Towards a better class analysis

The woke mob are "fallen" professionals who invested time, money and effort into gaining access to a club that will no longer admit them. No wonder they are angry.

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Late last year, I came across a blog that beautifully explains the painful political and social divide we are all currently living through. I spend a lot of my mental capital wrestling with the terms “left-wing” and “right-wing” as political phrases that have ceased to convey accurate information, adding to a lack of socio-political clarity in almost every conversation.

Benjamin Studebaker has found an elegant and simple way to explain our destabilising social moment. He points out that professional jobs, which require expensive university degrees, are no longer the ticket to economic stability and prestige that they once were. An ever-smaller group of professionals has managed to maintain a foothold on the career ladder, and Studebaker calls them “rump professionals.” Below them are their peers and fellow grads who did not. He calls these the “fallen professionals.”

I was one of the fallen. My past career and its changed trajectory — downward— transformed my political perspective and renewed my interest in class-based divisions. The lack of strong class analysis in the mainstream cultural narrative caused me to lose faith in the intellectual elites that I once trusted. These elites embraced shallow and misguided identity politics with greater and greater intensity, while demonising those who didn’t conform to this new ideology. 

Studebaker makes the crucial link between white collar job insecurity and the woke mob:

“A university degree no longer guarantees a stable, robust standard of living, but it still separates those who have it from those who do not. Why? Because college students are socialised to pursue the degree as a means of demonstrating their merit. When that merit goes unrewarded, young would-be professionals grow very cross. They want their virtue to be recognised. Unable to earn more or enjoy a higher living standard than the workers, the would-be professionals retreat into the cultural realm. They use the language and ideas they learned at university to assert their moral superiority, gaining an imaginary victory over the workers.” 

Nothing illustrates his point more than a spate of videos taken last summer during the protests against police. In one video, a group of slender, young adults scream abuse at a line of New York City cops. The cops stand there silent and stony-faced. It’s not just abuse — it’s class hatred. A woman tells them “you go to clown college for like 26 weeks.” One of her comrades, a shirtless, fey man in a green tutu hisses “you know hairdressers have to go to school longer than you do. Half of you don’t even have a college education.” (Posted 1 July by @Julio_Rosas11) It’s possible that the kids in the video have excellent, stable jobs in the field of their choice, of course, but it’s also possible they are theatre or gender studies grads working part-time as baristas.

I’ve seen dozens of similar videos of young people violently protesting last summer, and they all look and sound very much like “fallen professionals.” The woke mob are actually people who have invested time, money and effort into gaining access to the prestige industries that demand an expensive university education. They are emotionally attached to that outcome, and long to enjoy the trappings of success that living and working in that milieu brings. But they cannot access it. Gatekeepers block their way.

Studebaker’s essay it reflects some of my own experience. As I slid all around the increasingly slippery career ladder, the swift and angry rise of woke culture in the media lead me to retreat into a bubble, where I busied myself helping my partner build a business. From a distance I watched, aghast, as identity politics and extreme left-wing views choked more and more life out of public discourse. Studebaker gives us an interesting materialist take on the incentives behind the media’s push toward identity politics and, provocatively, calls professionals the “house slaves of capitalism.”

“Because the fallen professionals want to feel superior to the ordinary workers, the rump professionals have a financial incentive to sell ideas which flatter this superiority complex. This has led, in recent years, to the development of a woke industry which invents new terms and grounds for taking offence. By using these terms and taking offence in these ways, the fallen professionals feel they are participating in the culture of the rump professionals and they can distinguish themselves from the ordinary workers, who fail to use the language or to recognise the offensiveness.”

The essay also gave me insight into the youthful angst I have been critical of in past essays. I am now in my mid-forties. It has been a defining feature of my life that, whenever I have spoken to an older professional, they tell me how much better it was when they started out. This has been happening to me since the early 90’s, when I was still a schoolgirl. So I know how disheartening it is to hear that you missed the boat, that your odds are long, that even just a mere few years ago your chances would have been much better, but things are tough these days. That was the soundtrack to my teens and 20’s. It’s even worse for people coming into the job market today. The great democratisation of education has simply created too many bright young things with nowhere to shine, and their heads full of aspirational career notions. The economy cannot soak them all up. It then becomes all too easy to blame capitalism, or racism, or patriarchy for this dismal reality.

To be fallen is painful. It’s painful to the ego, which longs for the kind of validation you don’t get unless you are in the types of prestige organisations I once worked for. It’s painful socially, as you feel like a failure. And of course, it produces a terrible anxiety as you realise you cannot make even basic financial moves like buying a home in a decent school district, or paying off student loan debt. To be fallen prevents a person from becoming an adult. A large group of young people who are prevented from accessing the responsibilities and moderating influences of adult economic stability make for a restive population. They can become the bedrock to a revolution.

For me, falling out of my chosen career — twice — was very difficult. But because it lead me to being a small business owner, it was also incredibly illuminating and ultimately empowering. It forced me, understandably, to align myself with capitalism, and view it as a tool of personal liberation. Although I once considered myself a socialist, I have stepped decisively off that train. 

But that has placed me on the outside of what was once my milieu — friends and family who stayed with an intelligentsia moving increasingly to the left. I am now politically homeless, but I understand them, the people on the other side; how they viewed the brazen antagonism of Donald Trump as terrifying and intolerable. These concerns (which I once shared) were ramped up by media coverage of his shady business dealings (which I believed) and his many other perceived failures.

But there is a qualitative distinction between those who have stayed with the left-leaning intelligentsia and those who have moved away. Those of us who have left the left share a deep concern about ever-increasing government power and the overweening administrative state. Those who stayed with the left, seeing their cherished dreams of a better society disappear, demand even more of the government policies that failed to deliver that better society in the first place. The government, in turn, is happy to oblige as it allows them to increase their power.

This has had two negative consequences:

• It has overburdened individual workers and small businesses with increasing regulation and cost of living and;

• It has created a newly disaffected bourgeoisie which is confusingly both obsessed with systemic governmental misdeeds while simultaneously demanding that the government take more control over individual’s lives. Those New York Times readers devoted to the idea of what the paper once was still consider themselves informed and sophisticated. But they are wrong. The objective reality is now that anyone who gets all of their information from legacy media, is basing political and social judgments on the output of deeply questionable institutions. But the economically and socially vulnerable remain emotionally tied to the perception of status that comes with being consumer of specific kinds of media.

The Maoist tendencies now in vogue among our over-educated and underemployed youth may just be a passing fad, youthful protest energy that will naturally dissipate. Unless of course, it is successfully harnessed to create an ever-more powerful surveillance technocratic superstate that will no longer be burdened by democratic accountability. 

This essay was originally published in October 2020 on my site, www.whitegirlsburden.com. I’m sharing it again because Studebaker’s post is exceptionally good analysis of our current political polarisation.