We Have Never Been Middle Class. Hadas Weiss
or squeeze: that there are fewer people today who can consider themselves middle class than there were a mere decade ago and that, the way things are going, those who are on the brink will soon fall over the edge. But we are also cheered by headlines suggesting that if we only think globally, we will discover that the middle class is actually on the rise, its ranks swelling with go-getting pursuers of happiness in places like China, India, Brazil and South Africa. In one of those old tricks of language, at the same time that we question the numbers of people who are middle class, we affirm the notion that there is a middle class out there for people to climb into or drop out of.
There isn’t. One way to tell is by looking at studies conducted over the years to identify members of the middle class. Flip through research and analysis papers published by policy and consulting firms, think tanks, development agencies, marketing agencies, government agencies and central banks, and you find as many criteria as outcomes. Statisticians are particularly hard pressed to come up with universally applicable measurements. People in wealthy countries enjoy standards of living, work and consumption that the vast majority of the world population can only dream of, including those most likely to be identified as among the brave new global middle classes. What possible classification can encompass them all?
There are many possible groupings. Occupation is one: counting as middle class all manner of skilled professionals, managers and experts, and just about anyone else who performs nonmanual labor. It is temptingly intuitive until you think about the multitudes of underemployed and struggling white-collar professionals or, conversely, about high-earning nonprofessionals who just as intuitively defy the classification. Another popular criterion is relative immunity to poverty: deeming middle class those people who have sufficient resources to protect them against imminent hunger or want. But here again, we have all heard horror stories of upstanding members of the middle class abruptly toppled from riches to rags by personal, national and global market crises. Some analysts look at levels of disposable income, reading as middle class any earners whose incomes exceed, by a fixed measure, what would be required for the daily upkeep of their household and who can therefore buy nonnecessities. This definition misleadingly assumes steady incomes from which expenses can be computed and fixed portions parceled out in a world in which money actually flows in and out of households in highly irregular fashion. Other analysts define middle classes by absolute income levels. They face similar problems and then some, even when adjusting for national price indexes. The relative value of money is one thing; quite another is what people can do with it given the local material and social infrastructure and the political circumstances with which they contend. People enjoying comparable income levels in different countries have living standards so radically different from one another that it is hard to imagine them belonging to the same group. Still others define the middle class as middle income: those occupying the median of a country’s income brackets. This makes cross-country comparisons impossible, and besides, in each country there is too little variance between middle and somewhat lower income brackets to convincingly distinguish their members from one another. The most interesting criterion is what hard-nosed quantitative analysts call the subjective one: simply asking people to label themselves. It always trips analysts up because, by and large, many more people self-identify as middle class than would be so identified by any of the other criteria. This is true just about everywhere in the world and applies to those who would otherwise be considered both above and below the designated middle.1
If analysts are diffident about defining the middle class, representatives of the public and business sectors have no such qualms. Pundits exhibit broad consensus in finding the middle class to be a really good thing, invariably deploring its squeeze and celebrating its growth. The so-called middle class is also the darling of politicians left and right, conservative and liberal, all claiming to represent middle-class interests with the policies they promote. Think tanks and consulting firms help political actors appeal to self-identified or aspirational middle classes. While they come up with strategies to expand the middle class, marketers guide corporate executives on how to cater to middle-class fantasies. Joining forces with professional literature and reportage, these actors associate the middle class with a host of social and economic desirables. In particular, they single out security, consumerism, entrepreneurship and democracy as middle-class mainstays. They further represent these attributes as interconnected, one leading naturally to the other in a virtuous cycle of economic growth, modernization and collective well-being.2
Meanwhile, social scientists who have bothered to examine the lives of people who are presumed to be part of the new global middle classes cast serious doubt on each of these attributes. They describe populations united not by prosperity but by nagging insecurity, indebted ownership and compulsive overwork. They report on the inclination of these people to hoard what extra cash they have or to invest it toward things like a home or insurance rather than spending their disposable income on consumer goods. They identify their preferences for regular wages, whenever they can find them, over risky entrepreneurial profits, the pursuit of which is more often a forced adjustment to the absence of steady employment. And they underline their political pragmatism in backing whatever parties and policies might protect their interests rather than offering blanket support for democracy: something that is easy to spot in the recent history of Latin America and in present-day China.3
This is to say that “middle class” is an exceptionally nebulous category, neither clearly demarcated nor convincingly positive. Yet its vagueness in no way stops it from being mobilized across the board. The concept holds immense transnational popularity expressed not only in pronouncements by political and economic leaders about middle-class interests, virtues and aspirations, but also in the eagerness of people from all walks of life, all over the world, to identify themselves as members of the middle class. Now, when an anthropologist comes across a category so highly esteemed yet so poorly defined, and when she sees this category nevertheless deployed so vigorously by politicians, development agencies, corporate actors and marketing experts, she is likely to think of one thing: ideology.
In studying a host of issues popularly associated with the middle class in Israel and Germany while taking occasional sidelong glances at their global counterparts, I found this ideology everywhere. It prompted me to become more direct in questioning how the people I was observing were identified. If in fact the middle class is an ideology, I asked myself, what does it mean? What purpose does it serve? How did it come about and what makes it so compelling? This book is my way of answering these questions and exploring their implications.
I address the arguments in it, idiosyncratically enough, to an implicated readership. This calls for explanation. In this day and age, the pronoun “we” is suspect and almost always calls forth a defiant “not-me.” All manner of politicians, bosses, pastors and activists bandy it about to rally heterogeneous publics for causes they declare to be common. “We” is pronounced more spontaneously in opposition to the “not-we,” whether a powerful 1 percent to our 99 or a counterpublic perceived as threatening who we are and what we have. What I have in mind here is inclusiveness of a different kind, neither superimposed nor collectively proclaimed for strategic purposes or against a supposed opposition. It is rather a quiet, self-congratulatory “we,” which underscores a conceit of ours.
Sociologist Bruno Latour wrote We Have Never Been Modern to counter one such conceit: the view we have of ourselves as modern, or not primitive, in touting an objectivity based on separating the human from the nonhuman, the social world from the natural one. Latour claimed that such separation never really existed and considered hybrids like global warming, data banks and biotechnology as defying the belief that it ever has. Salient as this presumption is, he argued, it is a Western scientific and industrial construct. He proceeded to relativize it by elaborating on a prehistory and a posterity in which its absence is evident.
Thanks to Latour’s trailblazing work, I never questioned whether I could argue similarly against the conceit of the middle class. I believe the category to be false in that it suggests powers that we do not possess. I also believe it to be ideological in that it invokes these powers for purposes that are not our own and whose consequences are not to our benefit. But I did struggle with addressing this argument to an implicated readership. If there is one thing that an anthropologist is allergic to, it is universalizing: assuming all too easily that the way I imagine myself to be right now is the way we all are and always