“Are we the baddies?”

The “left” versus the working class

Instead of organized attempts to increase wages and worker protections, and to force restraints on capitalist disruptions (the gig economy/internet of things, massive immigration, etc), the Neo-Liberal “Left” has focused on identity concerns and state-enforced punitive technocratic change: the opposite of what workers actually want and need.

Consider, for example, all the punitive environmental policies like increased taxes on gas and forced switches to electric cars. These are seen as “left” policies, but whenever they are implemented (as France tried to do), they spark a massive protest movement by the working class — who will suffer most from them — which then gets smeared as “fascist.”

Other technocratic changes also had similar effects and showed the steep divide between the class alignments. DEI policies don’t matter to anyone involved in waged manual labor, because DEI isn’t about increasing the wages and benefits for those professions. Also, those policies don’t do anything for members of the working class that actually have the targeted identity markers: a black woman working at McDonald’s is never going to be offered one of those new positions created for black women at Goldman Sachs.

…And especially, there’s the issue of “leftist” moral health regimes like mandatory masking and vaccinations that arose during Covid, and also the longer-term technocratic programs like smoking bans. The former is still quite a big deal in the United States, with “leftists” elevating covid vaccinations to the level of the Eucharist, a religious act signifying a person’s belonging to a universal communion of believers…

The British sketch comedians, David Mitchell and Robert Webb, once did a rather hilarious bit about two SS soldiers suddenly noticing the skulls on their uniforms. Towards the beginning of the sketch (it’s a quick 2 minutes and 50 seconds, absolutely worth a quick laugh), one of them asks the other, “Are we the baddies?”

The other day, a longtime friend of mine mentioned that he’s been in a process where he’s essentially been asking himself the same question.

He already knew I’d understand what he meant, seeing as my book, Here Be Monsters, is really about how I’d had to ask myself that same question. No, of course I don’t mean that the “left” he and I both thought we were part of were Nazis. Rather, his question was more about our class positions.

As background — without giving away identifiable personal details about his life — my friend is a self-employed personal consultant. He’d previously been employed in a larger business doing the same work, but a few years ago, he decided to do it independently. He lives in a large city, has a graduate degree and a mortgage, and is squarely in what Americans nebulously call the “middle class.” He’s in the kind of position where he’s got enough money to live comfortably, but a sudden reduction of clients would force him to get a “traditional” job instead of working independently.

And something else you should know about him is that his political and social positions had been squarely aligned with most of what the “woke” stood for between 2016 to 2022. Mine had been, too (in fact, we’d marched in a protest together and often discussed identity issues), though I started questioning the entire framework earlier than he had.

So, after reading John Michael Greer’s The King In Orange, and having already read Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders, he asked me this:

… where am I in these class analyses? Because in some ways I assume I’d be considered among the Professional Managerial class or salaried classes but I don’t have a salary and increasingly feel the class disparity between myself and some of my tech clients….

It’s part of my journey into “wait — am I actually part of the bad guys?” That has been ongoing since I learned bourgeois meant “city dweller.”

He was kind enough to let me quote and expand my answer to him here, as I think it would be helpful to anyone who’s been trying to figure out what actually happened to the left and especially why “conservative” or “right-wing” positions suddenly seem to make more sense to them lately. It’s also probably very helpful for anyone still confused as to why Trump won this recent election in the United States.

Here is my (greatly expanded) response:

So, in the class framework, you and I both belong to what my friend Dan Evans calls the “new petite bourgeoisie.”

The traditional petite bourgeoisie in Marxist analysis were a minor urban class of small shop owners and trained contract workers (like clerks, transcriptionists, and early professional service workers).

The petite bourgeoisie were people who both:

1. Owned the means of their own production (a small business, for example). But:

2. Did not employ others to work their capital.

This made them an “intermediary class” in between the capitalists and the workers. They weren’t really capitalists since they didn’t employ others to expand their capital, but they also weren’t dependent on a wage from a capitalist in order to survive like the working class is.

This makes them also different from a recently created intermediary class, the Professional Managerial Class. That class was first identified by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, and is defined as people who manage capitalism and share the same values as the capitalists, but they themselves aren’t actually capitalists either.

Unlike the Professional-Managerial Class, though, the Petite Bourgeoisie tended to have more in common with the workers and tend to share many of their values (even if they don’t share the same economic circumstances). That’s because of their physical and social proximity to workers: they’re their neighbors and friends, and in religious areas, they probably go to the same churches together.

But Dan Evans noticed that now — at least for the past two decades — there are really two different kinds of Petite Bourgeoisie. The traditional part still exists, is mostly suburban or rural, and is made up primarily of self-employed skilled manual workers (plumbers, electricians, mechanics) or related small business owners (farmers, garage owners, “mom and pop” shops, construction contractors, etc).

The New Petite Bourgeoisie (NPB from here on out) are more urban, and they mostly share the following characteristics:

1. They usually have university degrees or a higher level education

2. They are self-employed or work as independent contractors, but usually in “intellectual” work rather than manual work

3. They have little or no material capital — if they have a business, it’s usually entirely online, or is a temporary “pop up” shop.

4. They are downward-mobile or definitely feel as if they are. Many are constantly at risk of needing to take an extra “gig” job because their primary business isn’t paying enough, and they feel pressure to downsize their lives — like going car-less, taking on roommates if they own a house, or moving to cheaper areas.

Another common theme you see with the NPB is that they tend to share the disgust the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC from here on out) has for the working class.

This last bit is a significant difference between the NPB and the traditional (or “old”) Petite Bourgeoisie. The traditional Petite Bourgeoisie tends to side with workers’ concerns quite often, even sometimes supporting revolutionary actions. Again, part of this is due to social and physical proximity — most of their friends, neighbors, and family members are working class. But also, part of this is self-interest: since they deal most often with the working class, to oppose them is to commit a kind of financial suicide.

The NPB “left” versus the working class

On the other hand, this new urban Petite Bourgeoisie, the NPB, is actually quite disgusted with working-class values, concerns, and even just their daily lives.¹ The biggest determiner of the NPB’s disdain for these cultural forms — and for the working class itself — seems to be their university training. That’s because, at least for the past few decades, university degrees have been sold to people as a way to lift themselves out of the muck and despair of being just an ordinary waged worker. Going to college means you can escape the small-town mindset of your family and childhood friends, or get something “better” in life than just working in a factory or as a grocery store clerk.

Now, again, Dan Evans noticed that the “left” in the UK hasn’t really represented working-class values or concerns for a few decades, and that’s what’s happened in the United States, too. That’s because what we call the “left” is mostly dominated by a mix of the NPB and the PMC, while the working class tends instead to vote for conservatives. There are lots of reasons for this, but their alliance to the right is primarily based on conservative promises of social stability, less globalized trade, and more national-based investment.

To see how this plays out now, take Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs and immigration policies. Tariffs would especially benefit the old Petite Bourgeoisie and also many traditional industrial workers. Consider: when’s the last time anyone hired an electrician to fix a broken toaster or coffee maker? And when’s the last time you’ve seen either of those with a “made in the USA” sticker on the box?

That kind of production doesn’t happen in the US or the UK any longer. It’s all being produced in Chinese factories, which means there are lots of people in the West who aren’t working in factories anymore. Also, the services the old Petite Bourgeoisie offered (fixing your toaster, for example, or even selling you that toaster) aren’t valuable in a system where you can just get whatever you need or replace anything within 48 hours with a product created halfway across the world with Amazon one-click.

Trump’s tariffs plan is meant to change that. Even if it doesn’t succeed, Trump’s tariffs are a sign to the working class and the old Petite Bourgeoisie that he actually understands their situation. As in 2016, when Hillary Clinton kept telling workers they were stupid for thinking the economy wasn’t as good as they said it was, the Democrats again acted completely oblivious to these material conditions and lost spectacularly to a man reckless enough to speak a bit of truth.

And immigration is a similar situation. Most immigrants to the US and the UK compete with the working class — rather than the NPB — for jobs. An immigrant dude from Mexico isn’t an economic threat to some Oakland hipster’s online witch candle shop, nor is he going to reduce the subscriber base for a Brooklynite non-binary life coach’s OnlyFans or Patreon account. Instead, he’s probably going to take a job in construction or road work. And he, and his fellow immigrants, will do that work for less than the prevailing wage, meaning his presence pushes wages down for other workers, too — but has no effect at all on the NPB or the PMC.

There are countless other examples of this. But essentially, Trump’s policies seem good for the old Petite Bourgeoisie and for the working class, whether or not they are actually going to help.

On the other hand, the NPB and the PMC both viciously hate and fear Trump. There are also lots of reasons with this, and they’re all seen as moral and political reasons, but the most important thing to understand is that Trump’s policies — and the policies of conservatives in general — don’t represent their economic interests. In fact, some of these policies would actually harm their economic situation.

It’s easiest to see this with the PMC, those upper-tier, highly-educated urbanites who work in corporations, technology, universities, media, and other related professions. Many of them are working for large institutions that rely heavily on a shrinking industrial base and a growing intellectual-work economy. And they don’t just move and shape information, they train, manage, “influence,” and entertain the people who work in those sectors.

Think of all the DEI or business management consultants, all the tech-company project managers, all the directors of human resource departments or of non-profits, all the professors of gender studies or college admissions heads, and all the people employed within these institutions who only ever get their hands dirty in hobby gardens. Such people do really damn well under the current neoliberal arrangement, and they are also quite terrified of the increasingly-angry working class seething far below them.²

Fear of Falling

Now, the NPB aren’t the PMC, but they have similar outlooks. They both ascribe to social justice (or “woke”) moral constellations, and they both share a fear and disdain for the working class. For the PMC, that disdain is more like arrogant contempt, but for the NPB it’s more a visceral fear that they might soon have to join them.

That’s the final important part of the NPB’s current situation. They — or we, because I’m technically also part of this class despite having no university degree — are all downwardly-mobile. Give any of us just a few weeks of no clients, no customers, or no subscribers and we suddenly start seriously considering getting a “real” (waged) job. Give most of us two months of that kind of bad luck, and we’re probably also moving back in with parents, family, or friends — even if we’re in our forties.

So the NPB is a deeply precarious transitional class, despite acting as if they’re established and dominant. That’s because they’re most like the PMC and are constantly hoping to enter that class. We’re the adjunct professors hoping for tenure, the small-scale internet influencers hoping to finally go viral, the Substack and Patreon and OnlyFans accounts fantasizing about six figures, and all the “gig” workers dreaming of remote work in Berlin or Lisbon funded by a modest but reliable passive income.

And what’s most ridiculous is that it’s both the NPB and the PMC who constitute what is now called “the left,” while the working class and the old Petite Bourgeoisie are now most represented by politicians from “the right.” Of course, little of what used to be meant by either of those terms maps onto what we now mean by them.

“Left” especially doesn’t mean Marxist/anti-capitalist left anymore, but rather Neo-Liberal “Left.” Instead of organized attempts to increase wages and worker protections, and to force restraints on capitalist disruptions (the gig economy/internet of things, massive immigration, etc), the Neo-Liberal Left has focused on identity concerns and technocratic change, and that latter bit is especially the opposite of what workers actually want and need.

Consider, for example, all the punitive environmental policies like increased taxes on gas and forced switches to electric cars. These are seen as “left” policies, but when they are implemented (as France tried to do), they spark massive working-class protest movement — the gilets jaunes — that then get smeared as “fascist.” The thing is, such policies affect them greatly, but they don’t touch the PMC or the NPB since they can either easily afford increased costs or don’t drive in the first place.

Other technocratic changes also had similar effects and showed the steep divide between the class alignments. DEI policies don’t matter to construction workers, farmers, line cooks, or anyone else involved in waged manual labor, because DEI isn’t about increasing the wages and benefits for those professions. Also, those policies don’t do anything for members of the working class that actually have the targeted identity markers: a black woman working at McDonald’s is never going to be offered one of those new positions created for black women at Goldman Sachs.

And especially, there’s the issue of “leftist” moral health regimes like mandatory masking and vaccinations that arose during covid, and also the longer-term technocratic programs like smoking bans. The former is still quite a big deal in the United States, with “socialists” elevating covid vaccinations to the level of the Eucharist, a religious act signifying a person’s entry into a universal communion of believers. The latter — smoking bans — is especially an urban US and UK-wide moral program (though the EU recently debated a Europe-wide ban on smoking on public sidewalks). The lower classes smoke and do lots of other things (like eating fast food) that the PMC — and the NPB who emulate them — find morally repugnant. Just as with Victorian-era decency laws (and Prohibition), these classes are eager to use the state against others “for their own good.”

The Capitalists Divided

But there’s still one part of these equations missing, which you can see in this summarization of the current political alliances now:

• The “Right”: old Petite Bourgeoisie, workers, national/manufacturing capitalists

• The “Left”: New Petite Bourgeoisie, Professional Managerial Class, internationalist/finance capitalists

You’ll see that I included two categories of capitalists in there, and that’s because the capitalists themselves are currently divided between those who want stronger nation-states and those who want stronger international institutions.

This is a division easiest to see in Germany and the United Kingdom, but it really applies throughout the West. In those places, manufacturing is in imminent danger of collapse due to competition from China. So, the capitalists in those places who derive their wealth from manufacturing and related industries would love to see more import tariffs and even more state investment.

On the other hand, the finance capitalists of those same places, as well as the corporations (including literally every tech company) who outsource their labor to the Global South, would suffer greatly if internationalist institutions like the WTO or the EU were to weaken or even collapse. They need open border regimes, free trade, and weak nation-states in order to maintain and increase their profits.

The various alliances between these two groups of capitalists and the other classes ultimately come down to self-interest. The national capitalists exploit the working classes of their own countries — that’s how they gain their wealth. But if they cannot open factories or other similar sites of production, then they lose their capital and those workers lose their means of survival.

Contrary to this, the internationalist and finance capitalists need the movement of money and products between countries to derive their capital. They need to buy labor from wherever in the world is cheapest in order to increase their wealth, and to sell the products of that labor wherever in the world they’ll get the highest price. They also need to pull out investment in one place at a second’s notice and re-invest it in other places — usually somewhere else on the globe — the next second. And they need a whole population of skilled intellectual workers to make that happen.

Those skilled intellectual workers are the PMC and the NPB. They’re the ones who manage these movements of information and wealth, including such apparently strange and unrelated tasks like siting new locations for an international coffee chain, generating “content” for the thousands of new Shopify websites created daily to sell Chinese factory overstocks, or crafting internal policy white papers to make tech workers a little more efficient through happiness incentives, or writing think pieces in the Guardian about how eating vat-grown meat and living in crowded apartments with your polycule will save the environment.

The (Potential) Rebirth of a Working Class Left

The thing is, while the internationalist faction of capitalists needs the PMC, they’re starting to need the NPB less and less. In fact, they’ve already begun the process of dismantling the NPB, which is why they (we) are “downwardly mobile.” Artificial Intelligence — refined algorithms and Language Learning Models — are replacing the kinds of work those of us in the NPB do. All the examples I cited above can now be done through ChatGPT and similar systems, and more is coming. I personally know scores of copywriters, translators, editors, artists, and online shop owners who are now desperately looking for waged 9-to-5 jobs in industries completely unrelated to their training. You probably know scores of them as well, including maybe yourself.

The Petite Bourgeoisie — in both its old and new forms — has always been a transitional class. By this, I mean that those within it can easily be shunted back down into the working class through sudden economic disruptions or downturns of fortunes. But where the old Petite Bourgeoisie usually has some physical wealth (a house, a workshop, a storefront, manual tools, etc) to fall back upon, the New Petite Bourgeoisie has nothing. That makes them less resilient and therefore more terrified of these changes. And because they’re so precarious, they’re more likely to support and even agitate for politics and politicians that keep the current neoliberal order together.

That’s why they supported Kamala Harris despite her having no other policy platform except “more of the same.” That’s also why they so vehemently opposed Brexit in the UK, and why they’re so eager to see EU expansion in Europe. Any alteration of the previous “progress” that created their class in the first place means they’ll have to join the faceless mass of regular workers that Blair, Clinton, and Obama each promised they could finally escape.

And that’s especially why they hate Trump so much. Not only does he not speak for them, but he speaks to the very classes against whom they’ve constructed their entire personal identities and moral constellations.

But let’s be clear: their hatred is a borrowed hatred. It’s really the PMC and the internationalist capitalists who have the most to lose from someone like Trump. The NPB was already dying out thanks to the very politicians and policies they supported. They — again, we — were not just a transitional class, but a temporary class. Like migrant or seasonal workers, or like office temps, we were created to help implement a radical change in the way capital functions, but we were never really going to benefit from that change.

And though this is profoundly unfortunate for us, it’s quite fortunate for what remains of the old (Marxist, anti-capitalist) left. That’s the left that hasn’t really existed since the anti-globalization protests at the turn of the last century. That was the last time (with maybe a short gasp during Occupy) that the left and workers actually spoke the same language.

Since then, the “left” has been dominated by the PMC, with the NPB aping whatever ridiculous trash (critical race theory, intersectional feminism, DEI) the PMC has churned out. But now that the capitalists don’t need so many of us to oil the new digital cogs, many of us will be forced back into the traditional working class again. We’ll have to find jobs where our university degrees (I don’t have one, but I basically do) look like big fucking jokes, constantly taunting us with what we were “supposed” to become versus what we’ve actually become. And in such a situation, we — the soon-to-be extinct New Petite Bourgeoisie — will naturally start aligning with the working class again … because they will also be us.

1. A short list of American working-class cultural forms would suffice to understand where the cultural difference begins: NASCAR, football, July 4th barbecues, country music, rap music, pop music, Sunday church services, lottery, fishing, Wal-Mart, Black Friday sales, picnics, potlucks, gender reveals, and weddings.

2. Remember that health insurance CEO who just got shot? He was a member of their class.