would continue producing all necessary goods and providing all necessary services. These books stand in stark contrast to a recent outpouring of literature whose authors and readers are less keen on gaming the system than they are on figuring out why the system fails and how it can be fixed. These texts diagnose a middle-class squeeze, especially but by no means exclusively in the US context, attributing it to such things as stagnant real-wage growth, diminished public support, job automation, the rising costs of health and education, the unrestrained power of speculative finance and corporate interests, vulnerability to financial crises, unjustified fees and inequitable tax burdens.⁶ While critical of the predicaments they diagnose as plaguing the middle class, they rarely question the logic of the institutions that govern the lives of its purported members. Rather, they attribute these institutions’ unfulfilled promises of security and prosperity to causes external to them. The reforms they propose are designed to make the usual middle-class investments in property, insurance and education pay off to the degree that they had in the past.

Anthropologists have one important advantage over purely conceptual theorists: the possibility of perceiving—through ethnographic research anchored in a broad understanding of what constitutes human experience and how it comes together—the interconnections between institutions that appear to be separate, primarily between political, legal and economic ones, and those associated with culture, lifestyle and belief. This turns out to be of great value for the matter at hand because the ideology that summons the middle class into being manifests itself across the fault lines of economy, politics and culture. Anthropologists typically discuss middle classes in the plural to signal the heterogeneity of their alleged members. Drawing on extended fieldwork among these populations in a wide variety of countries and settings, they describe their social relations and subjective experiences in ways that convey the constraints to which they are subject. They pay particular attention to their patterns of work, consumption and political action. Then they trace how these patterns are interwoven with pressures and opportunities emerging out of national and global markets.⁷

I am greatly indebted to their insights and draw on them in my analysis. I nevertheless approach the middle class from a different angle: that of immanent critique. Scholars have used immanent critique to various effects, their premise being that instead of criticizing a category or institution from the outside—which is at any rate impossible insofar as we actively partake in what we call into question—we can grasp it more fully by mining its inherent tensions and contradictions from within. To do so, we strategically take at face value the thing that we are interested in figuring out, and then follow the way it operates in the world or in people’s lives in order to spot the places where its own logic falters. Anthropology has a penchant for immanent critique because of the field’s emblematic methodology of ethnographic fieldwork. This method elicits the common ways in which things are defined and described, and triangulates them with interview data and with observation of people as they act over time and in specific settings within the institutions in question. This almost always brings to the fore a host of tensions between the official and ideological logic of institutions, what people do in their framework, and the outcomes of their actions.

Such tensions are inevitable insofar as all categories and institutions have been designed at certain points in time to accomplish specific goals for particular groups of people. This holds true even when the most successful among them assume the appearance of universality and common sense, as though devoid of purpose or origin—a neutral and unquestioned thing. Such thing-ification (scholars sometimes call it essentialization or reification) of a historical contingency is the greatest power to which an ideology can aspire, making it appear beyond contestation, a fact of life. But the very idea is founded on impossibility. In a world populated by human beings who are distinct, complex and reflective, no particular objective can ever attain such a stronghold on everyone’s thought and practice as to actually become as thing-like as it is sometimes held to be; hence the tensions and contradictions to be mined and deconstructed.

This is the approach I have taken in this book: I interrogate the category of middle class in its relation to capitalism in the first chapter, and then I proceed to relate it to institutions like private property in the second chapter and to human capital in the third, in order to expose their premises and promises. In the fourth chapter, I delineate features of politics and values commonly associated with the middle class. I tie the arguments together and follow some remaining threads in the conclusion. Throughout this inquiry, I bring examples from ethnographic studies that I have conducted in Israel and in Germany and from those that others have conducted elsewhere in the world. These explorations have triggered the revelations whose conclusions I formulate here. Even so, I spend the greater part of the book developing my arguments conceptually while using ethnographic data sparingly and for illustrative purposes alone. The literature on the lives and experiences of the people cast as global middle classes is already quite extensive and growing still. I reference some of the best of it in footnotes so that those interested in finding out more about the groups so designated can, in true middle-class spirit, make the necessary investments.