The Economics of Envy: A blind spot? Or the dog whistle of the bourgeoisie?

At Marquette University’s On the Issues forum last Monday, Mike Gousha, without throwing a hardball, asked Congressman Ryan to explain, and maybe defend, his comments on the “economics of envy.” And a very peculiar defense he made.

The first thing he said is clearly wrong: the “envious” classes do not drive and did not invent class conflict – and the latter certainly not lately. Class conflict is an historical feature of every civil society, from the time when class structures were primarily social, though modern times, when they became primarily economic. Only primitive societies have social roles without having stratified social classes. Naturally, people being what they are, conflict has run unabated during that whole time, though it is less noticeable in times of prosperity or national emergency. But it takes two to tangle: no one class started it.

Next, why ascribe bad emotions to the class thus singled out as driving the conflict? If you wanted to use a loaded e-word, you could call it the “economics of exploitation” instead. And if you wanted to better express the emotion the working poor feel, you would call it the “economics of oppression,” not envy.  

That’s because people who work for a living don’t necessarily envy, to use Mr. Ryan’s example, Craig Culver. They don’t want that kind of responsibility; they know their own limitations. For the most part, they just want to work for a fair wage and go home to their families at the end of the day. You don’t have to use an emotionally loaded word at all; you can use a morally loaded word and call it the economics of injustice. A living minimum wage, that enables workers to help pay for their children’s college education and save for their own retirement, is an issue of social justice, not bad emotions.

Finally, I’m not suggesting that equality of opportunity is not a good thing or that it does not, in large measure, exist in our society. What people like the working poor, and those who sympathize with them, are saying, is that by itself it’s not enough.

This is Mr. Ryan’s blind spot. Plainly he’s out of sympathy with a class of society he can bad-mouth so plausibly. It goes with the Republican territory. Likewise, to use one of columnist Eugene Kane’s expressions, the term “economics of envy” is a dog whistle audible only to the bourgeoisie. It causes them to think of people who really are shiftless, and lump those people with people who do want to work and will work for almost any wage they are forced to accept. That makes it easier to ignore injustices to the latter.

Class Myth: Who’s Picking Whose Pockets?

Well, it’s actually happening – been happening for some time. The shrinking middle class was in the news last week. It just proves what I’ve been saying: certain current members of the middle class (but not the petit bourgeoisie) are more likely to become one of the working poor than one of the Few. What’s having your pockets picked by people who are already working and poor compared to that? You might want to find some pockets to pick. But then you’d find you’d voted against it, and now that you need it, you’re not entitled to it anymore.

What’s actually happening is illustrated by the graphic in the papers and on the web. The Few are pauperizing whomever they can. Those are the kinds of jobs they “create.” That’s in the news this week too. The people who take them are forced into the underclasses, while the Few absorb to themselves the extra income they used to make.

Your only defense is to have some skill, expertise, specialization, or talent the Few particularly need in order to make their business schemes work. Believe me, I barely qualify. I make a decent living just because I know how to write, even though I’m a better philosopher than I am a writer. They have no use for philosophy and I can’t make a cent in commerce or industry on that account.

Obviously a great many other skills rate higher in the market than writing. They take talent, education, knowledge, and experience to acquire or develop. Then you sell them to the Few, and if you’re lucky or good, you become one of them. There’s other ways of joining, but ask yourself whether any of them are open to you.

Then ask yourself what are the possible ways you could fall in the other direction.

It’s certainly true they can’t pick your pockets if you’re broke. Be glad to have pockets to pick. Or better, when you’ve become working poor, your pockets have already been picked – by the people who pauperized you. Then you get your paycheck and see they’ve been picked again.

It’s a rare man – Gandhi for instance – who pauperizes himself. (Though some do through negligence, criminality, etc.) Therefore if you’re poor, or your forebears were poor, somebody pauperized you or them. Somebody in whose interest it was to pay you less or provide worse benefits then you could legitimately expect. Those people do it because they get to keep the difference. It’s called “profit.”

So now is a good time to remember that the Job Creators only create jobs if the jobs are likely to generate a profit. To which it can certainly be added, that the fewer worker expectations the job has to meet, other things being equal, the more likely it will generate profit.

What’s all this compared to a few shiftless people getting the entitlements the working poor have to settle for when their legitimate expectations are not met? Moreover they’re only entitlements because some elements of society cannot bear to see people who, for example, need and deserve health care do without, and because their employers have already washed their hands of the responsibility.

If you wonder why raising the minimum wage is a good idea, imagine your paycheck if it were your wage. It’s funny to think that, if we did raise it, the dollar menu at McDonald’s might be two dollars. But at that price, McDonald’s volume might suffer. Never mind. They’ll find a price point at which the reduced volume generates the same profit.

Who eats off the dollar menu anyway?...

…you guessed it.

It’s OK, but no better than OK, to be young, working, and poor, so long as you have prospects. I’m talking about working adults who, say, have children whose health is endangered, but are not insured. Or who’ve worked all their lives, who have nothing to retire on, and who’ll just have to keep on working as long as they can.

Politicians can talk about the middle class, or what’s left of it. I’m talking about social justice. You’ll see the justice of it – if you happen to become the next victim of the tendencies of this economy.

So please, by all means vote your interests, even if that means taking counsel of your fears. You might want to vote with the Few because you hope – vainly and thus irrationally in all but a few cases – to become one of them. (Might they create a job for you? That’s another story.) You might want to vote against the underclasses because, equally irrationally, you’re afraid of them. I’ve tried to explain this strange phenomenon elsewhere.

But I’m asking you to vote with the working poor prudentially and therefore rationally.

The best thing about this line of argument is that you don’t have to be a bleeding heart to accept it. You don’t have to feel guilty about already having more than you need. You don’t have to feel sorry for the working poor to see the need for fairness, justice, and equality in the workplace. Just imagine yourself in their shoes, and think about how sorry you’d feel for yourself.

Class Math: Whose Shoes?

Who are the working poor anyway? And how many tea partiers have ever seen one of them – unless they were looking in the mirror? No, they see them every day. The service economy is full of them, and they serve us all, petit bourgeois, tea partiers, and each other, cheerfully or not.

Here’s a sketch of who they are and who they aren’t.

They work. They work regularly. They work as much as their opportunities and other obligations permit them. If they lose one underpaid job, they find another one.

Bu they’re poor. They don’t make what is called a “living wage.” So if they don’t have a car, they take the bus. If their car needs repairs, they drive it anyway.

I’m only going to mention owning a home. They can’t get a mortgage or afford the sacrifices it would take to pay one. And they can’t save for a down payment.

In my neighborhood, you can see them walk by, maybe to the bus stop, maybe the park, maybe all the way to work. Or you can hear their cars because they need new belts or mufflers, or engine work. Not to mention the broken windows, taillights, tires, or body work you can’t hear.

They’re hard to tell from the shiftless people and lumpenproletarians. And that’s what’s got the tea partiers confused – or maybe that’s how the big bourgeoisie got the tea partiers confused.

“Lumpenproletarian” is a term used by Marx and Engels to refer to certain individuals, casual laborers by day and petty criminals by night, who are not quite proletarians and do not quite share their interests. Traditionally, their loyalties were for sale, very cheap indeed, to such bourgeois or state elements as might like to buy them. Then, they could be employed as a counterweight to the real proletarians, who occupied the same neighborhoods. But they don’t have much political weight at all anymore. Some seem to consider themselves anarchists; others may be trying to “occupy” something – an act that fits the definition of petty criminality to a tee, though in this case the criminal act is also and primarily a political act – which again fits the definition of anarchism, except with anarchists the crimes are supposed to be serious.

According to an antebellum saying, it’s good to be shifty in a new country. That implies energy. Lumpenproletarians can be shifty. For example, creative types that have more energy than talent, hence can’t make a living from their “art,” but it’s easier than work. Drug dealers have that kind of energy too, but they are not casual laborers by day.

What are lumpenproletarians entitled to? To be let out of jail on personal recognizance? To the return of their security deposits without deduction for damages? To an occasional drink on the bartender?

I don’t know.

Shiftless people, on this account, lack the energy to be shifty. They’re usually poor like the working poor, but when they work it’s not out of habit or obligation. And it’s not regular work. Between jobs they might be entitled to unemployment compensation.

They’re shiftless, sometimes, just because they can’t make shift. Like ex-cons or people on probation, they’ve run themselves out of options. That’s a good example: an ex-con can’t get a job because he “made a mistake.” Well, no one mistake is enough to ruin you. You have to make a whole series of mistakes, usually increasingly bad ones, before they put you in prison. Then they let you out, and you’re shiftless. But you’re not entitled to much of anything.

Other people are just broken – poor in spirit. Functionally, maybe, they’re shiftless. They’re not entitled to anything either unless they’re poor in spirit because, say, of a disability. It’s two different things. Being poor in spirit, without more, isn’t an entitlement to anything – except blessings and maybe the kingdom of heaven. To be sure, having a disability doesn’t make one poor in spirit of necessity. People who are trying to overcome their disabilities are very high-spirited and courageous indeed – not shiftless at all. And they are entitled to whatever forms of public assistance they care to ask for.

There’s another kind of shiftless person who works regularly, but just enough for the money to do what he or she really wants to do: hunting, fishing, other innocent hobbies. There are lots of things people would rather be doing; more people are content in their work than really happy with it. But if you don’t care to work, if you’re only working to be doing something else, you might resent what’s netted out for public purposes, even for your own social security. “Taxed Enough Already” means “I wanted to spend that money on fun” for a lot of people who would otherwise be functionally shiftless and who have just the level of political and social sophistication to be ready recruits for the tea party. They are easy to confuse about their class interests just because they would rather opt out of a genuine economic life.

Unfortunately, shiftless does not mean harmless. How far is the occupy movement from white supremacy morally and politically? Moreover, and equally unfortunately, it does not take any real energy to get a gun. Then there’s welfare fraud.

So here are some examples but it’s not a working definition yet. One could define the shiftless negatively as poor people society doesn’t feel obligated to take care of and doesn’t think are entitled to anything. They are on the margins of the country’s economic life, but unlike the working poor, their class interests are also marginal – barely felt and crudely if at all articulated. What can they lay claim to? This last goes for lumpenproletarians as well.

Back to the working poor. One of the reasons you can’t tell them apart from the others is that they’re constantly moving from one underclass to another. One stroke of luck, one setback, and your world is different. It’s quite as impossible to craft public assistance legislation to serve only the working poor and not the shiftless, as it is to craft tax legislation to help, say, the “job creators” and not the greedy and manipulative.

Here’s a notion: How when the bourgeoisie invent a particular form of the economy, they ensure everyone who takes part in it is pauperized. Industrial Revolution, meet the service economy. Condition of the Working Class in England, meet condition of the service class in America: poor education, poor health care, poor diet, poor housing, poor sanitation, and, God forbid, poor morals.

At least now working conditions are better. You can thank the unions for that!

So what are the working poor entitled to? No, people are only “entitled” to things by law, from the government. They’re “expectations” if the worker looks to the employer for fulfillment.

What do petit bourgeois professional and managerial types expect? A market wage, which for them is also and always a living wage – at any rate they expect it to support the style of life they are accustomed or aspire to, as that us what they consider “living.” Financial support for the actual and possible expenses of health care, normally in the form of insurance – so they don’t have to rely on entitlements. Something towards retirement – again, so they don’t have to rely on entitlements.

Or briefly and at the very least:

·         A living wage

·         Health care insurance

·         Something for retirement

These expectations are no less legitimate in purely human terms for the unskilled working poor than they are for people who, having marketable skills, can enter the market for those skills. But if you’re clever enough to design a workplace that doesn’t require skilled workers, but still produces enormous profits, and if you have enough influence to prevent your workers’ expectations from becoming entitlements – in other words, if you know how to pauperize your workforce and keep the government from interfering….

All this is by way of saying that if tea partiers of a certain demographic are more likely to join the working poor than the Few, then they will actually increase their chances of having to join, or at any rate the hazards of joining, by voting with and in the interest of the Few.

And it’s all because somehow they came to believe the working poor have no legitimate expectations – maybe just because it’s hard to tell them apart from shiftless folks, who don’t. It’s true the two are hard to tell apart. It’s not true that workers – any workers – have no legitimate expectations. I can’t say for sure the big bourgeoisie are the cause of this misapprehension; I can say it serves, and/or they would be happy to make it serve, their interests.

Here’s other thought: why not spend the social capital it would take to legitimate the expectations of the working poor, rather than let them fall into the shiftless underclass that is entitled to three hots and a cot if they end up in prison?

You’re welcome to take another look at this question from the standpoint of myth in my next post: Who’s Picking Whose Pockets?