Middle Class, We Hardly Knew Ye

I have been saving up my pennies to purchase a copy of Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. By all accounts, it is a game changing exposition of what Paul Krugman in his review of Picketty’s Capital calls “a second Gilded Age,” in which, again per Krugman, “the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.” (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/)

Pope Francis essentially said “Amen!” with his recent Tweet that “Inequality is the root of social evil.”

And while Picketty and the Pope do the heavy intellectual and spiritual lifting, the New York Times runs articles titled “The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business World,” reporting the following:

“As politicians and pundits in Washington continue to spar over whether economic inequality is in fact deepening, in corporate America there really is no debate at all… Investors have taken notice of the shrinking middle. Shares of Sears and J. C. Penney have fallen more than 50 percent since the end of 2009, even as upper-end stores like Nordstrom and bargain-basement chains like Dollar Tree and Family Dollar Stores have more than doubled in value over the same period.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/business/the-middle-class-is-steadily-eroding-just-ask-the-business-world.html?_r=0)

When French intellectuals, the Pope and corporate America are all in agreement, the game is up; politicians and pundits are, of course, mouthpieces for the burgeoning family dynasties and can, as such, be tuned out when considering whether the truth is not only out there, but, more importantly, ready at hand to, as the saying goes, set us free. So, as long as we are willing to set aside e.g. Newt Gingrich’s appearances on Crossfire on behalf of the oligarchy, in which he lambasts the idea of increasing the minimum wage, we can happily report that the scales are beginning to fall from our eyes, much as they are in regards to climate change. I am reminded of Mr. Beaver’s line in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “Aslan is on the move.” Except there is no Aslan, just us chickens. We chickens are on the move!

As we move forward, salvaging the middle class as a first step towards, dare I say it, a classless society, we will need to figure out how we allowed all of this to happen in the first place. I believe that it has a great deal to do with the interplay between thought and language. Along these lines, structuralism has elucidated the tendency in thought to mark off the world in pairs of binary opposites. In reconsidering these pairings, e.g. male and female, straight and gay, white and black, much good work has been done in demonstrating that the binary opposites are inevitably coded re: power; in each of the three examples power accrues to the former. But binary opposites do more than establish a rigid hierarchy. Notice that hewing strictly to the listed opposites leaves no intellectual space for, respectively, the transgender, bisexual, and mixed race folk among us. Binary opposites are just as much about exclusion as they are about domination.

This comes into focus when we consider the binary opposites rich and poor. Don’t forget that the emergence of the middle class is a very recent, historically contingent event, and that the American middle class proper only ever truly existed between the twin founding events of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the end of World War II and the beginning of the end with the election of Ronald Reagan. (By “middle class proper” I mean that sliver of time when any American who worked earned a genuine living wage.) The world functioned for millennia based on the binary opposites rich and poor, and without a middle class, and would happily settle right back into that homeostatic groove if left to its own devices. Recall that Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you,” not “the middle class you will always have with you.”

If we are on the move, if we are going to save the middle class as the first step towards saving the world, we’ll need to pry apart the binary opposites that prevent us from even conceiving of a world minus dominance and exclusion. Perhaps the exclusive nature of binary opposites helps explain Slavoj Zizek’s observation that “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

Movements like this need symbols. And note that binary opposites don’t just rule our minds, they also rule the marketplace. Think Crest/Colgate, Home Depot/Lowe’s, Walmart/Target, and Fed Ex/UPS, pairings which leave precious little space for Aqua Fresh, your local hardware store, Kmart and the US Postal Service, none of which will be in business in a decade. Of course, noticing that each of the listed pairings are actually much closer to clones than opposites leaves one wondering if our cherished freedom of choice is, at bottom, just another version of Jerry Seinfeld’s famous observation that rooting for one’s favorite baseball team is “actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it.” Our way of life has come to consist of preferring Crest and Colgate to Aqua Fresh, which means we’ve built an entire civilization out of a Hobson’s choice, i.e. “a free choice in which only one option is offered.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson's_choice) That said, I’ve always had a soft spot for one particular unwanted third wheel. As we choose to create a world without outcasts, let’s all raise a glass of RC Cola!