A View from the Bottom by H. Grant Timms

Beginning in the 1990s a great number of political commentators extolled the great democratising potential of the Internet, took note of the blurring of ‘left’ and ‘right’ political distinctions, and joyfully declared that ‘labels’ no longer mattered. The old, or ‘traditional;’ politics would be rendered obsolete, in part because borders would become meaningless to both information and to capital flows. The range of political choices would proliferate — just as the variety of consumer choices was increasing. A greater variety of information choices would lead to a greater diversity of opinion which in turn would drive the old parties in new directions – or create new parties. Most importantly, however, greater information flows would mean more power to the people.

It is certainly the case that the volume of information has increased. Whether this has led to a more informed public is a debatable claim, as is the claim to a greater diversity of political opinion. At any rate we still have the same major political parties in Canada, and what is more there has been a great deal of homogenisation between the parties. They are all parties of the centre, more or less. All three major parties have tried to position themselves as the party of the ‘middle-class.’ All three, more or less, have conceded economic policy to the Market. All three, more or less, accept that the role of government is to create a business – friendly environment, keep taxes as low as possible and to balance the budget, for these lead to job creation — and job creation is the primary obligation of government.

It’s all about jobs.

But jobs do not translate into either economic or political power. They leave both where they are now. Similarly, it seems clear that greater access to information has not translated into economic and political power. Just the opposite. The huge, unprecedented and growing disparity of wealth between the top 1 or 2% and the rest is a fairly good measure of the distribution of effective political power.

None of the three major political parties have a jot or a tittle in their policies or platforms that aim at redistributing either economic or political power — to restore both to the levels, say, of the late 1950s or 1960s when the ‘middle class’ as they are using the term actually existed. The term is meant to resonate with the people who make up the majority of the electorate, otherwise known as ‘working families’ or the ‘average voter’.

However, in the face of information-age, trans-national finance capitalism the ‘middle-class’ has become obsolete. There can be no ‘middle’ in an era when 1 or 2% of the population ‘own’ or control over 90% of the country’s wealth. To be sure there are working families and they represent the majority. But the ‘average’ working family is now typified as one in which one or both adults work at ‘precarious’ employment, defined as casual, intermittent, or as limited term contracts – perhaps more than one. Precarious employment used to be the reality for the undereducated, the poor, and those on the social margins. No longer.

Under these conditions, it is understandable why the primary concern of the majority is ‘jobs’, but this reflects a stunting of political imagination that goes along with the decline of effective political power and influence.

In one sense the current reality makes the old new again. When it first emerged, ‘middle-class’ simply referred to all those who were not members of the priesthood (or Church), the landed aristocracy or peasantry. The ‘non-Estate’ was specifically to the urban merchant or business class that was in the ‘middle’ because socially and economically it lay in-between the aristocracy and the peasantry – and was antagonistic to both. It sought to over-turn traditional power structures, and its hand-in-glove weapons were democracy and money. The middle class did not include anyone who worked for wages. These were referred to as wage slaves, people without property or capital obliged to sell their labour for the cash required to purchase the means to life. This was Marx’s proletariat, and its main concerns, like today, were jobs and wages. It is interesting to note that the majority of American democratic revolutionaries, including Jefferson and Adams, excluded wage-workers from the voting franchise. Wage-workers were excluded because they lacked the independence of material means, and so intellect, necessary to be viable political actors. In modern democracy economic power was political power and wage-labour had neither.

Our more contemporary notion of the ‘middle class’ only began to take shape out of the Great Depression, with applications of Keynesian economics, the growth of organised labour, and the institution of a host of social programs all designed to level the economic playing field. The project of the business class and neo-liberal politics over the past 20-25 years aimed at rolling back all of these, as they generated what neo-liberals referred to as “too much democracy.”

In an era characterised by present-mindedness, looking to 19th century might seem a waste of time. But it provides insight into the reality of today’s economic and political landscape. The appeal to the ‘middle class’ by today’s political parties is an appeal to a time and material condition rendered obsolete by global capitalism, to a time when the majority of average Canadians in middle had a far greater share of the economic wealth, and had some effective political clout to go along with it. Today, the great middle, the ‘average working family’ begins to look a lot like Marx’s proletariat. Calling them ‘middle class’ is so much flattery.

[Photo Credit: Chris Devers/Flickr]