We Have Never Been Middle Class. Hadas Weiss
or the manifestation of some innate instinct. Anthropologists have traditionally studied not “us” but “them,” that is, people who do things differently and whose otherness resists knee-jerk generalizations. A book written for and about us is therefore counterintuitive for an anthropologist.
But I made this choice deliberately, because one thing that does fall squarely within the domain of anthropology is critique. Anthropology’s fascination with all things remote and foreign does not normally feign a neutral, scientific or objective gaze as in the likes of National Geographic. To the contrary, it has often been a means through which to make some meaningful intervention in the distinctions and attributes people take to be universal, all those mundane assumptions that are nearby and familiar, whether about the nature and veracity of race and ethnic distinctions; the sources and consequences of gender roles and sexual preferences; the boundaries and peculiarities of childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age; the social uses of beliefs, rituals, emotions and scientific reasoning; the patterns and functions of eating, working, leisure and sleep; the definitions and significance of health and pathology; the relations that make up families, tribes and nation states—and the list goes on.
The logic goes something like this. If somewhere out there people behave in ways that are, for example, neither egoistic nor self-serving, then people’s self-serving behaviors in the advanced capitalist economies that most anthropologists come from and in which they disseminate their findings must stem from something other than an innate human disposition. Or if people elsewhere in the world succeed, for example, in satisfying their needs and desires with more egalitarian or collectively managed organizations for the production and distribution of goods and services, there are imaginable alternatives to our own economic and political systems.
The challenge of critique has grown more complicated, however, with the contraction of anthropology’s traditional terrain. The far reaches of the world are no longer so distant, and societies once foreign and exotic have long been drawn into the global networks of market and media. Critically minded anthropologists find themselves at an impasse. On the one hand, they are motivated to upend overhasty assumptions, debunk complacent generalizations and trouble entrenched structures of domination. On the other, they are just as entangled as the people they study in an elaborate and comprehensive social and economic web that—in the competitive pressures it imposes, the self-concern it generates and the penalties and incentives it introduces into everyone’s work, consumption and relationships—is all but universal. This leaves them hard pressed to find a standpoint from which to criticize forces that affect them as much as their subjects.
Anthropologists who have done so successfully have mostly focused on populations of the global peripheries that, while being subject to the pressures of global capitalism, lead lives that are partly removed from it. Yet even these populations are now fully entangled in the global production and circulation of money and commodities, regulated through institutions established or updated to channel their flow. These institutions include nation-states, the nuclear family, the free market, credit and debt, private property, human capital, investment and insurance. Each possesses its own rationale, which—because it is insuperably entwined with all others in the world we have created—seems so essential that it is hard to think of it as something that people have developed and tweaked at certain points in time to contend with or manipulate the conditions in which they found themselves. Such institutions appear wherever capitalism takes hold. They shape the way people understand themselves, whether as employees, investors, debtors, citizens, family members, property owners or members of a social class. The universalizing thrust implied by “we” is therefore neither whimsical nor presumptuous but a by-product of the ubiquity of capitalism itself.
Capitalism’s universalization is most conspicuous with respect to the category of the middle class because this category is extensive and inclusive to the core: it projects an image of every human being as a self-determining investor of money, time or effort, if not at this very moment then in potential and aspiration. It imagines society to be a composite of multiple interacting individuals who are willing to exert more effort than they are immediately rewarded for, shoulder a greater debt burden than they absolutely must, and scale back on expenses whenever they can, in order to build reserves for their future and for that of their families. The fortunes of all but those who are deprived of the means to invest in this way due to various social and geographical barriers that these people are presumably in the process of overcoming, are thereupon considered the outcome of their personal investments.
The image of an expansive and increasingly global middle class that everyone could join does away with such divisive categories as workers vs. capitalists, unless it implies that deep down everyone is a quasi-capitalist go-getter. It also softens the edges of other potentially divisive categories like gender, ethnicity, race, nationality and religion, to the extent that middle-class alliances and competitions are designed to cut through and transcend the boundaries that these divisions lay down, inviting people to redefine their place in society according to their private interests.4 It embraces diversity insofar as manifold distinctions are validated and identities made to flourish through the range of consumer items that more and more people can access. At the same time, it exacerbates inequality by encouraging competitive consumption, lifestyle and investment to signal advantages for some over others and to guard against disadvantages relative to others.
Middle classness implies that we take responsibility over our fortunes by working as best as we can while forgoing some immediate enjoyment as we cut back on our expenses (and while sacrificing some peace of mind as we borrow to finance the purchase of durable assets) in order to be rewarded for these forfeitures in the future. It implies that our misfortunes are consequently a result of our having made poor or insufficient use of the time, energy and resources at our disposal; that society is nothing but a plethora of individuals implicated in each others’ self-serving investments, sometimes as allies and sometimes as competitors; and that its institutions are realizations of working investors’ respective or combined powers and preferences.
If we identify with these ideas, or if, more commonly, we express them unreflectingly in our behaviors and sensibilities, it is because they are built into the very rhythms of our lives, into the instruments we deploy and into the institutions through which our activities are organized. It is also because sometimes they are in fact affirmed by provisional and relative rewards when larger investors acquire advantages over lesser ones, as do, for example, landlords over tenants. But if we have misgivings, they likely awaken when the instruments we use and the institutions we operate within no longer function quite so smoothly, and when the rewards suggested by investment-driven self-determination are not forthcoming. Philosopher G. W. F. Hegel famously wrote that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings with the falling of dusk, by which he meant that we are prone to understand things only after the fact. In this case, the hour of critique chimes at the dusk of the middle-class ideal, when a chorus of voices laments its decline. The timing, as I will explain in this book, has everything to do with the growing dominance in recent decades of global finance. Finance’s dominance exports middle-class identifications into newly liberalized economies while at the same time squeezing household resources in countries whose populations have long been considered predominantly middle class.
I hope, then, that my decision to address an inclusive “we” in this book will not be taken as a sign of my ignorance of or disrespect for real differences between people. I know and appreciate that there are many people who live under vastly different conditions, people unable to command resources and lacking the potential to fare better (or worse) as the result of their investments, people who share none of the premises upon which this book is based. Rather, this form of address emerges out of my determination to take seriously the structural forces that have generated and popularized the image of a porous and expansive middle class and rendered it plausible. My intention is to pick apart this plausibility for those to whom it applies, for example those who are inclined to read this book. I do assume that, like me, you are products of some investment in education, if in nothing else—that you dedicate time and money to learn more and that you implicitly believe in the long-term significance of these endeavors. Speaking directly to a readership that makes investments of this kind, I hope to tap into something else we have in common: the proclivity to reflect on our received wisdoms.
With more of us out there insecure