From John Buell: the entitled, the dispossessed, and the marginal

John Buell raises some interesting points in comments below to my post on the relation between economy and politics. Here is an excerpt from them, but the longer version is well worth reading:

I think progressives should move away from a rhetoric of rich and poor and instead talk about a three tiered socio-economic class system—the entitled, the disposed, and the marginalized middle class. The dispossessed suffer not only from rigged job markets but urban development projects that uproot them and selectively harsh law enforcement through the so called drug war. Deindustrialization and outsourcing even of many middle class jobs leave many middle and working class families desperate to hang on to their standard of living and sense of identity. Meanwhile, the wealthy now view their success in the market as not merely a consequence of their skills but as a permanent entitlement, a proof of their own moral worth and they have used their economic power to shape public policy—including both appropriations, lobbying techniques, redistricting, media consolidation-- that reflects this sense of entitlement.

Consumption patterns play a role in both the expression and cementing of this class structure, a reason why I think the concept of consumer tends to displace older views of citizens. Luxury consumption doesn’t merely increase expectations but also fosters new needs. Cell phones start as expensive toys, but as they spread to the upper middle class, public pay phones are eliminated in many locales and many who even hate cell phones find themselves compelled to purchase them. One can find many other examples. So the middle and working class is being squeezed both on the income end and on the level of expenditures thought necessary to sustain a certain way of life.

I believe these points have implications for the discussion of the autonomy of the political and the economic. A marginalized middle and working class, with its own history of ethnic, racial, and gender identifications, can gravitate toward xenophobic or homophobic forms of scapegoating in the absence of a politics that addresses its economic insecurity.However desireable one may think the notion of the autonomy of the political process and its capacity to foster new surprises and ways of thinking, politics will remain overwhelmed by repressive fundamentalisms if it does not confront these massive economic disparities and insecurities. But a redemptive politics has the best chance of getting some foothold if, rather than focusing on the need of the state to redress inequalities that have supposedly emerged by virtue of talent or “God given” luck from a neutral market, it makes citizens aware how these inequalities today are the result of conscious government policy conducted by and at the behest of a group that views itself as entitled.

I think John is right that the rhetoric of rich and poor is unproductive. I tend to lapse into it in part because I don't think of class terms as designating actual groups but as designating conflict and antagonism. The terms dispossessed, entitled, and marginal have relatively clear referents and a strong political valence. Yes, they lack a relation to production, but the terms worker and capitalist don't fit well with the postindustrial neoliberal economy. Also, in the US the Right has been successful in articulating the term worker with what they present as corrupt unions delivering fat cat deals that cripple the economy (a myth that has been all too effective up here in the rust belt). Also, in the American context, designating the privileged, the upper class, the winners, as "entitled" is great--it reappropriates the Right wing dismissive rhetoric of entitlements and turns it against them.

Comments

[dan]

Neoliberalism is a poor social theory that has benefited from a lack of sustained opposition to it from within economics and politics departments.

The imposition of this theory through dispossession, entitlement and marginalization represents a series of ongoing practices that are very much embedded in capitalist production and its current manifestations. The expansion of consumer debt, the massive deficit spending for war, and ongoing trade deficits represent a claim on the future earnings of labor and productivity in the US. They are not only linked to current production, they are the capitalization of future production. Moreover I believe these active processes of dispossession rely heavily on the gratification sustained through consumption combined with constant assertions of American exceptionalism.

However, I believe that a shift towards a triad of socio-economic analysis produces a politics that reinforces the belief in 'practical' changes through party politics. Doesn't it reduce the antagonisms of the capitalist system to a series of social configurations, rather than a sustained and systemic problem reinforced through a variety of political forms? If we are to think about politics and economics together, doesn't a binary relationship help in building political alliances? (Here I am thinking of the citizen/ non-citizen divide, where participation in the labor force precedes legal recognition). While capitalist and worker are inevitably a anachronism for contemporary political organizing, efforts to develop a better account of the sociological complexity of contemporary capitalism also produced 'third-way' politics, which Blair inevitably showed was just a nascent form of neoliberalism.

[Adam Kotsko]

It would be great poetic justice if the left actually appropriated one of the talking points of the right, like they've done with tolerance, etc. The Democrats seem to try to do that, but they don't understand how it works -- you can't just take one of the positive ones ("tough on national security") and apply it to yourself, you have to take the negative ones and apply it to those bastards.