The End of Respectable Wage Labor

The labor market we all know and love(?) is about to... well, it's complicated.

It is hard to recognize when one lives in a historical exception, a period of time not only unlike the past but also so unlike the future, it becomes more probable that the coming years will resemble an era thought long gone than what is familiar. The United States, fifty years ago, supported one kind of society with a remarkably clean (at least, in theory) social contract. There was a large, genuine middle class; people who followed a small set of basic rules were invited to join it. In 2023, as a rising tide of economic dysfunction ensludges all boats, we see reversion to attitudes and behaviors that might seem antiquated, but are more objectively recognized as commonplace within human history. The postwar prosperity and the high-trust society we were, alas, proved not to be permanent progress but an anomaly. Today, the supposed middle class has been pushed to the margins by decades of double-digit inflation in the Satanic Trinity—housing, medical bills, education costs—and, for reasons to be discussed below, no longer really qualifies as one; it is not the norm for a person at the statistical median (of income, wealth, or social standing) to be in the sociological middle class, and it does not seem to be the case anymore. Our self-asserted economic leaders have shown, during the pandemic, a willingness to have us die for their own profits—the rent and the interest must eat first. Morale is terrible; a market has been made for authoritarian politics. The future, no doubt, will have "leftists" and "rightists" because there is always some kind of spectrum, but it seems that the ideology that is classically called liberalism—the idea of a society being held together by consensual social contracts rather than force—is not long for this world.

Decades of gains have been lost; however, it is not accurate to say that progress is impossible. We are, simply put, at a point where it would require a forceful overthrow—this need not be violent, as violence is a failure mode, but it always requires the threat of violence—of global capital. Morally speaking, this would be utterly justified. The argument backing so-called private property "rights" is that we owe some deference to previous generations—and the heirs they have selected to rule over us when they are gone—but our society has been run so execrably over the past few decades, we owe them absolutely nothing. Alas, it is impossible to say whether such a revolution is imminent. History, as well as present conditions in much of the world, shows us that people will tolerate decades of abysmal treatment without response. Furthermore, not all revolutions win; the moral rectitude of a movement does not guarantee its success. It is just not as easy as it should be to depose and eliminate a ruling class.

I will offer predictions here, but it is requisite for me to admit that no one can actually see into the future—the best one can do is, by assessing the present, develop an inertial forecast; that is, to describe what will happen in the absence of the sorts of events (e.g., natural disasters, radical technological changes) and human forces (e.g., unrest, revolution, and war) that are innately unpredictable. What I shall discuss is the trend, the midline. It is not guaranteed to happen and it is not necessarily what I think will happen. It is, more specifically, where we are going if no revolt against global capital occurs, and it is not, for most of us, a good place.

There is much political claptrap about the United States "middle class" as proof of our society's exceptionalism and virtue; we are told that historical societies—or modern dysfunctional ones in the so-called "third world"—lack middle classes: there are only rich and poor. What social classes even are requires lengthy discussion, and we will have to get into that, but for now let us say that this is mostly false. Medieval England did have a middle class; so does the contemporary United States (although, statistically speaking, you are not a part of it.) Even Marx, notable for his rejection of a middle class's importance—his work, based on the correct presumption that a middle class is too unstable to do more than fight for its continual survival, and therefore has no real discernible historical will, focused mostly on the tensions between the lower and upper classes—would have said that a middle class, socially speaking, did exist. There are poor people and rich people; there are also, usually, people who are poor but that should be, by a society's logic, rich... and vice versa. There's always a middle. Still, the distinction that really matters in most societies—and, also, the one we have become—is the one that exists between those who own and those who sell their labor. People in both classes "work" but toward different ends; owners commit their time to preserving the conditions of ownership, while workers exert the efforts that actually keep the world running, though they earn next to nothing for it. Marx called the former class the bourgeoisie (ruling class) and the latter, the proletariat (working class). We shall also use these terms; they are not without some simplification, but they are the most accurate. Throughout most of human history, the wage labor market has been a ghetto, relied upon only by the abjectly desperate, and it is still this way in the Global South, where salaries, even for jobs that are lucrative and respected here, are so low that transition into the owning class is impossible. These two-class societies (again, there are more than two sociological classes, but the two poles are all that matter) have a dynamic that was once called "third world"—there is widespread inopportunity, government corruption exists on all levels, the economy is languid—but that has become familiar, in recent decades, in North America as well. This is capitalism's only possible future. Profits have been maximized to the bone; the muscle has long since been eaten, and what's left for the beast to consume are its own organs.

To see where we are going, and why we are going there, it is necessary to examine preindustrial societies. Of course, in our doing so, we will simplify grossly. We are not smarter than these people were; their societies were often as complex as ours are today, and they varied widely in religion, culture, and worldview. The ranking of social classes—there are six of them—that will be explored below did not exist in the same form everywhere, and it is not necessarily true that all six of them are found, though at least four usually are, and the ranking tends to be stable, for reasons rooted in human psychology. For example, the competing elite ("Class B") might have been clerics in India, secular civil servants in China, vassals (knights) in Europe, and samurai in Japan; none of these social classes would have recognized their counterparts elsewhere as similar. Still, the real social roles of these classes show uncanny recurrences; this stratification seems to apply to all settled agrarian societies—and we shall discuss, shortly thereafter, whether and why or why not it does apply to ours. The six classes are:

Class A—the noncompeting elite. Every society requires mobility through competition, but the people at the top, notably, never want to compete. They might sully themselves with gross effort; worse, they might lose. Class A consists of the pontiffs, the monarchs, and—in today's world—the billionaires. They do not work for anyone; the world is expected to work for them. This class is hereditary; its existence was traditionally justified through religious dogma and the threat of supernatural punishment—today, self-asserted prior achievement ("property rights") is used instead. In some societies, such as the contemporary United States, people in this class will posture as Class B, to argue that they exist at the pinnacle of a so-called meritocracy, but this is largely a show our rulers put on to keep ruling. In their minds, they are superior humans, and there is absolutely no reason they should justify themselves, or their disproportionate consumption of resources, to us.

Class B—the competing elite. In this class are the generals, the financial ministers, the vassals, and the top bureaucrats. In Plato's elitist terminology, they have "souls of silver," meaning that they are second-rate at true leadership but, nevertheless, skilled at tactical work. Internally speaking, this class tends to be more meritocratic than Class A—since they do some actual work, Class B moves their incompetents into unimportant roles to minimize their damage. All that said, entrance into this class usually remains closed and hereditary in practice; it is rarely open to more than a couple percent of the population. Society does tolerate meritocratic upward mobility in times of extreme need, but when such exigencies do not exist, the Class B jobs go to second sons of aristocrats. Only during a crisis—or an anomalous period of expansion and a state-supported, strong middle class—will opportunities exist here for the progeny of wealthy peasants ("Class C") and merchants.

Class C—the free peasantry. Although "peasant" is used as an insult today, this usage is historically abnormal. In fact, it remains a compliment (e.g., paisan in Italian, similar to mensch in Yiddish) in many languages. Nations have typically viewed their free farmers as their most valuable people; this is part of why we call them countries. Administrators, elites, and armies are unfortunate necessities—free productive people are, at least in the ideal, the treasured creative force. (This does not always mean they will actually be treated well. More on that later.) They plant the seeds that feed everyone. There is a wide income range among this set; there are peasants so wealthy (the gentry) they no longer have to work, and there are others who are so poor, a few bad harvests or a wartime pillage might push them into serfdom or, worse, wage labor. Indeed, it is not false to say that most peasants—historical and contemporary—are low income by today's standard, although measurements of their finances are often misleading, because free peasants use money rarely. In good years, they share food with their neighbors, to build the social connections that will sustain them in bad ones, when they might need help. Peasants work together on each other's projects—raising barns, building houses—in an economy of favors and gifts rather than material trade,which can be measured and taxed. In general, throughout most of history, free peasants did not work nearly as many hours—or under such oppressive micromanagement—as modern workers, though one should not romanticize their conditions. During planting and harvest seasons, they worked 14- to 16-hour days; the labor was exhausting and usually beyond their ability in old age. Still, the annual total work bill for the typical historical peasant was about 1300 hours per year—when there wasn't anything for them to do, they rested. 

Class D—bound laborers and serfs. Serfdom was not a benign institution, but in most countries, a serf was not the worst thing a person could be. Although serfs did not own land, they knew the land they worked better than its owners and were concordantly bound to it; they were, thus, skilled labor. Serfs enjoyed certain legal protections; the manorial lords had to care for them when they were sick, and provide food and shelter year round, regardless of whether there was work for them to do. Serfs could not not be sold into mines, factories, and brothels. A separate class of similar standing were the skilled artisans who were members of strong guilds; often, they were wealthier than serfs and even free peasants, and they were legally free, but de facto they relied on their guilds to exist—should they lose such auspices, they would fall into something worse, something dishonorable: wage labor. 

Class E—wage labor. Traditional people, like people today, did not seek out risk. They feared poverty and dishonor far more than they could be driven by the prospect of surplus income. Even a manorial serf was guaranteed subsistence, but a wage worker had to earn his pittance every day. Although they were and are not slaves, legally speaking, it is not truly accurate to call a wage worker, as one might a landowning peasant, a free rather than bound laborer. Society simply has not bothered to bind them yet. But it knows how to do so; when wage earners become too uppity, it is facile to reduce them to bondage through the time-tested cycle of usury, inflation, and personal debt. Although wage labor is today considered not only respectable but mandatory—those who do not participate, especially if they are male, are reviled; even owners of capital pretend they live or die on the whims of the market—we live in an extremely unusual time. Although it has always been possible (but very rare) for a wage laborer to beat the house at its own game and become wealthy, very few societies have considered the bargain worthwhile—extreme risk-taking, especially for people with families to support, has traditionally been considered dishonorable. 

Class F—slaves. Modern societies like to claim this bottom tier does not exist at all—in the U.S., involuntary servitude is illegal, except for prisoners. To be a slave is worse than to be a bound or wage laborer; slaves' families can be broken up, and it is often legal to sell or rent a slave to an employer of any kind. Though societies have varied in terms of how badly they have made it legal to treat a slave, it has never been good to be one. In addition to the moral issues—I would argue that it is objectively wrong to enslave people, and I doubt I would find much disagreement—this class can become an albatross for a society for a wholly functional reason: if a job or class of tasks is assigned to slaves, it becomes difficult to get free workers to do it. Serfs and above will outright refuse; wage workers will demand a premium over the pittance they usually receive. Thus, modern societies tend to keep this class—like the embarrassing incompetents who populate the hereditary non-competing elite—out of sight. 

The ranking above, notably, is not about wealth or income. Wage earners can become wealthy; free peasants and even junior bureaucrats (ascending Class B) can be poor. Instead, it is about the protection to which society believes a person is entitled. Kings will start wars to protect their free peasants—not only are they the ones who define the country, but they produce the food that everyone including kings requires to survive—but this would never be done for the sake of slaves or wage workers, who can be imported or replaced.

The six-class system above seems foreign to us, because the psychological principles seem at first not to apply to our society. We view a person as high-ranking because of the car or house or jewelry he possesses or can access; traditional societies ranked people based on what they were protected from. The bourgeoisie, as it ascended, upended this. A medieval peasant would have considered a 10 percent chance of dynastic fortune and a 90 percent chance of ruinous poverty to be a terrible bargain; bourgeois financialization might, instead, run the numbers and find positive expected value. Of course, the narrative of class overthrow in which the historical bourgeoisie displaced the aristocracy and gentry is not at all accurate—the people of the old upper classes assimilated, on an individual level, into the new bourgeois world with great ease; they were the ones with such wealth that extreme numerical risks could be tolerated.

The merchant class's greatest strength—and, historically, the reason most societies have so despised it—was its lack of shame. We are talking about people who would willingly do wage labor—they had no manorial or feudal social connections; they had no reputation to protect—if the price were right. Of course, we must recognize survivorship bias. It is true that, from circa-1400 to circa-2000, there really was enough opportunity in wage labor for people, if they played employers against each other faster than their bosses to figure out what was going on, to make small fortunes and occasionally (as owners, using skills from upper-tier wage work) large ones. At the same time, most of the people who took this path ended up worse off for it: starving, losing their families, falling into debt bondage, being imprisoned, getting conscripted into wars. The bourgeoisie that rules over us, the winners of this game— along with quite a few former aristocrats who want us to believe they played it—are no better than millions or billions of us who lost in this brave new world of shameless commerce; they are just luckier. And of course, the bourgeoisie's founding myth is almost entirely a lie. The "self-made men" who climbed the rungs of the labor market into the owning class were, nine times out of ten, already secure in, or at least near, their acquired position at birth; the truth is that the bourgeoisie absorbed the prior upper class—to mutual benefit, and at everyone else's expense.

The bourgeoisie contention has been that wage labor ought to be ubiquitous; they even claim that salaries for corporate executives are, in fact, "fair" market wages—a claim that, given the extreme rarity of the social connections necessary to become one, does not hold up. To make respectable something—wage labor—that had once been considered dishonorable took time; it didn't happen overnight. Until the Gilded Age, the upper-tier peasants and aristocrats who worked in business discussed their labor among peers as if it were an eccentric dabbling, like recreational card counting or hobbyist mechanical work. Although I am sure most of these people invested substantial time in such endeavors, it was not a thing they would admit to. In order to remain respectable, these people had to be something other than businessmen—poets, statesmen, and farmers. We see the remnants of the pro-peasant disposition today; people who grew up in suburbs describe their childhoods as "rural", and middle-class Southerners still refer to everyday homes, where nothing edible grows, as "the farm." While it became common, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, for people's businesses to bring more income than their land holdings, no one would have told anyone.

Peasants and serfs especially were disgusted by the notion of living on the market. They took pride in the skills—seed selection, crop rotation, planning one's annual labor—that set them apart from day laborers, as well as the deep webs of social connection they formed by sharing their surplus produce (since, often, they could not do much else with it; no one would be served if it rotted.) Peasants understood that nature would give them years of barley and years of watermelon, but no fruit of this world was sweet enough to justify the risk of one's children falling into mines and brothels, so they resisted the new order as long as they could. The bourgeoisie—domestically, via enclosures; abroad, through wars of conquest—had to force it upon them. 

Does the six-class model above apply to modern society? Formally, no. There are very few peasants, insofar as our economy is no longer centered on agriculture. I would say that, as an abstract social model as well as a consequence of human psychology, the six-class model does have some applicability. Classes A and F are extant, but their very existence is socially unacceptable, so they are hidden from us—the truly wealthy have neither the desire nor need to impress us. The four intermediate classes, it seems, have fused into an amalgam we are to take as evidence of a large middle class—even, as that of a classless society. Businessmen want us to receive them as something like the historical Class B: a competitive elite who had to earn their positions. Small businesses, and the romance around them, channels Class C; indeed, this class persists in exceptionalist societies (expanding empires) that can promise future freedom, esteem, and wealth for those who succeed while implementing the expansion. Class D—with the necessary but often decried protectionism—persists in some of the fields we call professions, though many of those (consider academia's nightmarish job market; consider how easily software engineers are divided against each other over minutiae such as code indentation) have been so incompetently managed as to plunge their people, along with the rest of us, into Class E: wage labor.

In the new world, however, wage labor is neither dishonorable nor dishonored. Historical societies considered it perverse and immoral to bet one's health, dignity, and family on the whims of the labor market. The modern view is that one should, and must, do so—markets are the closest thing we still believe in to deities; the bourgeoisie tells us they are omniscient. Of course, the conditions into which most people fall are—and, in the United States, it is increasingly so—degrading and dishonorable. The bourgeoisie has succeeded in convincing us that the problem is not with wage labor as an institution; rather, fault lies with the 90+ percent of us, as individuals, who for some reason fail to thrive in it.

The bourgeoisie, like the labor-averse aristocracies it claims to have deposed, makes pretenses of respectability. This disallows its direct, visible involvement in imperial expansion; the issue is that bourgeois society requires it. Wage workers are only actually free (and, therefore, disinclined to organized action or even violence) when they can reinvent themselves—when there are new places they can go where they can state their industrial and professional histories to be whatever stories they might invent, and no one will check their references. Until 1920—I'll discuss our postwar prosperity later—these new places came to us at the expense of indigenous North Americans. Manifest destiny and natural resource extraction allowed capitalists to lock in a rate of expected economic growth—an invisible number that is not quite the same thing as, but behaves similarly to, an interest rate—below which any shortfall became everybody else's fault: if you can't keep up with student-loan interest or rising housing costs, it's because you, as a worker, are failing to increase your productivity. Of course, we no longer live in a time of facile expansion; as a consequence, all things that do not directly serve the very rich are falling apart. Millennials and Gen Z have had to work far harder than their parents and grandparents, and have received far less. We don't know what the precise jobs (as in, the tasks and labor) of 2050 will be, but it is very likely the case—it is absolutely true along the inertial timeline in which global corporate capitalism persists without forceful opposition or overthrow—that the only good ones (sinecures in government and corporate bureaucracies) will go to children who aren't ours. If the inertial timeline is, in fact, our future, then wage labor will revert to the historical norm, by which it is viewed as—and, for most people, truly is—dishonorable, degrading, and unprofitable. 

There are many reasons why this inertial outcome might not occur. We could go socialist, replacing wage labor with mutual aid. We could see a rise of old-style, Bolshevik left-authoritarianism—whether this is painful-but-desirable or catastrophic depends on whether it is the leftism or the authoritarianism that remains in place after the revolution succeeds. There are uglier possibilities, though. We could see the breakup of the United States. We could see fascism; we could see needless external wars—when young men have no option but subordinate labor, the only option they see as having masculine dignity is to carry a weapon: soldier is the only role invented, over five thousand years, that is both subordinate but accepted as masculine. The inertial outcome, the trend, is only one possibility, but if it is what we see, the U.S. will become identical to the "third world" societies we decry, where gated communities are everywhere, government corruption is a way of life, social cohesion is nonexistent, and armed men guard the entrances of shopping malls. In such a society, there will still be a middle class, just as there is one in these broken countries, but it will be neither as large—it will be 5 to 10 percent of the population, at most—or as prosperous as the one we had in the midcentury. 

The six-class social model above does not describe, with precision, any specific society. Real societies might have had four or eight or twenty-seven formal castes into which they ranked people. Nobles considered the distinction between a baronet and a marquis meaningful; my analysis does not. No medieval peasant conceived of himself as sitting in the third of six social classes within a model that would be produced eight hundred years later; still, he did know that he ranked below the kings and courts, but above the serfs, wage earners, and slaves. And yet it must seem—in light of our modern obsession with precisely how many social classes there are—that any assertion of that model's relevance contradicts Marx, who asserted that only two classes really mattered. Does it?

Political ideology tends to dictate, in the United States, how many social classes people believe there are. Old-style conservatives—not the right-wing populists roused by Trump, who often exist in furious reaction to the same systemic failures we leftists have been warning others about for decades, but the mostly-extinct class of people who actually defended our nation's institutional capitalism—would insist that there is one: social class does not exist—rather, we live in a fair society—but is a story people invent to explain their personal failures. Liberals—here, I mean centrists who hold some leftist values, but still support and defend capitalism because they value their positions within it—will tell you that there are at least three social classes, because they are of course (all of them) in the middle one. And then we leftists, per Marx, tend to assert that there are only two economic classes that matter, and that almost all of us are in the bottom one. Who is right? The answer, of course, is: it depends. Are we talking about economic or social classes? Is our assessment of society static—that is, focused on a moment in time—or dynamic, factoring in the likely influences of political power? Does a person's own perception of his social class—recall that most people put themselves in the virtuous middle one—matter? The questions proliferate.

Traditionalist conservatives assert there is only one social class because they want to believe the society they inhabit is just; they refuse to see the influence of class, and prefer to believe that it either doesn't exist or, more commonly, isn't important. Liberals are willing to believe that social classes do exist, but almost always put themselves in the middle one or, if speaking in confidence, in an upper-middle one defined by meritocratic success. And then we have Marx, who put himself out of style for a hundred years, despite his impeccable analysis of capitalism as it behaved during his time, with his assertion that only two social classes—owners versus workers, haves versus have-nots, capital versus labor, past versus future—truly matter. It did not make him many friends, among those who proudly place themselves in society's warm middle, to do so. But Marx was right. There are people for whom the inertial passage of time is a friend—interests and rents will accrue faster than costs—and people, most of us, for whom it is an enemy. The petit bourgeoisie has capital, but lacks power; they do not get to decide whether their houses (and house values) are blighted by above-ground power lines, highways, and nearby construction. They remain reliant on the labor market to survive, and while they believe they hold "cultural capital" and "social capital" and "career capital" that shall protect them from a bad turn, this stuff turns out to be paper armor in a real crisis.  Having been a Goldman Sachs V.P. in 2017, or having great references from prior employers, or holding a degree from Harvard, does not mean all that much when the world goes off its bark. On the other hand, a small number of people—the true bourgeoisie, the true owning class—have actual capital that can be used to hire armed men to protect one's holdings. Marx judged, in his time, that the middle class was on a path to extinction. He was not, in an inertial context, wrong. Middle-class status is inherently unstable; the people who control the labor market on which your existence still depends will use their power only against you, never in your favor. What seems to have refuted Marx is that, by 1960, the North American and European middle class appeared stronger than ever. A middle class, it turns out, can exist and be stable, so long as the conditions supporting one persist. What it takes is support, extensive and expensive, from the state. Marx failed to predict the world wars and how they would reshape not only nations, but the perceived role of the state.

To the extent that the U.S. had a middle class before 1941, it was largely a nomadic, prospector class driven by western expansion and natural resource extraction. The postwar, midcentury middle class was more sedentary in nature, and it was also created by explicit design. This was not always benign—black Americans were often excluded from the prosperity into which the state allowed white working people to rise—and it was, without a doubt, a reactive move. The Soviet Union, many of whose leaders truly did believe they were building a communist society, created modern middle classes even in marginal countries that had once been very poor. Children of leather tanners and beet farmers studied nuclear physics and aerospace engineering. The West knew it could not retain research supremacy over its Cold War rivals unless it supported a middle class generous social programs, abundant and affordable education, cheap and accessible housing, and a de facto federal job guarantee for skilled labor—which forced the private sector, in turn, to adopt a civilized employment climate. Wethus experienced  the "nice guy" capitalism of the U.S. midcentury, but when the Cold War ended, so did the elite's need for us, and now we are back in normal history, the kind Marx wrote about.

In discussion of the bourgeoisie and what it means to be bourgeois, we need to discuss terminology. The historical bourgeoisie was the urban middle class of the early Renaissance, simultaneously  admired for its industriousness and despised for its shamelessness. Today's bourgeoisie is, at least superficially, quite different; they have made virtue signaling (as empty as it often is) ubiquitous. Also, how is it that the bourgeoisie is a tiny upper social class, but bourgeois values—which describe middle, not upper, class values—are everywhere in our society? The answer, of course, is that bourgeois culture is built from the rules the rich tell us everyone follows, while they of course do not. Indeed, the very rich and very poor are often alike in their shameless rejection of bourgeois liberalism—the former have broken all its rules to get ahead; the latter, if they followed any rules, earned nothing for it. This shared view at the top and bottom of society is voiced by Logan Roy in Succession, who claims life is "a fight for a knife in the mud." As a billionaire, Logan stands at the pinnacle of the bourgeoisie while he flouts bourgeois values in private: "There are no fucking rules." This is also, one should note, why the most competent of his four children, Kendall, is the one he least respects. Roman, proud to be a rich wastrel, insults bourgeois culture at every chance; Siobhan exploits it for personal benefit; Connor lives as if it does not exist. Kendall, however, truly buys into bourgeois liberalism—he believes shareholder interests matter; he believes he can oppose his father's political will without destroying the relationship; he believes corporate business can be done without indulging in the toxicity of the bad old days (which, in truth, never ended.) The validity of bourgeois liberalism, a ruse invented to disguise the conflictual and forced-based politics that actually underlie large-scale private property and inequality, is Kendall's tragic belief, the falsehood that leads to his ruin. Kendall, despite his dynastic birth, tries to be woke, hip, entrepreneurial—he tries to be middle class.

Money and markets are state creations. So, too, are the middle classes that market-based societies require in order to function. However, it is not commonplace for societies to need large middle classes with the political importance or level of prosperity that we, in North America and Europe, are accustomed to. Manorial society did not collapse even though most people were illiterate. Nations today where poverty is the norm can remain stable for a long time. A middle class is not an ontological necessity and, without state support, it dies. This is what we are seeing today.

In the inertial timeline, wherein the bourgeoisie remains in charge and dysfunctions slowly accrue, but there is no major intervening historical event to challenge their rule, we shall probably see a return of the attitudes that produce the six-class work-caste model. History suggests that it is more native to us as humans to rank ourselves and each other according to social freedoms and protections than by the fluctuating and often illimpid status of someone's finances. Protection from competition (Class A) is always more sought-after than the freedom to compete (Class B). Work that is seen as self-sufficient and positive-sum, such as farming (Class C,) is valued more than labor, even if it serves a necessary or even noble purpose, that must restrict supply—arguably, disenfranchising the free market—to command decent payment (Class D). Wage labor, unless supported by a vast state bureaucracy as well as rapid economic expansion, becomes a contest (Class E) to live as poorly as possible, and leads mostly to bad places.

This will induce, in our culture, a cycle. As wage labor becomes less individually profitable, the well-to-do will take less effort to pretend they participate in it. To live on the market's whims will cease to be a point of pride; it will become dishonorable, like reckless gambling, again. The fantasy of market capitalism is that volatility is an opportunity to be sought; the reality of people who must eat every day is that human systems are fragile, participation in dangerous or degrading labor often has permanent negative consequences, and that serious personal risks are traditionally considered intolerable unless compensated with extreme opportunity of a kind that hasn't existed in capitalist wage labor (at least, not for the people doing it) for decades.

Class F, the slave class, is trickier to discuss. It is not, at present, accurate to call most workers "wage slaves" because slavery, in the historical norm, is an adversarial legal status inflicted by the state (either deliberately, or by neglect) to compel labor. It largely exists outside of the law, either among those judged to have severely broken it (prison labor) or who have no real access to its protections (such as many victims of human trafficking, as "guest" workers in the Middle East.) Anyway, in terms of social status, the median corporate worker is more comparable to a low-tier serf than a slave; things could be a lot worse than they currently are. This, however, could change. COVID-19 seems to have accelerated the proletarianization of the former middle class. Malignant managers now have an arsenal of surveillance tools they can install on employee laptops. Communications technologies have made it easier for bosses to influence workers' reputations—it turns out that reputation is a vector for slavery—even after they leave a company. It is possible that these processes will continue until true unfreedom, for the worker, is achieved.

It is very likely, should the ruling class see fit to push wage workers into slavery, they will use the same time-honored mechanism the world has seen before: personal debt. Competition for jobs ensures that people can only achieve subsistence in optimistic circumstances—a more reasonable, or even pessimistic, person is forced to accept wages considered fair by people who cannot imagine yet that bad things happen to them—and so it has become normal to turn unfortunate events into personal responsibilities. An unlucky visit ("out of network") to one of our esteemed healthcare casinos might result in a six- or seven-figure bill. Unemployment insurance often fails to cover all cases, as if long-standing joblessness were a choice. Rent and housing costs go up as manipulators of inelastic markets enrich themselves. People forced to buy plane tickets on a tight timeline pay three times what the ticket costs for everyone else. We don't have a society anymore; we have a slow-motion, stochastic-stakes war—and most of us are losing.

As a classical liberal for longer than I have been a leftist, I could not understand why so many traditional historical societies held such hatred—usual, to the point of absolute internal prohibition—for usury, a term now reserved only for lending at extreme rates, but classically applied to all personal lending. To be clear, we should note that traditional societies did, in fact, allow lending at interest—commercial loans, such as a rural community's trade of a share in its harvest for help in building a bridge, were allowable. Still, it seemed archaic to me that personal lending—after all, people choose to borrow money—would have borne such stigma, even being considered an act of war. The problem, of course, is that usury begets inflation; as prices go up, people who would have been able to "live within their means" otherwise are forced to adjust. Usury leads to inflation which leads to more desperate borrowers; it's a cycle. Where this is most common, traditionally, is around milestone ceremonies—marriages, funerals; in our culture, the four-year-process of readying oneself for the labor market. the truth is—and Marx saw this, while most economists do not—that, while markets for individual products achieve equilibrium, the really big markets tend, for political and class and power reasons, to diverge. Debt enables distorted prices; workers compete by accepting lower wages; divergence becomes inevitable.

David Graeber, in his fantastic book Debt: the First 5,000 Years, discusses how these mounting debts, at first, seem harmless and ceremonial. No one goes to jail, in 2023, because he cannot pay his student loans. States and powerful individuals, in the West, are currently quite limited in what they can do to compel labor. Still, when conditions change and such needs are perceived, debt's existence—even when we are discussing ceremonial debts designed to be impossible to repay—is regularly used to justify new compulsions. There are many ways to turn people into slaves; the most effective might be to convince them that they had the same opportunities as everyone else—that they participated, every step voluntary, in a "free market"—but failed, personally.

The language of debt and legitimized usury pervade everything we do. Financial "aid" packages for college students often contain, far more than grants, loans that society must provide to support these ungodly inflated tuition levels. Today's ruling elite has eliminated the idea that people can—let alone, should; let alone, should and it is morally acceptable to compel them to do so—help others because it is the right thing to do. Instead, the aid given to nations in the Global South—scant reparations for centuries of colonial plundering—is offered in the language of loaning and borrowing; if unpayable, these debts are forgivable only when otherwise-involuntary concessions (e.g., privatization experiments that enrich the already wealthy, at national expense) are made. People accept the mounting debts—even the random ones that occur because of bodily misfortune rather than profligacy—because it seems easier to believe in a world system than to violently unbelieve; history tells us that it is very hard to know when people shall unbelieve, all at once.

The inertial trajectory of the United States is terrible. However, cracks in bourgeois society are beginning to show. We see this in the ferocious but often bizarre disputes we call "the culture wars." These divisions, by destroying social cohesion among working people, suit the short-term interests of the bourgeoisie; at the same time, they undermine the claims of rationalism and contractuality—human freedom has been maximized; collective identities are tribalistic and obsolete; we are all freely transacting economic units—on which bourgeois society rests. 

It is actually useful, as exhausting as the disputes are, to examine these cultural tensions. Dissertations have already been written about how racism, sexism, and religious bigotry drive support for capitalism; we shan't get too deep into that here. Rather, I'd like to posit that the core cultural tension of our nation—the geographic division between a "red" suburban/rural society and a "blue" urban one—is, in truth, a result of one of the most mundane factors—and, yes, a material one—a person could imagine. In the 1950s, one would not have found such severe differences in political outlook or ideology between Seattle and Kansas; there were Republicans who worked for the University of Washington, and Democrats with corn fields. What changed? A small difference in economic strategy, plus time. Although it is the norm, and has long been the norm, for all adult members of a family to work, it has become necessary in today's world for one to decide whether to pursue a one-career or two-career strategy. This isn't about liberalism or conservatism, nor is one better than the other. One-career families followed the single (traditionally, but not always, male) breadwinner wherever opportunities—higher salaries, cheaper housing, better schools—emerged, even if that meant living in unfashionable places. Two-income strategists found themselves restricted to a small number of large cities, where opportunities are numerous but the cost of living is so high that most people, financially speaking, did not come out much better. One wouldn't have expected this to produce such a divergence in outlook, let alone today's geographic rancor—that happened over time. One-income families began to view urban areas as unaffordable, unfriendly, and dangerous. Two-income families started writing off whole swathes of the country as "flyover states" or economic no-go zones where only unambitious losers lived (or, at least, stayed.) Stereotypes replaced actual people when it came to how Americans discussed—and viewed— people in the regions of the "other" political color. 

It might seem that the main battle in today's culture wars is over transgender people. It's not. This isn't to say that transgender rights aren't important; they are, but the really big battle—bigger than economics, bigger than the debate over society's acceptance (or lack thereof) of gender minorities—is one over the future of traditional masculinity: what should it be, and should it exist at all?

Working-class conservatives actually know—they are not stupid—that the politics they support go against their economic interests. Although pre-bourgeois societies viewed it as vicious—akin to gambling—for a man to willingly stake his family's fate on the labor market, today's conservatives have fully accepted the bourgeois position that it is, instead, the highest expression of masculinity to do so and survive. We on the left are often ignorant to the degree to which a large number of men—they are not stupid; they are not sexist; they are not all bigots—take pride in their ability to gamble on the labor market and not starve. Although an economist or a Marxist would say they are breaking even at best, they often believe, and do not like to be disabused of the notion, that they are beating the house at its own game—that they, with the speedboats they get to use during their two annual weeks of vacation, are actually winning.

Of course, if there are winners, there must be losers. Here's where we get to that this cultural battle over transgender people is really about. Note that almost all of the fury is directed at transwomen—those born men who choose to become women—and not the reverse. Transmen, like lesbians, mostly do not exist in the view of the loudest bigots; it is the men who are becoming women whom they feel are cheating. But why? Seeing as women still earn less than men in the workplace, wouldn't it be the reverse? 

Bourgeois culture's attitude toward gender is strange and self-contradictory, because while a bourgeois society must reject all aspects of tradition that might be impediments to commerce—we should all view ourselves as genderless, transacting units—it has no shame about leveraging traditional gender roles and expectations for their sheer motivational power. The view of traditional societies—this is dark, but it is recurrent—is that boys are to be gambled with and girls are to be gambled for. Both sides end up with distinct privileges; both end up with different disadvantages. The idea that one can choose the other package is, while not without precedent, unpopular in societies (and most do, and ours certainly does) that believe the performance of gender roles is necessary for their survival. The truth is that most transwomen—it is not easy to change one's gender, but expensive and extremely difficult—are doing so because of real gender dysphoria rather than any strategic reason (e.g., to avoid "losing at" maleness) but, nevertheless, the choice to opt out of the contests infuriates those men who see themselves as capitalist patriarchy's present or future winners. As they see it, it was never a choice for them whether to take up the capitalist's perversion of the hero's journey—to go out into the world, to do whatever takes to grab the bag, and to spend what is in the bag to get the prize that is a woman—and it should not a choice, either, for others they consider fully male. They have been told that women are prizes for participation in society; it disgusts them to see a biological male become, rather than conquer, the woman. Much as homophobic men often turn out to have latent sexual attractions to men, I suspect that most transphobic men are envious, secretly wishing they could have opted out of the masculine bullshit (perhaps, without full appraisal of the approximately equal amount of bullshit women endure.) 

The perspective above is foreign to those of us in liberal, "blue" regions of the nation. We tend to hold the view that gender is a social construct, and this is mostly true. We often believe that men are the more privileged gender—this one is far more debatable. We could spend hundreds of hours debating which of the mainstream (cishet) genders is more privileged and resolve absolutely nothing. In truth, gender privilege in today's U.S. is an insignificant rounding error compared to racial, economic, and class privilege. Proletarian men and women are abused; bourgeois men and women are coddled. I suspect the reason gendered hatred—even in a time when actual differences between the genders are low, historically speaking—seems to run so strong right now is that people make oblique comparisons; they do not anchor themselves to their true economic class and standing but, instead, to where they think they ought to be—what they believe "middle class" is still supposed to mean. If I were to give a summary of the gender-and-privilege question, though, I would say this: the short answer is that women are more protected, but also more restricted. Men more easily reach the upper ranks of the dominance hierarchies that corporate workplaces truly are (they are not meritocracies) but they also fall faster to society's bottom. 

The formal position of bourgeois culture is that men and women—as genderless, bloodless, transacting economic units concerned only with self-interested, numerical rationality—ought to be equal; at the same time, bourgeois culture embraces patriarchy because it is so effective at compelling work. We must be careful here; the word patriarchy may be charged, but I am using a technical definition. A patriarchy is a type of society in which three things tend to be true. The first is that a child's social status depends largely on that of the father. A boy whose mother is a CEO will be rich, but he will not have the same connections and opportunities that he would if it were his father who held that rule. The second is that, for men over forty, social esteem (which is related to, but not the same thing as, status) is measured by their ability to protect and advance the status of the young—sons foremost, other relatives next, friends and professional mentees distantly. The third is that such societies tend to hold an attitude of "men do; women are." It is tacitly taken as universal that the male desire for access to females is the motivation for everything; therefore, it is neither surprising nor scandalous when highly-placed men exhibit sexual misbehavior. We, therefore, absolutely do live in a patriarchy. Note that nothing has been said about which gender lives with more advantage, or which sex it is better to be. That is a completely different discussion; it is very possible to be male and miserable in a patriarchy.

A patriarchal society, such as the one the bourgeoisie has designed for us, does not conceive of itself as sexist, let alone misogynist. One could argue the opposite. Women, it tells us, have intrinsic value; indeed, bourgeois society tells middle- and upper-class women (working-class women are still treated like trash) that they are beautiful and courageous and wonderful. They are complete. It is men who must go out into the dirty bag, grab the bag, and woo the fairer sex. Men, on the other hand, are told that they have no intrinsic value, that they are worthless until they have proven themselves via material success, and that they will become worthless again if the means of wealth or an income are revoked. The Good News, says the bourgeoisie, is that women don't care about innate traits or physical appearances—in truth, they do, because everyone does, but they're not supposed to—but only one thing: material success. Every man is born with the ability to strap on a shield, pick up a sword, go out into the world and come back with a dragon's head or a pot of gold—and then, the women shall be his! The mythology behind patriarchy is that men make life possible, while women make it comfortable. Conservatives, men and women both, thus view it as a betrayal of a social contract—a refusal to engage in the work that makes life possible—when a biologically male person becomes a woman, opting out of being judged according to his success on the labor market. The men grow resentful at someone making a choice they considered never available to them. The women, who tend to focus on top-level reward profiles and therefore compare themselves, enviously, to the most successful men, feel disgust at those who've decided "real" women are not worth the pain involved in the quest to grab that bag. Of course, none of this stereotype-driven resentment has anything to do with actual transpeople or the real reasons for changing their gender; in the context of the viewpoint we're discussing, reality is irrelevant.

Bourgeois culture could not, in truth, persist without capitalist masculinity. Men and women will show up to subordinate wage jobs, if nothing else is available—and for most people, nothing else  is—and do the work. However, the system needs a few people inside it who really believe in the bourgeoisie's narrative. The specific brand of stupidity that leads a person to buy into capitalism tends, more often than not, to be male. There are heterosexual men. Convince heterosexual men that they can attract women by changing their names to Mary Sue, and at least a few will do so. Convince heterosexual men that they can attract women by inserting foreign objects into bodily cavities, and at least a few will do so. Convince heterosexual men that they can attract women by subordinating other men, and doing it so well that they get higher-paying and (just slightly) less subordinate jobs, and at least a few will do so. The deeply held—if logically unsupportable—view of the system's upkeep being inherently masculine is not, strictly speaking, a necessity to keep the whole thing running, as societies like ours can be run on unfree labor. However, if you want to keep up the mass perception of our current arrangement being voluntary and even desirable, you need to manipulate people's minds in just this sort of way. "Universal basic income? Keep that away from me! I'm a man!"

There has been much dialogue of late around toxic masculinity. I hope we can all agree that not all masculinity is toxic, and that men are not toxic—I see no reason to believe we are any more or any less toxic, in aggregate, than women—but, nevertheless, such a thing clearly exists. There are dangerous, empathy-deficient men out there. Capitalist masculinity and toxic masculinity are not formally the same thing,but they overlap. Toxic masculinity is openly self-centered, making itself impossible to like; it is not even charming, for it derives its own power from others being powerless. Capitalist masculinity pretends that it is merely ambitious. It seeks to expand, not to deprive. It sets (or has had set for it) simple rules and follows them. A man provides; that is simply what he does. To conquer and enslave the innocent is not truly what it wants to do—of course it isn't—but it would show weakness, and a lack of masculinity, to question orders if one's only concern were mere compassion for others. Subjective feelings just aren't important; objective control is. The logical extent of this is that all morality is feminine weakness rationalizing itself; I obviously think this is horseshit (and you should to) but it is the apotheosis of capitalism's masculine energies. Vae victis. 

Reckless gambling, although it is not restricted to men and, as a pursuit, seems (and, for many people, probably is) divorced from sexuality entirely, can be—and has been taken as—an expression of toxic masculinity. The payoffs and risks are not evenly shared between the gambler and his family. He, should he become poor, will suffer discomfort, but men are socialized to tolerate (and valorize) discomfort; those who depend on him, however, are at risk of powerless destitution. If he loses, they all lose. On the other hand, if he wins, they may not. Why does he seek ten times the means to feed a family, if there is not something in him that would prefer to have ten families (or, at least, ten—or many more—female sexual partners)? His losses are suffered by many; his gains might be only his. This, I suspect, is why one of the reasons gambling for serious stakes is despised by so many traditional cultures—including, to some extent, our own, if it is called that.

Most human societies have considered wage labor unreliable and dishonorable, to the point that people would only pursue it if they had no alternative. This said, the fact alone does not argue against ubiquitous wage labor, because almost all of these societies had views—especially around gender, and one's right (or, historically, lack of a right) not to conform—we would consider barbaric. It is useful, still, to understand the gendered reasons for the six-class hierarchy to emerge. Social class and status, in these societies, certainly matter; however, it is the doings of men that determine where people go. Networks of vassalage and manorial protection become common. The men held in highest esteem are the protectors; it is next best to be protected. Those who are neither are insignificant and valueless. We can see how the six classes emerge from the above. The noncompeting elite (Class A) are those who announce that they protect society from the gods; if they can convince others, they stay in charge. The competing elite (Class B) protects it from short-term perils. The peasants (Class C) require protection—as they are not professional warriors—but also protect everyone from starvation. Skilled artisans (Class D) protect themselves, although they are resented for doing so, by controlling their labor market; serfs are protected (but also exploited) by the manorial system. The people (Class E) who cannot extend, but do not receive, protection are the wage workers, near the bottom and traditionally not much higher than slaves. They're notionally free, but only because no one has bothered to make them unfree. As for Class F, the most unfree? They are the ones made examples; they are reminders of what can happen to a person who is not protected, and this puts them in the most stigmatized class—so stigmatized that it is often legal to abuse them.

The role of protection—and the role of its absence in the stigmatization of the lowest classes—is also visible in today's world with the phenomenon of so-called cancellation. It is not celebrities who get canceled over minor misbehaviors—Louis CK has not been canceled, and his misbehaviors were not minor—but average people, most of whose names remain unfamiliar, until a cursory web search leads to results ugly enough to prematurely—and often unjustly—terminate a hiring process out of their favor. Employers do not enforce cancellation because they care at all about the missteps that led to the public shaming—employers are not "woke"—but, rather, because the shaming happened in the first place. We are a society of appearances, a society of reputation. We are not a nation of shopkeepers; we are a nation of reputation managers. The reason a canceled person becomes unemployable is because his having been shamed indicates that he was unable to manage his own. It really is that simple; it is all self-referential (a lie unanswered becomes truth) and it is all bullshit. But that is where we, as a society, are. The truth about wage work is that the work itself—since all work, in the bourgeois world—does not need to be, and often is not, degrading; but the process of getting the opportunity to do such work remains so. The employer holds the power to turn off the worker's income, subjecting him to a months-long slog of a process—which some people, physically or psychologically speaking, do not survive—wherein he must beg strangers to get it turned back on. There can be no good in this, not really. Thus, we fetishize protection. We associate with those we believe will protect us; we collect educational and corporate paperwork—a curriculum vitae—with the absurd belief that past accomplishments will save us from possible future horrors. It is not so. We are not actually protected, and no one is coming to save us.

Bourgeois culture, in its drive to push all of us into a labor market from which profits could be maximally extracted, successfully upended the traditional attitude toward wage labor. We were told that it is noble—no, it is manly—to live on the market, without any protection. The vast majority of us failed to accrue meaningful capital; we were told that we were nevertheless accruing tokens—strong credit ratings, useful professional connections, fancy pedigree—that might confer some of the protection afforded to the real bourgeoisie by its capital (and, notably, from the state's willingness to forcefully protected its so-called property rights.) Today, though, all the social contracts are falling apart. The vast state support necessary to keep a middle class afloat is no longer there.  The contradictions inherent in the bourgeois mentality—we must be genderless transacting units, but we must also know and uphold our place in a patriarchal economy—are exposing themselves faster than anyone could spackle them out of view. People are realizing, at an unprecedented rate, that the society they live in does not make sense.

The inertial trajectory of our society is clear; the speed at which these processes unfold is less certain. Technological factors—in particular, those related to progress in artificial intelligence—shall play a major role, and I don't think anyone knows enough to make perfect predictions there. In today's world and at its rate, there is no more than fifteen years' worth of useful morale to keep our current capitalist system, in which we pretend mass participation is voluntary, going—if capitalism survives after 2040, it will be a kind far more illiberal than what we have today. We should expect the current socioeconomic elite to try for this—some of them may dislike fascism, on an individual level, but authoritarianism is what suits the class. It is their clear next move.

Furthermore, it is not possible to restore capitalism to a liberal state, as was done deliberately in the 1940s. The old arrangement, at a lower technological level, lasted a few decades. At ours, it would rot quicker than it could be built. We should not try to replicate what did not work now, when the odds are even worse.

The public seems to be stepping out of its former collective delusions. People, if they have the option, are refusing to return to their drab open-plan offices and long commutes; the sense of this having been a good way to live is gone. The future is going to find it absurd that, not long ago, we considered a lifestyle in which one obeyed pointless rules and answered to shameless careerist professional managers not only voluntarily but laudable—masculine, even. The Davos fantasy is that we will trust our economic leaders to manage our worsening economic circumstances in penance (although they themselves will sacrifice nothing) for prior geopolitical and environmental sins. That won't happen. The fascists hope to benefit from our nation's collapsed sense of purpose—to be in a capitalist country in 2023 is like being behind the Iron Curtain in 1987—by driving some bizarre fantasy of antique masculinity. I certainly hope that doesn't work. As for the rich, as individuals, most of them seem to be banking on the inertial trajectory, in which we regress to a "third world" society where some people are owners, some people are workers, and the classes do not mix. This outcome, as well, we should consider unacceptable. We can do better than this. This time, the Left can win, because capitalism is not just failing in a few nations, but failing everywhere it exists. The form of capitalism called "neoliberalism" is nothing but a euphemism for managed decline. It can, in fact, be beaten—your idea has more charisma if you are offering anything else.

The inertial forecast for the United States is dreadful, and my strong suspicion is that none of the social democracies in Europe are better off than 10 to 20 years behind us. If we do not defeat capitalism here, it will be imposed on them there. The U.S. is a testing ground for terrible ideas—our healthcare casinos, our absurd prices for higher education, our ridiculous employment climate—that are later rolled out all over the world. The system's moral credibility is worse than nonexistent and it is all about to crash. One can be nervous about the severe changes (as the inertial forecast is not necessarily very likely to happen) likely to take place; even still, the future is a major collective opportunity for the Left. And in a society where individual opportunity is next to nonexistent, that's something not to skip.