We Have Never Been Middle Class. Hadas Weiss
we have made and continue to make for our future, the promises of the middle class no longer seem so credible, and the time is ripe to start doubting as, indeed, many already do. Yet doubters come in different forms. Some respond by rejoicing in the fact that through popular access to global financial markets and their instruments, we can now escape the straitjacket of middle-class renunciations, outgrow expectations for security and piecemeal progress that would issue from our judicious consumption and incremental accretion of property and education, and instead get A Piece of the Action.5
Financial advice books encourage us to take the plunge, none with more spectacular success than Robert Kiyosaki’s bestseller from the turn of the twenty-first century: Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money—That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! Kiyosaki compares the advice he received from his two fathers. The first, a university professor, considered his home his largest asset and was always fretting about pay raises, retirement plans, medical benefits, sick leave, vacation days and other perks. He loved the university tenure system with its promise of steady employment. He wanted his son to study hard so that he could find a good company to work for. And he struggled financially all of his life and died leaving bills to be paid. The second was an entrepreneur who had barely finished the eighth grade but went on to become the richest man in Hawaii. He likened the person who would follow middle-class dad’s advice to a cow ready for the milking. Rich dad recommended learning how money works, buying and selling assets frequently and with savvy, and always being on the lookout for new moneymaking opportunities. He is the undeclared hero whose voice is channeled in the book to wean readers from middle-class reticence and rouse them toward financial risks and fortunes.
Such books are evidently not written for a critical “we” but for the ambitious “I” who picks up on the failings of the middle-class ideology and wants to rise above the madding crowd that would continue producing all necessary goods and providing all necessary services. These books stand in stark contrast to a recent outpouring of literature whose authors and readers are less keen on gaming the system than they are on figuring out why the system fails and how it can be fixed. These texts diagnose a middle-class squeeze, especially but by no means exclusively in the US context, attributing it to such things as stagnant real-wage growth, diminished public support, job automation, the rising costs of health and education, the unrestrained power of speculative finance and corporate interests, vulnerability to financial crises, unjustified fees and inequitable tax burdens.6 While critical of the predicaments they diagnose as plaguing the middle class, they rarely question the logic of the institutions that govern the lives of its purported members. Rather, they attribute these institutions’ unfulfilled promises of security and prosperity to causes external to them. The reforms they propose are designed to make the usual middle-class investments in property, insurance and education pay off to the degree that they had in the past.
Anthropologists have one important advantage over purely conceptual theorists: the possibility of perceiving—through ethnographic research anchored in a broad understanding of what constitutes human experience and how it comes together—the interconnections between institutions that appear to be separate, primarily between political, legal and economic ones, and those associated with culture, lifestyle and belief. This turns out to be of great value for the matter at hand because the ideology that summons the middle class into being manifests itself across the fault lines of economy, politics and culture. Anthropologists typically discuss middle classes in the plural to signal the heterogeneity of their alleged members. Drawing on extended fieldwork among these populations in a wide variety of countries and settings, they describe their social relations and subjective experiences in ways that convey the constraints to which they are subject. They pay particular attention to their patterns of work, consumption and political action. Then they trace how these patterns are interwoven with pressures and opportunities emerging out of national and global markets.7
I am greatly indebted to their insights and draw on them in my analysis. I nevertheless approach the middle class from a different angle: that of immanent critique. Scholars have used immanent critique to various effects, their premise being that instead of criticizing a category or institution from the outside—which is at any rate impossible insofar as we actively partake in what we call into question—we can grasp it more fully by mining its inherent tensions and contradictions from within. To do so, we strategically take at face value the thing that we are interested in figuring out, and then follow the way it operates in the world or in people’s lives in order to spot the places where its own logic falters. Anthropology has a penchant for immanent critique because of the field’s emblematic methodology of ethnographic fieldwork. This method elicits the common ways in which things are defined and described, and triangulates them with interview data and with observation of people as they act over time and in specific settings within the institutions in question. This almost always brings to the fore a host of tensions between the official and ideological logic of institutions, what people do in their framework, and the outcomes of their actions.
Such tensions are inevitable insofar as all categories and institutions have been designed at certain points in time to accomplish specific goals for particular groups of people. This holds true even when the most successful among them assume the appearance of universality and common sense, as though devoid of purpose or origin—a neutral and unquestioned thing. Such thing-ification (scholars sometimes call it essentialization or reification) of a historical contingency is the greatest power to which an ideology can aspire, making it appear beyond contestation, a fact of life. But the very idea is founded on impossibility. In a world populated by human beings who are distinct, complex and reflective, no particular objective can ever attain such a stronghold on everyone’s thought and practice as to actually become as thing-like as it is sometimes held to be; hence the tensions and contradictions to be mined and deconstructed.
This is the approach I have taken in this book: I interrogate the category of middle class in its relation to capitalism in the first chapter, and then I proceed to relate it to institutions like private property in the second chapter and to human capital in the third, in order to expose their premises and promises. In the fourth chapter, I delineate features of politics and values commonly associated with the middle class. I tie the arguments together and follow some remaining threads in the conclusion. Throughout this inquiry, I bring examples from ethnographic studies that I have conducted in Israel and in Germany and from those that others have conducted elsewhere in the world. These explorations have triggered the revelations whose conclusions I formulate here. Even so, I spend the greater part of the book developing my arguments conceptually while using ethnographic data sparingly and for illustrative purposes alone. The literature on the lives and experiences of the people cast as global middle classes is already quite extensive and growing still. I reference some of the best of it in footnotes so that those interested in finding out more about the groups so designated can, in true middle-class spirit, make the necessary investments.
What We Talk about when We Talk about the Middle Class
What do we talk about when we talk about the middle class? The critical half of the term is not “class” but “middle.” It evokes a spectrum of gradated positions with people moving to and fro between lower and upper reaches. The middleness of middle class suggests space: we move socially and economically relative to people occupying higher or lower positions, inching closer to some and then to others. It also suggests movement in time: awareness that within the span of our own lifetimes we can ascend or descend. Consecutive generations of our families may do the same, impelling, continuing or altering our greater upward or downward trajectories. Our perpetual movement bespeaks restlessness. The middle class is sometimes spoken about as an aspirational group, drawn by prosperity within reach, and sometimes as an insecure one, haunted by a fear of falling. It is, as social critic Barbara Ehrenreich1 put it, evanescent: requiring ever-renewed effort to assert and maintain one’s social position.
In contrast to “middle,” which is amplified in the way we talk about the middle class, “class” is toned down. In fact, class is muted to such an extent that, as some