The Woke and the Working Class
The following is an excerpt of a manuscript-in-progress by Rhyd Wildermuth.
It can also be read as a pdf at this link.
The identity hierarchies and categories created though Woke Ideology— of race, ability, gender, and sexual orientation—glaringly omit a specific division which any Marxist immediately can sense: that of class. In fact, class cannot be introduced within these categories without undermining the entire system of categorization.
Consider: what does a jobless and homeless “white heterosexual able-bodied cis-man” really have in common with a CEO who possesses all those same identity traits? Or for that matter, what do certain of a CEO’s employees have in common with him except for those identity markers?
This is the reason why any Marxist (especially black Marxists such as Adolph Reed) who attempts to re-introduce class as a framework and foundation for solidarity or radical organising is typically smeared as a “class reductionist.” Class destabilizes the entire discourse by looking for commonalities and differences along a fully different set of co-ordinates which cut across all the other identity categories. It divides every supposedly unitary oppression grouping by asking a simple question: do you have access to wealth and the creation of more of it? Or must you sell your time, your body, and your labor for even the minimal means of your survival?
Most intolerably of all, the question of class threatens the stability and position of those who argue most on behalf of Woke identity co-ordinates. Consider a short list of such theorists and activists: Rachel Cargle, famous for her statement “I refuse to listen to white women cry,” owns several businesses and has a net worth estimated at 3 million US dollars. Judith Butler, the founder of modern declarative gender theory, is reported to have about 9 million US dollars in wealth. Robin DiAngelo, who runs a consulting business for corporate diversity programs and who is the author of the book White Fragility, is also a multi-millionaire, as are Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, and Kimberly Crenshaw.
The problem for such people is that, from a class framework, they have much more in common with the capitalists than they do with the proletariat. Their class identity would thus alienate them from the groups for whom they position themselves to speak, while also giving lie to the idea that any identity group is a coherent category.
Understanding the Professional-Managerial Class
The class positions of the primary theorists of Woke Ideology are actually the reason for the complete absence of class analysis within their criticisms of race and gender. Donna Haraway, whose work opened the way for Judith Butler and others to move feminism away from class analysis towards identitarianism, explained why she thought such a transition was necessary in A Cyborg Manifesto:
“For me—and for many who share a similar historical location in white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies—the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion.”
Haraway was writing after the Combahee River Collective Statement (1), whose assertion that identity must be a primary organizing foundation for all political struggle significantly shook the left’s understanding of class and sex. However, there was also another profoundly influential essay published a few years before which her admission of location within “white, professional middle-class” was reaction.
That essay, written by Barbara and John Ehrenreich and published in 1977 in the journal Radical America, offered a completely different framework for understanding the failures of leftist organizing in the United States. For the Ehrenreichs, the core issue was not the difficulty of defining women or the need for better understanding of identities, but rather the ascendancy and dominance of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) to which not only the authors, but also Haraway, the members of the Combahee River Collective, Judith Butler, and all the current theorists of Woke Ideology belonged.
The Ehrenreichs defined this Professional-Managerial Class as follows (emphasis mine):
We define the Professional-Managerial Class as consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.
Their roles in the process of reproduction may be more or less explicit, as with workers who are directly concerned with social control or with the production of propagation of ideology (e.g.; teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, writers of advertising copy and TV scripts, etc.). Or it may be hidden within the process of production, as is the case with the middle-level administrators whose functions…are essentially argued by the need to preserve capitalist relations of production. Thus we assert that these occupational groups—cultural workers, managers, engineers and scientists, etc.—share a common function in the broad social division of labor and a common relation to the economic foundations of society. (2)
The PMC roughly translates into the idea of “white collar workers,” those who work in offices rather than in service, factory, or manual labor jobs. The Ehrenreichs’ definition is broader, however, in that it includes people who work in ideological professions which do not have a specific administrative role, including artists, writers, entertainers, professors and other educators, psychologists, and social workers. As ideological workers, their function is not in physical production, but rather in the “reproduction of capitalist cultural and class relationships.”
Key to understanding the PMC is that they are a small subsection of the working class itself, meaning they do not possess their own means of production and must sell their labor. That is, they are not actually part of the capitalist class, but nevertheless share and reproduce the cultural values of the capitalists. Barbara and John Ehrenreich describe them as a “derivative class,” a class derived from the masses of the proletariat to support the capitalist order.
…The very definition of the PMC—as a class concerned with the reproduction of capitalist cultural and class relationships—precludes treating it as a separable sociological entity. It is in a sense a derivative class; its existence presupposes: (1) that the social surplus has developed to the point sufficient to sustain the PMC in addition to the bourgeoisie, for the PMC is essentially nonproductive; and (2) that the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has developed to the point that a class specialising in the reproduction of capitalist class relationships becomes a necessity to the capitalist class. That is, the maintenance of order can no longer be left to episodic police violence. (3)
In other words, the PMC is a highly-paid subset of the proletariat whose salaries and very existence derive from their role as reproducers and guardians of the social order. This work exists so that the capitalists do not need to use relentless, naked violence to keep workers in line. They create the cultural forms—the “structures” of domination—which ensure the rest of the working class remains content with their economic situations. They train, civilize, supervise, treat, and amuse the producing classes—the factory and service workers, the manual and agricultural workers, the “blue collar” sorts—and by doing so smooth over and mollify class tensions so to ensure the perpetuation of the capitalist order.
The PMC is also what has been called by conservative critics the “liberal latté-drinking urban elite,” since their values, professions, and lifestyles—even among those who hold to leftist political frameworks—are heavily aligned with an urban (bourgeois) cultural sensibility. Demographic polling on political issues supports this critique—those with higher degrees and higher incomes who live in urban and suburban areas show higher support for liberal or progressive policies and candidates than those with lower incomes, less education, or those of their cohort living in rural areas.
In this way, the PMC also maps closely to the older Marxist analysis of the “petite bourgeoisie” (the ‘little urban class’). These were the small shop owners, doctors, lawyers, and people in other highly-specialized and rare professions who did not work for a wage but were nevertheless not true capitalists (because they did not exploit the labor of others to increase their capital). Despite not actually being engaged in capitalist exploitation, their cultural and political values aligned with the capitalist class, and they strongly supported political repression of the lower classes.
The Professional-Managerial Class, then, is an evolution or expansion of the petite-bourgeoisie with the important distinction that they are often also salaried.
The PMC versus the rest of the working class
The observation that the PMC is not actually engaged in physical production is deeply important for understanding the tensions and diverging concerns between them and the rest of the working class. We can easily sense a vast difference in values and economic concerns between a woman working in a meat-packing plant in the Des Moines, Iowa and a woman running a yoga studio in Portland, Oregon. We can sense this same difference when we consider other comparisons:
A black trans woman working for an investment bank versus a black trans woman working at McDonald’s
An Hispanic woman cleaning houses through a maid service versus one teaching gender studies at UCLA.
A black male sanitation worker versus a black male editorialist for The Atlantic
A white male construction worker versus a white male database administrator.
Besides deep differences in compensation and standards of living, not to mention the vast disparity in the physical effects on the body, the relationship between the PMC and the rest of the working class is an unequal relationship of consumption. That is, the rest of the working class is producing the physical goods and services (housecleaning, food and food service, construction, sanitation, dry cleaning) which the PMC rely upon for their elevated standards of living.
This tension inevitably creates a deep difference in values and cultural worldviews, one which especially manifests in leftist political organizing. In a 2019 interview for Dissent Magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich elaborated on some of the personal experiences which had led her and her former husband John Ehrenreich to develop their analysis of the PMC. After recounting a story in which a leftist professor and his wife accusingly read aloud quotes from Mao at her because of her working-class sensibilities, she then explained:
For example, there were fights that would break out in food co-ops—they were called the “Twinkie wars.” People wanted the food co-op to carry the highly processed, no-doubt-bad-for-you foods that they could get in the supermarket, and the more PMC types did not want that.
So, there was a lot of empirical data that went into this essay. There was a real difference between people who worked essentially telling other people what to do—and teachers get included in that—and people who do the work that other people tell them to do. It becomes a difference between manual and mental labor, but it carries with it a shitload of weight—I see it all the time, the contempt for especially white working-class people among leftists of college backgrounds.
While these experiences occurred before “The Professional-Managerial Class” was written, they could just have easily occurred today. In fact, Barbara later recounts in that same interview a more recent experience which elucidates this divide succinctly:
In 2009, there was an event—part of an international series of socialist gatherings—in Detroit. There was a workshop at this conference, and I had invited a group of working-class people from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who I had become close to. About six or seven of them drove from Fort Wayne to Detroit, and they were mostly laid-off foundry workers: stereotypical white men—though, actually, not all of them were white. I was closest with one of them, Tom Lewandowski, who created a workers’ organization and was the head of the Central Labor Council in the Fort Wayne area. [At the event], they talked about what they were facing in the recession. And then some woman in the room who was an adjunct professor suddenly says, “I’m tired of listening to white men talk.”
I was so aghast. Of course, it was a big setback for my friends from Fort Wayne, who were humiliated. I advised Tom not to get into settings where he would be subjected to that ever again. There has to be a way to say to such people, look, we know you probably aren’t doing great as an adjunct, but have some respect for other people’s work and their experience, and recognize that they are different from you in some way. I’ve just had too many encounters like that, which are kind of heartbreaking. (4)
In the woman’s statement, “I’m tired of listening to white men talk,” which has itself become somewhat of a rallying cry for Woke Ideology, we can begin to detect the reason for the existence of the “white cis-abled-heterosexual-male” as the alpha-oppressor category within the Woke framework. He is a symbol for the entire working class, the uncultured manual worker who doesn’t use the right words, who eats processed foods, and who has never read Judith Butler. This is all regardless of the fact that he isn’t actually representative of the working class, a class which is composed also of black and Hispanic people and women as well. Despite the true diversity of the working class, he functions as its symbol specifically because he isn’t oppressed on account of his identity, but only on account of his class.
The problem here is that he functions as the symbolic container for everything the Professional-Managerial Class is not, both below their economic status and also above. So, he is not only an angry, brutish, cheap-beer drinking working class threat, but also the capitalists for whom those in the PMC ultimately work. The rich who own the banks, the newspapers, the media and internet technology corporations, and those who fund the non-profit organisations and educational institutions from which the PMC derive their high salaries and standards of living share the same identity category (white, cis-, abled, heterosexual, male) as the car mechanic who shops at Walmart, lives in a trailer, listens to country music, and watches Fox News.
Of course, there is another buried contradiction here, as the Professional-Managerial Class is itself also mostly white, even after years of pressure to implement corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies. Here, though, the point of such policies is always to improve the racial and gender diversity of the Professional-Managerial Class, rather than improving the material conditions of the more traditional working class. None of the Woke theorists are arguing for more inclusive, equitable, and diverse hiring policies for the masses of laborers in construction, manufacturing, janitorial, hospitality, agriculture, or retail, only for those that head those industries and manage those workers.
Woke Ideology is “Leftism” Only for the PMC
This contradiction derives from the complete disconnect between the Professional-Managerial Class and the rest of the working class, and it is sustained by Woke Ideology’s complete avoidance of class analysis. When such workers are even treated in any political discourse, they are caricatured through the symbolic container of the white cis-heterosexual able-bodied male whom they conceive as their true oppressor.
Again we must ask what objectively binds such men together, and we will each time come up lacking. The farm hand who works the fields near my home has little in common with the farmer who owns those lands. The white male delivery driver for Amazon has little in common with the white male CEO of Amazon. Yet each of these men, according to the framework of Woke Ideology, benefit and maintain esoteric systems of domination: white supremacy, cis-hetero-patriarchy, toxic masculinity, global anti-blackness, and so on.
This is how the Professional-Managerial Class is able to categorize them as a unified group, dissolving all differences—especially their unequal material conditions—into a monolithic force. This is also why there’s so little adoption of Woke Ideology among the rest of the working class except in its most populist forms, forms which they encounter primarily through cultural entertainment and social media. It’s also why there is such a backlash against identity discourse in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in France, the “reactionary” movements that oppose the teaching of declarative gender theory, Critical Race Theory, or ‘le wokisme’ in early education, as well as increasing anger towards liberal or left-identified politicians and activists who dismiss such concerns as coming from ‘deplorables’ or ‘fascists.’
The problem is that the Professional-Managerial Class cannot actually speak for the rest of the working class, because although they hold cultural and political positions which give them the influence that can actually change and shape society, their material conditions, lifestyles, and values are closer to the capitalist class. What they imagine as a march towards progress and equality, what for them looks like liberation, appears not only out-of-touch but also dictatorial to the rest of the working class whose concerns are more practical and related to their actual economic situations.
This difference is particularly sharp when it comes to Woke analysis of the family and traditional cultural values. A migrant agricultural worker is much less likely to see Woke calls to “Abolish the Family” (5) or challenge binary gender roles as helpful or even good, especially because their own families are the only refuges they have against the alienation and exploitation of capitalism. But we must also ask, why would a construction worker really care that facial feminization surgery is not always fully covered by medical insurance companies when he doesn’t even have medical insurance? And what relevance are any of the discourses about white privilege, cis-heteronormativity, or the gender-pay gap in Silicon Valley tech companies to a minimum-waged retail clerk (of any gender or racial group) at Walmart?
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is a druid, theorist, and writer living in the Ardennes. You can follow his writing at From The Forests of Arduinna
Notes
a statement, incidentally, composed by black, professional middle-class females
“The Professional-Managerial Class.” Radical America, 1977 p13
Ibid p. 15
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/on-the-origins-of-the-professional-managerial-class-an-interview-with-barbara-ehrenreich
per Sophie Lewis.