Why Class Analysis isn't Enough

On downwardly mobile managers and consumption

Next Wednesday will be the debut of my monthly research lecture series where I’ll be exploring key texts in the Moloch Theory project towards a “critical bureaucratic studies.” This month’s talk will be about Foucault’s lectures ‘Security, Territory, Population’ where he develops a number of crucial concepts, such as how the concept of humanity as a “population” of organisms transformed how power works in society today.

These research lectures will be on the last Wednesday of every month at 5 PM (Pacific) / 8 PM (Eastern). Each lecture will be free for premium subscribers and $5 for anyone else. Your price of admission also includes access to the recording.

---

My recent essay “Capitalism after Capitalists” wondered whether we have any capitalists left, arguing that the capitalist class has relinquished direct control over corporations and the economy by disappearing themselves into the managers. But this raises the question of the principle of differentiation within the new heterogeneous managerial class. How does it make sense to propose a class which includes accountants, social workers, foresters, and CEOs, but from which we would exclude people like plumbers, ships captains, and coffee shop owners? At what point does this monstrously broad idea of a managerial class become more of a conceptual hindrance than it’s worth?

downwardly mobile managers

Critics of Burnham’s theory (and of “professional managerial class” discourse in general) have objected precisely this, namely, that the focus on managers divides the working class and provides cover for capitalists. After all, doesn’t a doctor actually have more in common with a worker with regards to their situation as dispossessed of capital and having to earn a living with wage-labor? This form of analysis argues that managers are actually just workers, but ones which have been duped into an identification with the capitalist class because the managers are typically paid more and don’t engage in manual labor.

From what I can tell, this line of argument often comes from downwardly mobile managers who have been initiated into the managerial class through education in the symbols, rhetoric, and affects of this class, but who are not enjoying the economic benefits which they sense were promised to them by virtue of their class position. We might say that they became managers but never rose to the level of elites.

Graduate students and university professors can be especially militant on this front, because they occupy such a strange class position — on the one hand, they have the highest degree of training in their field, and even train the next generation of managers, but they are massively underpaid and overworked, essentially functioning as the labor-power which upholds the entire education-industrial complex from which an army of deans and administrators profit.

Further, there exists within the professorial world a byzantine hierarchy of tenure track professors, endowed chairs, university named professors, of which only a limited number of positions exist (although new distinctions are always being born to satisfy the limitless vanity of academics). In the end though, only a small upper crust of professors who teach at top schools are truly elites, enjoying some prestige and social influence, whereas a tenure track professor at a state school does not experience much more than a middle class existence (and those are the lucky ones who managed to land a job in their field).

Much has been made of the “elite overproduction” thesis, namely, that more college-educated professionals were created than the economy could support to hire and pay, producing many people trained as managers who nonetheless find themselves in the same or even worse economic straits than their non-college educated peers. This failure of expectations has aroused a social consciousness amongst some manager types about the injustice of labor conditions generally in society, causing them to develop an identification with the working class.

We can discern some of the genesis of the MAGA backlash and the woke conquest of the Democratic party in this entrance of the college-educated professionals into the labor movement (David Sessions discusses this “proletarianization of intellectuals” and the activist element from graduate students in this conversation with The Point’s Jon Baskin), in the process foisting the theoretical discourses and norms of university onto what was the Democrats’ more economically diverse coalition. This decisively contributed to a splintering which drove the working class out of their movement, sending workers into the arms of Donald Trump who picked up on the repressed populist impulses bubbling within the Republican party and the country at large.

This conflict highlights what these downwardly mobile managers experiencing proletarianization overlooked as they attempted to identify with the labor movement. Although a manager might become aware of their oppression as a wage-laborer, they have still been schooled in managerial ways of thinking, and also possess the manager’s privilege to exercise knowledge-power and produce symbolic capital. Managers exercise power, in part, by devising the theoretical frameworks which organize labor and production. This type of work requires the maintenance of symbols and status, as well as their distribution, which determines the hierarchy of persons and knowledge within an organization.

This was what workers responded to so viscerally — these managers joined the ranks of the labor movement and then immediately started managing them. From policing speech to imposing mandatory trainings, the managers began to enforce a new set of concepts and norms which had their origin much more from the academic theories of Adorno, Fanon, and Crenshaw than from within working class communities themselves. Further, much of the manager’s power of critical analysis was applied to examining and stigmatizing working class culture, including their media, hobbies, and behavioral norms, and then prescribing changes which often resembled adopting the cultural habits of the managers themselves, typically from educated urban elite backgrounds.

the shift towards consumption

I concluded last week’s piece with the provocation that the structural understanding of class today may be less useful than it used to be, and I think this conflict highlights exactly that — downwardly mobile managers thought that because their relation to capital was similar to workers that they must actually be workers (and there is a sense in which, yes, of course, Capital is exploiting their labor-power for profit), but this turned out to not be the whole story. It eventually became clear that class was intimately related to a shifting system of social signifiers around consumption and lifestyle.

We have to realize all the crucial ways in which a doctor is not like a normal worker. A doctor’s testimony in court bears a different legal weight, often determining whether someone is competent to stand for trial or not. A doctor can diagnose you with a physical or mental illness which can define you for life, a doctor’s assessment can determine whether you are allowed to serve in public office or the military or in the police, and they can even exercise legal authority to keep you at a medical facility against your will. I would direct others to Foucault’s work on this point, but we should not miss that managers as embedded within the biopolitical structures of society are empowered to exercise symbolic and physical force over ordinary individuals.

Beyond this though, we also implicitly understand a class difference between doctors and workers based on their consumption habits. The doctor lifestyle tends to be performed in society more as buying at Whole Foods, watching “The White Lotus”, and jogging or doing yoga, whereas the working classes can be identified as more likely to shop at Wal-Mart, drive trucks, attend church on Sunday, and lift weights instead of jogging. Of course, there are thousands of micro-distinctions within these larger groups, all signified by different brand loyalties, food choices, clothing, hobbies, fandoms, lingos, and body language (which

Theory Underground

has referred to as “getting lost in the niches”).

The idea that these consumption habits are “merely” superficial and mask an essentially homologous relationship to production ignores that capitalism in the West has increasingly shifted towards consumption as its defining activity. In a society which has shifted away from industrial production towards a “service-based” economy, the primary work that Americans do on behalf of the rest of the world is to consume. We run a trade deficit with many developing countries so that their economies can use our consumer demand to grow their production capacity. The mighty American consumer carries the world economy.

But in the long run, this shift from production to consumption will be the way of all flesh, for the internal tendency of capitalism which we now seeing play out pushes for a greater automation and atomization of production. With sufficient advances in AI and automation, laborers will become less necessary, eventually being replaced as machines talk to machines. This has been particularly disquieting for many in the managerial class, as they thought they were the safe ones. The truck drivers were supposed to learn to code, but instead AI learned how to code first. AI will draft legal documents, make marketing copy, and produce public policy long before it ever fixes the plumbing in someone’s house. Ultimately, under capitalist conditions, the only labor left for human beings will be to consume what is produced by Capital. We will just be one mass of libidinally inflamed organic matter, consuming healthcare services for sick bodies and never-ending entertainment to distract our distended souls.

That is, if Capital can achieve liftoff where it decouples from us. This will require an immense amount of energy, as well as human labor and technical capacity. I have my doubts that this escape velocity will be achieved. Perhaps all this hullabaloo about “capitalism” will come to a stupifying silence as our current world order unravels and civilization collapses back into subsistence living. Capitalism’s greatest enemy is itself — what happens when the bubble pops?

---