Month: June 2021

Dividing workers against one another prevents formation of class consciousness and collective action against the owner class. Racism and sexism provide obvious examples, aligning white men against what should be their fellows, black workers and women workers. Police and military forces compose a martial class that defends the wealthy’s class interest from the rest of the working class, dividing them from and pitting them against the “civilian” population.

Class consciousness arises from recognizing the alignment of one’s own needs with the needs of others in the same economic situation. Where one worker sees that their colleague suffers the same exploitation they do, and both wish it to end, they can build trust and cooperate with one another against the owner class that exploits them. The owner class also recognizes their shared interest in continuing to exploit workers, so they cooperate with one another to undermine collective action.

Class consciousness can be undermined by disrupting the perception of shared interest. Highlighting non-class identity traits invites workers to align with their identity group above their class. Where the owner class privileges one identity group, workers who identify with that group see their interests more closely aligned with their identity group rather than their colleagues. As a result, the owner class need to contend only with a subset of the working class, and they can mobilize the support of privileged identity workers in the struggle.

While whiteness and maleness continue to serve this divisive function for the owning class, the introduction of professionalism has also done widespread damage to class consciousness. Workers in “professional” careers enjoy high wages and flexibility in their work environment, making such careers highly desirable among workers. Entry into a professional career usually requires tertiary education, limiting the pool of qualified workers. Social inequalities expands access to higher education for members of the privileged group, so race and gender disparities influence the composition of the professional class.

Tertiary education serves as a shared experience between the owner class and the most privileged members of the working class. Many social signifiers students learn in order to enter a professional career are also signifiers of the owner class. In their eventual jobs, professional workers engage in status games similar to those played by the owning class, notably conspicuous consumption and the pursuit of positional goods. When a professional considers the experience of the working class, they may find that experience much different from their own due to their income and working conditions. Professionals may reasonably question whether they belong to the working class or instead to some middle class that stands between the two.

Nevertheless, professional and non-professional workers alike experience exploitation by the owning class. While professionals enjoy an elevated status due to their income and social signifiers, their household wealth remains a fraction of that held by the owning class who employ them. Professional workers generally hold their jobs in order to support themselves and their household because they lack sufficient wealth to do otherwise. Owner class employers claim property rights in all of the creative labor produced by their professional employees, alienating them from the products of their labor. Professional workers usually draw salaries rather than hourly wage, so their employers can demand variable amounts of time from them, alienating them from their family and community.

The owner class also exploits the professional class by making them complicit in the exploitation of non-professionals. Given unbounded demands on their time, professional workers have an incentive to leverage their earnings to pay for time-saving services usually provided by non-professionals. When the owner class creates an opportunity to extract work from non-professionals, professional workers provide the demand for services and become the primary customers. A non-professional then expends their effort and time on the needs of a professional for the profit of an owner rather than serving their own analogous needs. The professional as customer directly engages with the non-professional who must then treat their customer as if they belonged to the owner class, alienating them from one another. As a result, the professional stands in a similar relationship to the non-professional as the owner does, reinforcing the professional’s perceived alignment with the owner class.

By focusing on wealth disparities, professionals can see themselves in the same frame as the rest of the working class. When the class signifiers and delegated oppression are removed, the professional worker finds themselves more similar to non-professional workers than to their owner class employer. Their lives are just as contingent on the whims of the owner class. They have similar ability to influence their working conditions and terms of employment, weak as individuals but strong as a collective.

The owning class creates the illusion of a “professional” middle class to disrupt class consciousness among workers of the most and least privileged classes, limiting their ability to act collectively. Professionals must resist acting as delegates in oppression and reflect on their shared motivation with the rest of the working class. Otherwise, the oppression of both classes will continue.

Abstract political theory creates frameworks without reference to material conditions or historical events. Like many Enlightenment philosophers, John Locke approached property acquisition as an ideal thought experiment. The ahistorical perspective allows a theorist to ignore the history of unjust acquisition. Instead, a Lockean philosopher can defend situational injustice by showing alignment with the ideal theory. Locke himself argues that ownership claims arise from the investment of labor, so one must work to own property and profit by it. Anyone lacking property must have not done the work and should invest their effort if they want to improve their situation. With this framework a Lockean does not need to address past injustices that prevented equal opportunity for acquisition.

Acquisition of private property needed justifications during Locke’s time as traditional commons arrangements transitioned into private ownership. Locke’s theory justifies the enclosure of common lands because private ownership improves the land over its natural state, and anyone else could do the same by enclosing a different parcel. In practice, there are distinct class differences in who was entitled to enclose the commons and who would be forced to abide by those enclosures. New property claims dissolved traditional usage rights, removing claim to the land from the very people who worked it. While these seizures should be condemned in Locke’s theory, an abstract political theory conceals these injustices. The framework projects from an idealized original state to the current situation. The placement of the present moment becomes a rhetorical act intended to connect “now” with the idealized “state of nature” and disregard the permutations in between.

Supporters of regressive political economies benefit from convincing the working class that all positions in society have been earned fairly. The poor deserve poverty, not aid, and the wealthy are owed influence, not stewardship. Scholars are never entirely isolated from political interest, as evidenced by privately funded research originated solely to vindicate a politically important narrative. If the community of scholars widely endorses a perspective that aligns with politically interested narratives, we have reason to challenge it with historically grounded scholarship. Abstraction cannot absolve moral wrongs against actual people.

In a coercive social order, the government exercises state power to ensure compliance with the decisions of a few individuals who govern everyone else. A government the exercises state power only in accordance with the community consensus could be described as a cooperative social order. A Pyramidal government will often employ coercion, and a Horizontal government will often require consensus building to facilitate cooperation. Insofar as coercion can be employed to build consensus, and cooperation between the elite and a subset of the working class can support a hierarchy, these two social orders can be distinguished from the Pyramid and the Horizon.

Defenders of coercive social order have many examples to demonstrate feasibility. Cooperative social orders historically exist only temporarily and at small scales. As such, advocates for cooperative authority must demonstrate that they propose something feasible as well as desirable. In the absence of longstanding empires built on cooperative arrangements alone, the advocate for cooperative social order remains at a disadvantage.

A forensic analysis of failed cooperative social order reveals a few themes. After an initial period of easy consensus, the community finds it more and more difficult to address needs without imposing some hierarchy. Clashes around those nominated to the hierarchy and their handling of the situation then erode the ability to form consensus, and the community fails. Alternatively, the community adapts to hierarchy and practices more coercion to maintain itself.

Both trajectories might be framed as failures of cooperative social order, and one might infer that coercion must be a feature of any functioning society. However, the historical prevalence of coercive social order provides an additional dimension to the account. Any cooperative social order brought into existence must cope with coercive social orders already established. A successful cooperative community attracts individuals seeking refuge from coercive societies and invites individuals to resist coercive societies through collective action. The rulers of a coercive society then have an interest in the failure of cooperative ventures in order to discourage challenges to their power. Since no community can maintain itself against constant attack, the cooperative eventually succumbs to economic or political pressures applied by its neighbors.

Coercive social orders enjoy a substantial natural advantage. By definition a coercive government needs to build consensus across a smaller number of individuals. Rulers agree on law and policy, police and military segments agree to obey the rulers and enforce compliance on the rest of the population.

A cooperative social order must obtain a wider consensus or else resort to coercion. Even in a small community, obtaining agreement will consume more time and effort than the unilateral action of a single individual. Larger communities or networks of communities take on additional coordination burdens to make and implement large scale decisions. By every measure, a cooperative social order is less efficient than a coercive social order.

The natural advantage makes coercive social order attractive, but it should not obscure the human cost. A coercive society engages in a form of warfare with its own citizens. Enforced compliance enables rulers to organize society around their interests and appease only enough broader interest to maintain the support of the martial class. The support of the martial class then carries out violence to ensure compliance of remaining population, dividing the society within itself. An honest critique of coercive social order must focus on the morality of enforced conformity and systemic oppression. A focus on efficiency serves only to obscure the moral cost of a coercive social order.