called<\/a> \u201cdigital Taylorism,\u201d before being dispensed with altogether, as has already befallen large numbers of post and bank clerks, for example. A white-collar office job is no longer a secure and relatively comfortable escape from the working class, but rather the main target of automation.<\/p>\nThe third classical sector of a middle-class job was in the professions, occupations based on high and long education, handling particular kinds of knowledge, inaccessible to the public. They include ancient professions such as teaching, medicine, law, in many countries also the civil service, and the twentieth-century \u201csemi-professions\u201d of nursing and social work, to name but two.<\/p>\n
For a long time, the professions were respected by and seen as uninteresting to business and capital. In the German nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century tradition, they were often summed up as Bildungsb\u00fcrgertum<\/em> (the cultured bourgeoisie), which was more or less on par with the Wirtschaftsb\u00fcrgertum<\/em> (the economic bourgeoisie). Sociology has distinguished the professions from the business world, as oriented to the cultivation of knowledge and to public service, rather than to profit.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n The Professions Undermined<\/h2>\n \n This middle-class professionalism is now under attack \u2014 lawyers largely exempted \u2014 and in the process of being destroyed. The attack comes from several angles, which may be summed up as invasion by managerialism. It involves a relative devaluation of specialist knowledge, a loss of respect for it. In practice, this means first of all a subordination of professionals, teachers, researchers, physicians, nurses, engineers, and others, to administrative managers, in schools and universities, hospitals, and enterprises.<\/p>\n
The practice of professional knowledge is submitted to auditing, evaluations, and sanctions by managers, deriving from an institutionalized mistrust of professional autonomy and of professional ethics. Professional cognitive practice and ethics are subjected to pervasive cost- benefit calculations, often specially invented ones of internal quasi-markets, such as university administrations charging university departments for the use of university premises. These cost-benefit inventions are also part of a particularly heavy anti-professional attack under the banner of commerce.<\/p>\nA few succeed by escaping into an upper-middle class of managers and ‘star’ professionals, but for the rest, the present \u2014 and probably the future as well \u2014 consists of instability and a downward trajectory.<\/q><\/aside>\nThe imposition of an ideal norm of commercialism \u2014 the instrumental opposite of the professional mindset of intrinsic values, of knowledge, of service to needs, of the impartiality of law and regulation \u2014 is operated both by private commercialization (of schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on) and by the so-called \u201cNew Public Management\u201d of tax-financed institutions. Internally the latter are supposed to work as firms on a quasi-market basis, buying and selling services to each other, and externally they are required to hire private firms to provide public services.<\/p>\n
In this way, education, health care, and social care have become profitable areas for capital accumulation, attracting great interest from the \u201ceconomic bourgeoisie,\u201d knocking down the \u201ccultural bourgeoisie\u201d on the latter\u2019s old terrain.<\/p>\n
The middle-class professions should not be idealized, as they could very well become closed, conservative, complacent, and inefficient, with repetitive routines. But this is not inherent in professionalism, and being a teacher, a doctor, or a civil servant was once a great source of middle-class pride and self-confidence. That pride and self-confidence are now being trampled upon, and a managerial whip is overruling collegiality. A few succeed by escaping into an upper-middle class of managers and \u201cstar\u201d professionals, but for the rest, the present \u2014 and probably the future as well \u2014 consists of instability and a downward trajectory.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n A New Politics<\/h2>\n \n The dialectic of industrial capitalism, which Marx analyzed and predicted with impressive accuracy, is no longer operating in the Global North and has been stymied in the South. Postindustrial capitalism is no longer producing a growing, ever more concentrated working class. That process ended in the North in the period of 1965\u20131980, when working-class social weight peaked. In the Global South, manufacturing employment stalled in the 1990s, and industrial employment \u2014 including construction and mining \u2014 around 2010.<\/p>\n
Even if the sectors of the working class lost to the Right could be won back, the labor movement is only a necessary component of egalitarian politics, no longer sufficient as its natural center. Decisive to any successful egalitarian politics in the postindustrial era is a positive middle-class policy of the Left.<\/p>\n
This is a very delicate and difficult issue, because an egalitarian middle-class policy cannot abandon the most vulnerable, nor the bottom half of the population to privatizations and income stagnation, nor the rights of employees against employers. It is the opposite of Blairism and the right-wing middle-class orientation, which has destroyed the French Parti Socialiste and the German SPD, the opposite of turning one\u2019s back on the people, of carousing with capital while representing an upper-middle-class view of the world.<\/p>\n
The task is to convince the middle class \u2014 or substantial parts of it \u2014 of the advantages of equality and human solidarity over neo-pharaonic privileges and rewards for capital and its children. The starting point is that postindustrial, financial capitalism is abandoning and excluding the middle class, creating a 1 percent versus the 99 percent society. Whoever governs these dismal democracies, it is certainly not the median voter of economic theories of democracy. \u201cAverage is over\u201d could stand as the neoliberal epitaph for the middle class.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n
\n This is an edited excerpt from G\u00f6ran Therborn\u2019s book Inequality and the Labyrinths of Democracy<\/em><\/a>, out\u00a0now from Verso.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The surge in inequality since 1980 has been driven from above, by the top 10 percent, and even more so by the top 1 percent and the even smaller fractions of pharaonic wealth. The other 90 percent have not all been impoverished, but they have been abandoned. This has given rise to a bitter journalistic [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3461,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91590"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3461"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91591,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91590\/revisions\/91591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}