Eric Aarons on The Middle Class Today

Above: Eric Aarons some years ago now, pursuing his passion for sculpture

In the following notes and reflections former Communist Party of Australia Secretary Eric Aarons considers the historical and current social and economic importance of the Middle Class to the causes of liberal rights and social change. After Bernstein, he considers that the Middle Class has not disappeared - despite prior Marxist predictions that it would.  Hence the place of the middle class remains important for Australian Leftists today.

                                        

by Eric Aarons

I write this essay, not to expound or urge any particular political line or policy, but to stress the importance for those doing so not to neglect today’s middle class. 

In my view, Karl Marx’s most abiding contribution to understanding human history and forms of social organisation was the primacy he gave to the development of the ‘productive forces’ available to any  population  of human beings. He was not the first to do so; Adam Smith, and the group of ‘Scottish Historians’ around him, held to that view also (see Classics edition of The Wealth of Nations: Books 1-111, 1986).

In his introduction to that edition, scholar Andrew S. Skinner quotes William Robertson, a member of the Historians group, that ‘In every inquiry covering the operations of men when united together in society, the first object of attention should be their mode of existence. Accordingly as that varies, their laws and policy must be different,’ (p. 28)

The ‘Industrial revolution’ of the 18^th century was characterised as ‘a rapid and ceaseless development of the productive forces’. Most of these were new inventions, featuring machines driven by the power of steam, then electricity, then nuclear power, and in sizes from miniscule to massive. Lawrence James writes: ‘The middle classes refused to abandon the rest of society to the physical and moral consequences of industrialisation. Middle class men and women put pressure on the state and local  government and offered their time and money to create what they regarded as a humane, contented and civilised society.’ (p.249 Lawrence James: The Middle Class  A History, 2006). They still do.

It may be needless to point out that this proliferation of new productive forces, their operation,  maintenance and improvement, required more skilled and educated people, and in turn more educators to achieve that purpose. So education rapidly extended, spreading far beyond its previous limits of educating and forming ‘gentlemen’ who were distinguished by not having to work for a living with their hands, or even their brains, but to be recognised socially as such, and to keep up with the escalating written cultural advances.

Their daughters also had to be educated ‘to  make a good marriage’ – that is, one to a man with money, or expecting an inheritance.  There were also growing demands of generally not fully occupied middle class wives for suitable enjoyable reading, while an increasing number of women wrote such books and are still famous for doing so.

On a wider scale, the industrial revolution required a growing proportion of the population to be educated so that they could extend and deepen that approach to the industrialisation revolution.  I suggest that these requirements marked the origins of the modern middle class, and the building  of its present cultural, political and economic larger role, with women becoming increasingly prominent, despite remaining discriminations.  

Karl Marx wrote a lot about the growing proletariat, created by the ascending capitalism, that he thought would end the rule of capital. And, using his withering polemics, Marx defended his predictions, warning that radical members of the middle class might be ‘unreliable revolutionaries’, because of what he saw as their impending ruin by capital and decent into the ranks of the proletariat. Marx thought that ‘class origins’ were generally a useful guide to future political behaviour, and this still existed in my young days. But 90 years later, in today’s ‘topsy-turvy’ world,                it doesn’t count for very much.

 The Middle Class today

The modern middle class in the economically developed countries, though not officially organised,  has become the largest stable social group in their countries, since the working class, unwillingly, relinquished that position. It comprises about 40 percent of the population, and holds 35 per cent of the wealth of the countries they inhabit, according to figures presented by Thomas Piketty in his book: Capital in the Twenty-First Century. This analyst also points to their growing patrimonial (inheritance) role, particularly in regard to housing, which is becoming increasingly expensive, and important for their offspring.

The middle class is neither disappearing now, nor destined to do so, as Marx and not a few later economic theorists have suggested, though they struggle along with others to cope with the continuing Global Financial Crisis. It is time that left/progressives acquainted themselves with the social characteristics of the middle class, and the role they could play (indeed are presently playing) in ongoing struggles, such as climate change, conservation, and exerting a degree of moderation in human dealings with our planet and other living species.

An attempt to sketch this class’s  modern ‘profile’.

I present, partly from my own memories, elements of such a profile. Both sets of grandparents were middle class; one Jewish (from England). He was there employed as a cigar-maker, but he established himself in business as a shoe-repairer in Melbourne, then a seller of manufactured boots and shoes. Successful, he bought a house in the developing suburb of Glen Huntly, then one beside it for his eldest daughter, Miriam.

He had a club foot and walked with the aid of a stick. He had quite a good voice, and knew a wide selection of Cockney songs, a large number of which denigrated women. This was widespread in those days, but remains very active, and still widely violent along with economic discrimination.

 Clearly, the middle class likes new things and processes, notably with women, along with men taking to bicycles in large numbers when they became available. They also took to the early radios driven by a metal ‘cat’s whisker’ on a sliver of metal ore, then large decorative consoles with valves.

My maternal grandparents had a large modern house in the northern (upper) part of the suburb of Caulfield, and they had built in the large grounds a sheltered garden in which the grew plants, mostly  for sale.                                               

My paternal grandmother drove (rather roughly) the big Buick they owned, as did her daughter Rae. TV when it came was a must – indeed any new device that responded to the desire to extend and exercise their inherent human capacities, which were stifled or looked upon with disapproval by conservatives who want to keep to accustomed ways.

The middle class does not respond to theoretical speculation about general social advance,but  persistently pursue it pragmatically, devising practical measures to actually achieve some aspect of it. ‘Schools of Art’, for instance, if I remember rightly, were widely established, mainly by middle class women in Melbourne, around the turn of the twentieth century.

INCOME:

Using his deciles mathematical system on income, Piketty says that if the average pay in a country is 2000 euros per month then this distribution implies that the top 10 percent can earn on average, 4000 per month, the bottom 50 percent 1400 euros a month, and the middle 40 percent 2,250 a month. “This intermediate group may be regarded as a vast ‘middle class’ whose standard of living is determined by the average wage of the society in question.”

But it helps to keep in mind that ten ‘deciles’ consist of 10 parts that he then often divides into 3 parts, which correspond roughly to the classes. The first decile, comprised of the top dogs, is basically made up of those who hold the most wealth and have the most say on the key issues, and is often called the establishment. The next usage goes 2 to 4 (the middle), and the lower five make up 10. Piketty adds: ‘. . . if the average pay in a country is 2,000 euros per month then this distribution implies that the top 10 percent earn 4,000 euros a month on average, the  bottom 50 percent 1,400 and the middle 40 percent 2,250 . This intermediate group may be regarded as a vast ‘middle class’ whose standard of living is determined by the average wage of the society in question’. (p. 250)             

‘The middle class allegiance is to free trade (and of course cheap food and the rights of property). For the previous seventy years the middle class had enjoyed unparalleled power over the lives of others, mostly those beneath it. Whether as employers, shapers of public opinion, voters, elected officials or public servants, its members had been able to compel a significant part of society to accept its assumptions and ambitions. Pragmatists tended to outnumber idealists.’ (p. 248, James Lawrence book)

The prevailing religious and moral codes of the Victorian middle class made social indifference impossible. They refused to abandon the rest of society to the accompanying physical and moral consequences of industrialisation, to create what they saw as a humane, contented and civilised society, of which they would constitute a major if not leading part.

They endorsed the view that the possession of the faculty of reason was humanity’s major weapon in winning a material life from nature, and urged that it should  also be the centre of political life, thereby under-estimating the role of other factors, such as emotions, values, self-promotion, enrichment and plain deception.

Anyone who wants to win their support for a cause or a particular approach to an issue, needs to ‘make a good case’, including a fair one, which the Abbott/Hockey government has failed miserably to do; Their bluster does not suffice.

An earlier example of the role that the middle class can play was the defeat of Menzies, who declared in the post-war election of 1949 his intention to declare the Communist Party illegal and dissolve it. Winning that vote, he introduced a law to do so, but it was declared invalid by the High Court.  He then resorted to a referendum (of the whole of ‘white’ Australia that he was confident of winning).  It was defeated on September 21, 1951, and there can be little doubt that a large section of the middle class, both high officials and ‘ordinary’ members, voted in this direction.

Similarly, the middle class joining the struggle against the Vietnam war was crucial to the struggle against it, so the lesson is an abiding one.                                                         

The Social State in Australia - An analysis by Eric Aarons

                     

 

In this new 'Left Focus' article former Australian Communist leader Eric Aarons provides an analysis based on Thomas Piketty's influential new book 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'.  In particular Aarons defends Piketty's notion of a 'Social State' as a project for progressives in today's world.

by Eric Aarons             

In his fine and successful book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas

Piketty uses the term ‘the Social State’ to describe a form of government that  controls the capitalism of our day sufficiently to ensure that every citizen gets an adequate mix in  quantity, quality and kind  of the goods and services necessary to live a civilized life in today’s conditions.

This was never achieved in the socialism of the 20^th century by those who tried the hardest – the Russians, then the Chinese, Vietnamese and Yugoslavs. Nor were their political formations suited to winning lasting popular support.

 

But that period witnessed the two biggest and worst wars ever.

The first, ‘The Great War’ against Germany, is presently being ‘celebrated’ for its hundredth anniversary (because We won it) though a major feature of it was a struggle to possess the most colonies with the most people and resources.

 

The Second World War, fought against German and Japanese fascism, which was an extremely reactionary ideology based on grounds of racial superiority and revenge, which could not be permitted to succeed.

 

I was born in 1919, so did not see any of the first war, though I was moved in observing some of the human wreckage that came through it. Then I saw and felt the Great Depression that followed it for a decade. By the time the second broke out I was politically aware, and on the basis of the facts then prevailing,   thought that socialism was the only possible solution.

 

I could literally ‘feel’ the sentiment around me then. It was: that we will fight to the end against German and Japanese fascism; but ‘never again’ will we put up with the sacrifices of wars, in which capitalists always do well, but make few, if any,

 

 Radical social changes for the better.

 

I am sure that pro-capitalist forces knew quite well that they were then very much on the defensive and had to suitably respond. The same note was struck by the extensive postwar planning agenda which included plans for doing away with the dilapidated and bug-ridden city shacks in which the majority of working people had to live, while wide-ranging plans were made for the future with the great Snowy-mountains project and other plans put in place near war’s end.

 

New thinking was encouraged, and practiced enthusiastically – not like today, where it is demanded to get out of the hole capital has dug itself into

All this, and the influx of refugees from shattered European countries who immediately found jobs, created the three decades of unprecedented prosperity that followed, showing what could be done by a socially engaged government that still respected private property rights, but was prepared to act outside the usual bounds, to correct or mitigate the faults in the capitalist system and respond to glaring economic and social needs.

 

Many important products went into mass production for the first time, such as synthetic plastics (on a scale in which we are near to burying ourselves). And in 1947 were invented the now truly universally present ‘transistors’ using rare ‘semi-conducting minerals, and now essential in all our electronic appliances and especially the miniaturised ones.

 

It was, in fact, a practical response to the over-theoretical and rather rambling ideology of the neo-Liberalism developed by Friedrich Hayek that made valid criticisms of socialism as practiced, but failed to make a compelling case in favour of permanent adherence to a capitalism that had in major respects run amok ,with no alternative yet in sight.

 

Three decades of prosperity and peace

 

For three decades there was virtually full employment; it was easy to leave a job and find another better one, while profits were also booming.  I noticed all this when I returned at the end my three year study period in China, and was somewhat taken aback by the scale of spending that was clearly now the norm. The Social State had arrived, though we didn’t yet have the name for it.

 

War torn Europe had to spend some years repairing colossal damage, and couldn’t therefore immediately take on this initiating task, while the US was more occupied with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to drive out of the country all artists, writers and activists deemed to be ‘leftist’.

 

So I feel justified in claiming that the first examples of the Social State appeared in Australia and New Zealand, and we should now exert ourselves to contribute to the development and renewal that Piketty prescribes.

 

Government’s role today embraces efforts to regulate capitalism’s inherent cycles, irregularities and periodical crises; and in the financial sector, its increasingly deliberately illegal activities that have incurred multi-billion dollar fines from an Obama Presidency.

 

We, in Australia, though relatively well-placed economically, are faced with a new conservative government trying to foist on us an austerity regime, while at the same time giving open slather to environmental damage from our massive coal deposits and the money-making plans of ruthless so-called ‘developers’.

 

Capital Fights Back

 

But capital does not welcome, or even recognize, the word ‘sufficient’, especially in regard to profit, which is its lifeblood. It worked away in the ideological field with attacks on trade unions, cries of ‘nanny’, concerning the new State, ‘living off the public teat’, ‘not standing on your own two feet’, and the like. Then came the outbreak of an escalating bout of inflation in the mid-1970’s when, particularly with his theory of neo-Liberalism and winning the Nobel Prize, Friedrich Hayek turned the ideological tide which, along with the mantra ‘success is the sure sign of merit’ (literally, where money is concerned, the assertion that ‘might is right’, worked in favour of a capital on the offensive.

 

Regrettably the left, with its own concerns from even worse socialist failures and accompanying fragmentation, was not up to the task of waging the essential ideological struggle against neo-liberalism. But now, Thomas Piketty, with his new approach and forcefulness has given the left a second chance. We must not waste it this time!

                                                     

This, if properly and persistently used along with a renewed and refurbished Social State, can break neo-liberalism’s present ideological hegemony and undermine the present political dominance of the mega-rich, who dictate in various ways the direction of society’s (indeed, humanity’s) development.

 

Certain unusual or misunderstood aspects of neo-Liberalism have to be grasped if this struggle is to be won. For instance:

Neo-Liberalism describes itself as something that was not, and could not be created by human beings. It is a self-generated, self-organized combination of elements that, spontaneously welded themselves into the system that we now call capitalism.

 

Because of that supposed ‘fact’, no individual or group of individuals can be blamed for shortcomings:  these are more likely to be caused by government,   union or leftist interference. This system has evolved, and we cannot control evolution. Indeed, to try to do so can only make things worse than they may presently be. And nothing like ‘Social justice’ can exist, for ‘society’ is not an entity that can be studied or managed as a whole.

 

Humanity’s now outdated old instincts are the main problem, always holding us back. Rather than inbuilt ‘human instincts’ and ‘fellow-feeling’, we now have to  control ourselves by a set of abstract rules. Hayek proclaims: ‘I believe that an atavistic longing after the life of the noble savage is the main source of the collectivist tradition.’(The Fatal Conceit, page 19). The one exception concerns our intimate companions:  Because, ‘if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order [capitalism] to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them.’ (ibid. page 18).

 

The rest can go hang, he is saying; but with the sweetener for some                     ‘that such a system gives to those who already have [which is] its merit rather than its defect.’ (Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2, page 123)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

   

Hayek has devised what would be a legally binding constitution to guarantee that it will survive even the demise of the above supports for the inner nature of the system.

 

Personally, for some years, I and others had hoped, rather, to do away with capitalism altogether. While capitalism was still in full control, it was the social democrats of various kinds in Australia and worldwide who, to their credit,    worked hardest to abolish the sordid slums where the majority of working men, women, and children were forced to live. These were replaced with decent habitation, and many of their progeny showed through their abilities that higher education should no longer be be confined to the wealthy – a principle now under a new threat from the Abbott government and its education minister, Christopher Pyne.

 

Feelings were intense, ‘post-war reconstruction’ had to heed – and did – modern concerns with new social problems, complexities and to a degree our relation with nature itself and other species began to appear. Capitalists and their ideologists were very much on the defensive, and  the conservative Robert Menzies presented himself as a spokesman for the developing middle class.

 

It was a period when really full employment existed, and I can remember a  time early in Menzies reign when a  2 percent rate of official unemployment caused anger and concern.

 

The State

 

People realised that only democratically elected governments could have the power to obtain the money now required to solve new tasks, and thereby had both the right and duty to step in – not to take over the lives of individuals and families, but to help all citizens cope with the increasing complexity of modern living. 

 

This expressed the conviction that a civilized society required not only the piecemeal reforms already set in place, but an undertaking that the state itself would work more broadly, as in fact it did. This was significantly and particularly in the three unprecedentedly prosperous decades (a whole generation!) that followed the victorious end of the Second World War.

 

Some possibilities occur to me that could make a significant difference, without repeating the socialist mistake of advancing to foremost requirement the abolition, essentially by confiscation, of all significant private property in the means of production.

 

Johnathan Sperber, in his important recent book Karl Marx: a nineteenth-century life, includes from a new edition of Marx’s collected works, the fact that Marx had some second thoughts about private property.

 

Reading a copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract, Marx had heavily penciled in the margins that ‘a genuine democracy would be the “true unity of the universal and particular”, where the state would be a “particular form of the people’s existence.” Sperber then publishes comments holding that this structure would not be the same as anarchism but the ‘creation of circumstances in which the  state ‘no longer count[s] as the totality’ that is, was no longer opposed to the private interests of civil society. (Karl Marx: a nineteenth Century Life, pages 113-4) 

 

Taking notice of Piketty’s view that the Social State, now 60 or more years old, is in need of renovation and renewal, I believe, with him, that ‘civil society’ needs a boost. Philosopher John Gray writes of this concept that: ‘this is a complex structure of practices and institutions, embracing a system of private or several property, the rule of law, constitutional or traditional limitations on government authority, and a legal and moral tradition of individualism, which is the matrix of moral tradition of individualism, which is the matrix of moral and political life as we know it.’ (Liberalisms: Essays in political philosophy, page 262).

 

It is also related to to the concept of ‘self-management’,which I have  personally and positively experienced in a cooperative printery.

 

The one thing that I would like to add to any set of changes, is that it be made   clear that ‘ownership’ is not absolute, but includes also the concept of custodianship, implying that possession includes some responsibility to preserve, where possible, the value of an asset – and particularly of our wonderful natural assets.                                                                               

 

 Addendum

 

viewing a DVD of Ken Loach’s film The Spirit of ’45 (the end of the Second World War) I realized that, despite extensive damage, the British nation and people had not only been moved like everybody else by the spirit of ‘never again’ without changes for the better, would they fight for a defective and unfair social system.

 

They had immediately set about ensuring it was actually done. Many of the demands developed after WW1 by the left, labour, and progressive movements, but rejected by the dominant rich and aristocratic forces were, dusted off and refurbished by radical intellectuals and socialists, and actually put in place by the first post-war government.

 

Winston Churchill, a prominent hereditary aristocrat, had played a major part in defeating a movement to do a deal with Hitler, peopled by some prominent aristocrats, including some close to the royal family. And, succeeding, when war actually broke out rose to the top and played a leading part with inspiring speeches and, mainly good, military and political decisions.

 

When the first postwar election was held, he stood as a candidate to lead the new government, but was defeated by Labour.