Had I Known

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Had I Known Page 24

by Barbara Ehrenreich


  In the 1960s, for the first time since the Progressive Era, a large segment of the PMC had the self-confidence to take on a critical, even oppositional, political role. Jobs were plentiful, a college education did not yet lead to a lifetime of debt, and materialism was briefly out of style. College students quickly moved on from supporting the civil rights movement in the South and opposing the war in Vietnam to confronting the raw fact of corporate power throughout American society—from the prowar inclinations of the weapons industry to the governance of the university. The revolt soon spread beyond students. By the end of the sixties, almost all of the liberal professions had “radical caucuses,” demanding that access to the professions be opened up to those traditionally excluded (such as women and minorities), and that the service ethics the professions claimed to uphold actually be applied in practice.

  The Capitalist Offensive

  Beginning in the seventies, the capitalist class decisively reasserted itself. The ensuing capitalist offensive was so geographically widespread and thoroughgoing that it introduced what many left-wing theorists today describe as a new form of capitalism, “neoliberalism.”

  The new management strategy was to raise profits by single-mindedly reducing labor costs, most directly by simply moving manufacturing offshore to find cheaper labor. Those workers who remained employed in the United States faced a series of initiatives designed to discipline and control them ever more tightly: intensified supervision in the workplace, drug tests to eliminate slackers, and increasingly professionalized efforts to prevent unionization. Cuts in the welfare state also had a disciplining function, making it harder for workers to imagine surviving job loss.

  Most of these antilabor measures also had an effect, directly or indirectly, on elements of the PMC. Government spending cuts hurt the job prospects of social workers, teachers, and others in the “helping professions,” while the decimation of the US-based industrial working class reduced the need for mid-level professional managers, who found themselves increasingly targeted for downsizing. But there was a special animus against the liberal professions, surpassed only by neoliberal hostility to what conservatives described as the “underclass.” Crushing this liberal elite—by “defunding the left” or attacking liberal-leaning nonprofit organizations—became a major neoliberal project.

  Of course, not all the forces undermining the liberal professions since the 1980s can be traced to conscious neoliberal policies. Technological innovation, rising demand for services, and ruthless profit-taking all contributed to an increasingly challenging environment for the liberal professions, including the “creative ones.”

  The internet is often blamed for the plight of journalists, writers, and editors, but economic change preceded technological transformation. Journalism jobs began to disappear as corporations, responding in part to Wall Street investors, tried to squeeze higher profit margins out of newspapers and TV news programs. The effects of these changes on the traditionally creative professions have been dire. Staff writers, editors, photographers, announcers, and the like faced massive layoffs (more than 25 percent of newsroom staff alone since 2001), increased workloads, salary cuts, and buyouts.

  Then, in just the last dozen years, the PMC began to suffer the fate of the industrial class in the 1980s: replacement by cheap foreign labor. It came as a shock to many when, in the 2000s, businesses began to avail themselves of new high-speed transmission technologies to outsource professional functions.

  By the time of the financial meltdown and deep recession of the post-2008 period, the pain inflicted by neoliberal policies, both public and corporate, extended well beyond the old industrial working class and into core segments of the PMC. Unemployed and underemployed professional workers—from IT to journalism, academia, and eventually law—became a regular feature of the social landscape. Young people did not lose faith in the value of an education, but they learned quickly that it makes more sense to study finance rather than physics or “communications” rather than literature. The old PMC dream of a society ruled by impartial “experts” gave way to the reality of inescapable corporate domination.

  But the PMC was not only a victim of more powerful groups. It had also fallen into a trap of its own making. The prolonged, expensive, and specialized education required for professional employment had always been a challenge to PMC families—as well, of course, as an often-insuperable barrier to the working class. Higher degrees and licenses are no longer a guarantee of PMC status. Hence the iconic figure of the Occupy Wall Street movement: the college graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debts and a job paying about $10 a hour, or no job at all.

  Whither Class Consciousness?

  So in the hundred years since its emergence, the PMC has not managed to hold its own as a class. At its wealthier end, skilled professionals continue to jump ship for more lucrative posts in direct service to capital: Scientists give up their research to become “quants” on Wall Street; physicians can double their incomes by finding work as investment analysts for the finance industry or by setting up “concierge” practices serving the wealthy. At the less fortunate end of the spectrum, journalists and PhDs in sociology or literature spiral down into the retail workforce. In between, health workers and lawyers and professors find their work lives more and more hemmed in and regulated by corporation-like enterprises. The center has not held. Conceived as “the middle class” and as the supposed repository of civic virtue and occupational dedication, the PMC lies in ruins.

  More profoundly, the PMC’s original dream—of a society ruled by reason and led by public-spirited professionals—has been discredited. Globally, the socialist societies that seemed to come closest to this goal either degenerated into heavily militarized dictatorships or, more recently, into authoritarian capitalist states. Within the United States, the grotesque failure of socialism in China and the Soviet Union became a propaganda weapon in the neoliberal war against the public sector in its most innocuous forms and a core argument for the privatization of just about everything.

  But the PMC has also managed to discredit itself as an advocate for the common good. Consider our gleaming towers of medical research and high-technology care—all too often abutting urban neighborhoods characterized by extreme poverty and foreshortened life spans.

  Should we mourn the fate of the PMC or rejoice that there is one less smug, self-styled, elite to stand in the way of a more egalitarian future? On the one hand, the PMC has played a major role in the oppression and disempowering of the old working class. It has offered little resistance to (and, in fact, supplied the manpower for) the right’s campaign against any measure that might ease the lives of the poor and the working class.

  On the other hand, the PMC has at times been a “liberal” force, defending the values of scholarship and human service in the face of the relentless pursuit of profit. In this respect, its role in the last century bears some analogy to the role of monasteries in medieval Europe, which kept literacy and at least some form of inquiry alive while the barbarians raged outside.

  As we face the deepening ruin brought on by neoliberal aggression, the question may be: Who, among the survivors, will uphold those values today? And, more profoundly, is there any way to salvage the dream of reason—or at least the idea of a society in which reasonableness can occasionally prevail—from the accretion of elitism it acquired from the PMC?

  Any renewal of oppositional spirit among the professional-managerial class, or what remains of it, needs to start from an awareness that what has happened to the professional middle class has long since happened to the blue-collar working class. The debt-ridden unemployed and underemployed college graduates, the revenue-starved teachers, the overworked and underpaid service professionals, even the occasional whistle-blowing scientist or engineer—all face the same kind of situation that confronted skilled craft-workers in the early twentieth century and all American industrial workers in the late twentieth century.

  In the coming
years, we expect to see the remnants of the PMC increasingly making common cause with the remnants of the traditional working class for, at a minimum, representation in the political process. This is the project that the Occupy movement initiated and spread, for a time anyway, worldwide.

  The Unbearable Being

  of Whiteness

  Mother Jones, 1988

  This column is addressed to my fellow white people and contains material that we would prefer to keep among ourselves. God knows we have suffered enough already from the unique problems that have confronted white people over the centuries: the burden of bringing Christianity to heathens so benighted that they usually preferred death. The agony of sunburn. But now we face what may be the biggest problem of all. You know what I mean, brothers and sisters, low self-esteem.

  It started with the Asian menace. Many years ago, “Made in Japan” applied chiefly to windup toys and samurai movies. No one thought twice about sending their children off to school with the sons and daughters of laundrymen and chop suey chefs. But now, alas, the average white person cannot comprehend the inner workings of the simplest product from Asia, much less read the owner’s manual.

  In the realm of business, our most brilliant blue-eyed MBAs admit they are like children compared to the shoguns of Mitsubishi and Toshiba. As for education, well, the local high school is offering a full scholarship to the first Caucasian to make valedictorian. And what white parents have not—when pressed to the limit by their brutish, ignorant, dope-fiend children—screamed, “Goddamn it, Stacey [or Sean], why can’t you act more like an Asian-American?”

  Yes, I know the conventional explanation: White people lack convincing role models. Consider President Reagan, whose own son grew up believing—hoping?—that his true parents were the black help. Or consider the vice president, George Bush, a man so bedeviled by bladder problems that he managed, for the last eight years, to be in the men’s room whenever an important illegal decision was made. Or consider how long it took, following the defeat of Robert Bork [as a Supreme Court nominee], for the conservatives to find a white man who was clean-shaven, drug-free, and had also passed his bar exam.

  Then there were the nonblack Democratic candidates, who might be considered the very flower of white manhood. For months, none of them could think of anything to say. Political discourse fell to the level of white street talk, as in “Have a nice day.”

  Then, stealthily, one by one, they began to model themselves after Jesse Jackson. Even the patrician Al Gore, surely one of the whitest men ever to seek public office, donned a windbreaker and declared himself the champion of the working people. Richard Gephardt borrowed Jackson’s rhyme about how corporations “merge” with each other and “purge” the workers. Soon he was telling moving stories about his youth as a poor black boy in the South, and how he had inexplicably turned white, clear up to and including his eyebrows.

  Confronted with the obvious superiority of the black candidate, many white voters became perplexed and withdrawn. We had liked to think of black people as simple folk with large thighs and small brains—a race of Head Start dropouts, suitable for sweeping floors and assisting blond cops on TV. In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: In 1984, 92 percent of black people voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of white people.

  Or compare the two most prominent men of television, Bill Cosby and Morton Downey Jr. Millions of white Americans have grown up with no other father figure than “Cos.” Market researchers have determined that we would buy any product he endorses, even if it were a skin-lightener. No one, on the other hand, would buy anything from Downey, unless it was something advertised anonymously in the classified section of Soldier of Fortune.

  Perhaps it is true, as many white people have secretly and shamefully concluded, that these facts can only be explained by resorting to genetic theories of IQ. But I still like to think there are environmental explanations. A generation ago, for example, hordes of white people fled the challenging, interracial atmosphere of the cities and settled in the whites-only suburbs. Little did we know that a lifestyle devoted to lawn maintenance and shrub pruning would, in no time at all, engender the thick-witted peasant mentality now so common among our people.

  At the same time, the white elite walled themselves up in places like Harvard to preserve white culture in its purest form. Still others, the brightest of our race, retired to Los Alamos to figure out how to bring the whole thing to a prompt conclusion. Unfortunately, our extreme isolation from people of alternative races meant there was never anyone around to point out the self-destructive tendencies inherent in white behavior, which is still known collectively as “Western civilization.”

  Let’s face it, we became ingrown, clannish, and stupid. Cut off from the mainstream of humanity, we came to believe that pink is “flesh-color,” that mayonnaise is a nutrient, and that Barry Manilow is a musician. Little did we know that all over the world, people were amusing each other with tales beginning, “Did you hear the one about the Caucasian who…”

  I know. It hurts. Low self-esteem is a terrible thing. Some white men, driven mad by the feeling that people are laughing at them, have taken to running around the streets and beating on random people of color or threatening to vote Republican.

  Believe me, that kind of acting out won’t help. If white people are ever to stand tall, we’re going to have to leave our cramped little ghetto and stride out into the world again. Of course, there’ll be the inevitable embarrassments at first: the fear of saying the wrong thing, of making mathematical errors, of forgetting the geography of the southern hemisphere. But gather up little Sean and Stacey and tell them, “We can do it! If we study and try very hard, even we can be somebody!”

  Is the Middle Class Doomed?

  New York Times, 1986

  Most of us are “middle-class,” or so we like to believe. But there are signs that America is becoming a more divided society: Over the last decade, the rich have been getting richer; the poor have been getting more numerous; and those in the middle do not appear to be doing as well as they used to. If America is “coming back,” as President Reagan reassured us in the wake of the economic malaise of the early 1980s, it may be coming back in a harsh and alien form.

  It was in the late sixties that American society began to lurch off the track leading to the American dream. No one could have known it at the time, but, according to the economists Bennett Harrison, Chris Tilly, and Barry Bluestone, those were the last years in which economic inequality among Americans declined. Since then, in a sharp reversal of the equalizing trend that had been under way since shortly after World War II, the extremes of wealth have grown further apart and the middle has lost ground. In 1984, according to a report by Congress’s Joint Economic Committee, the share of the national income received by the wealthiest 40 percent of families in the United States rose to 67.3 percent, while the poorest 40 percent received 15.7 percent (the smallest share since 1947); the share of the middle 20 percent declined to 17 percent.

  Some economists have even predicted that the middle class, which has traditionally represented the majority of Americans and defined the nation’s identity and goals, will disappear altogether, leaving the country torn, like many developing societies, between an affluent minority and a horde of the desperately poor.

  At least in the area of consumer options, we seem already in the process of becoming a “two-tier society.” The middle is disappearing from the retail industry, for example. Korvettes and Gimbels are gone. Sears, Roebuck and JCPenney are anxiously trying to reposition themselves to survive in an ever more deeply segmented market. The stores that are prospering are the ones that have learned to specialize in one extreme of wealth or the other: Nordstrom’s and Neiman-Marcus for the affluent; Kmart for those constrained by poverty or thrift. Whether one looks at food, clothing, or furnishings, two cultures are emerging: natural fibers versus synthetics; handcrafted wood cabinets versus mass-produced maple; D
avid’s Cookies versus Mister Donuts.

  The political implications of the shift toward a two-tier society—if this is what is really happening—are ominous. Felix Rohatyn, the investment banker and civic leader, has observed: “A democracy, to survive, must at the very least appear to be fair. This is no longer the case in America.” We may have outgrown the conceit that America is a uniformly “middle-class” society, but we have expected the extremes of wealth and poverty to be buffered by a vast and stable middle class. If the extremes swell, and if the economic center cannot hold, then our identity and future as a nation may be endangered.

  Because the stakes are so high, the subject of class polarization has itself become bitterly polarized. On what could be called the “pessimistic” side is a group of mostly young, though highly acclaimed, economists who tend to be based in the relatively prosperous state of Massachusetts. The other side, which is represented at two research organizations, the Brookings Institution, in Washington, and the Conference Board, in New York City, argues that there are no fundamental flaws in the economy, and that the shift toward greater inequality will be short-lived.

  Though much of the debate has been numbingly technical, the differences sometimes seem to have more to do with ideology than statistics. Fabian Linden of the Conference Board, for example, says of “the pessimists”: “There are always people who think that this is an imperfect world and has to be changed.…It’s awfully arrogant, if you think about it.”

 

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