Good Evening Friends,

You know, if you read the chapter entitled "The World of Capital," in Chris Harman's A People's History of the World, one is struck at the extent to which our very values and sense of ethics have been handed down to the rest of the population, in a top-down manner from the bourgeoisie to the rest of us. To ponder this makes one almost feel dirty and violated.

These values and sense of ethics were entirely consonant with, and seem to have grown out of, the emerging capitalist means of production. These ideals include: punctuality (as work became more and more tied to the clock and moved further and further away from the natural rhythms of the day and year); efficiency (getting the most productivity out of each worker through the least number of motions) - "time is money;" "clean living," (in the form of a stable home life - a man/wife nuclear family (such an home life, it was decided by the capitalist producers, that such a private home life tended to make workers more acclimated to punctuality and productivity; and this set the right example for the next generation of workers.

The promotion of organized sports by the bourgeoisie, in addition to being yet another means they had/have at their disposal, to drain away the disposable income of the working class back into their own pockets, also served as a means of promoting nationalism, something completely unknown to European popuations during the early periods of post-Roman/Byzantine monarchical rule.

There are other values of modern capitalism (in America in particular and perhaps promoted and practiced by the lower classes with special intensity since the 1970s), that have suffused society and have, arguably been imparted to us from the top down. What makes this objectionable is that the bourgeoisie, very nearly by definition and by the nature of their power, do not seem to feel bound by them and indeed, may not even see this characteristics as virtues applicable to people like themselves; and I would go as far as to say that they seem to see the exact opposites, for themselves as virtues.

But before we enumerate some of these others values, let me remind you of the ethical definition of Existentialism I take from the Cambridge Dicitonary of Philosophy (1991): a philosophical and literary movement that came to prominence in Europe, particularly in France, immediately after World War II, and that focused on the uniqueness of each human individual as distinguished from abstract universal human qualities.

So we're talking about the abstract universal human qualities that capitalism promotes - for the lower classes, of course.

Perserverance: "Never give up." "Fall off a horse, get back on again." "Winners never quit and quitters never win." "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." And so on and so forth.

What this means in the economic life of our society is that when one of us loses his job, he has to find another way to earn a check. We are constantly enticed with the panacea of going back to school or "retraining." We are steered to career counseling and the like, with all the attendant services that go along with this. We're offered advice on writing winning resumes and sharpening our interviewing skills and the like.

A period of unemployment can be like a dark sojourn through the wilderness. We got to remember to "keep [one's] head up," "keep a stiff upper lip," and remember that "the sun'll come out tomorrow. Failure brings admonition, from various quarters to "try harder."

Do the bourgeoisie need to have perserverance? By definition, no, not when you are at the top of the power structure. When a member of the capitalist ruling class "loses" his job, for whatever reason - even by his own fault- he does not find himself "scrambling" for the next opportunity. We have seen this is so during this crisis of the economy with respect to the banks that were "too big to fail, which means, really, that the top executives, were, themselves, too big to "fail," go personally bankrupt paying lawyer fees, and go to jail, as we don't lightly jail billionaires in this country.

We have seen the irrelevance of perserverance to the bourgeoisie, as the recovery of the financial sector as a whole was heavily favored over the manufacturing sector, Detroit; especially in the way contracts were held to be sancrosanct with respect to payments made by AIG (facilitated by the U.S. taxpayer) to foreign banks and members of the international investment sector - having bet correctly, apparently, on derivatives- as well as unconditional bonuses paid over to employees of the domestic investment apparatus; while the living standards of auto workers came under relentless assault, as the CEOs (at one time even criticized for coming to a hearing before Congress, one time, via corporate jets) had to submit these "restructuring" plans proving their path to viability before the government would give them one dime. The banks were not subject to any such "accountability."

Also, when a member of the capitalist ruling class "loses" his job - whatever the reason, his own fault or some other reason - his departure from the corporation is usually facilitated through a negotiated settlement, perhaps allowed to resign, and he is, of course, given his "golden parachute," tens of hundreds of millions of dollars. He is promptly hired somewhere else (and he probably hasn't lost any of his, on average, fourteen board memberships) - long before you and I would have received our first unemployment check.

Be we, on the lower ends of the food chain, must perservere the turbulence of the free market.

Petty Bourgeoisie: they are the next rung down and don't quite have the social power of the upper capitalist ruling class, to persuade the government to "bail" them out and so forth. I guess you could call the petty bourgeoisie the near-rich. When one of these loses his jobs, I doubt that he has to suffer the indignity of "retraining" or the unemployment line, as the members of this group tend to heavily aggregate around the dominant sector of the economy, finance, or whatever it might be in any period in history. When one of the petty bourgeoisie loses his job, he is likely to get a very respectable severance package, so that he doesn't have to get another job right away. But he can probably get another gig soon enough, since he either knows a guy or knows a guy who knows a guy, and presto! he's got another job - again, long before you or I would have received our first unemployment check.

There is a speech available on the Internet given by Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman in the year 2007. He said that the top "hedge fund guy," in 2006, had made the salary of all eighty thousand New York City public school teachers - wait for it - for the next three years. Such a man we would identify, I think, as the top layer of the petty bourgeoisie. You know, I had seen a story on television about a man who had been a hedge fund operator for a firm, lost his job in this recession, opened his own shop, but the economic downturn forced him to close his doors, and found himself delivering pizzas after having previously pulled down a salary of seven-hundred-fifty thousand dollars a year.

That he could fall so hard and so quickly marks him as a member of the lower rank of the petty bourgeoisie. No doubt circumstances do call upon him to exhibit a certain resilience, as he struggled, last I "heard" from the program, to keep his family in the large, petty bourgeoisie-type home (obviously he had some money saved. Ah, savings, what a concept). It looked like he was going to pull his children out of the private school they were attending. But a mysterious benefactor had stepped forward to cover the costs of keeping his youngsters in their school and with their friends.

Now, our friend, the sidetracked hedge fund investor/pizza delivery man, made an explicit statement of class solidarity, that illustrates that perseverance - to the limited extent that it is even called for , even by this deposed member of the lower echelon of the petty bourgeoisie - operates in an entirely different way than it would for you and me. He said something to this effect: he made a statement that was a combination vow, assertion, wish, and invocation that he was going to be back on top and be in a position to do what the mysterious benefactor did for his kids, for someone else's children. All he needed, he said, was to score a few "wins" that year.

First, families whose children attend public schools have no need of such a service. Second, you and I know that working people (low income and low-middle income) do not talk this way about making their personal recovery from extended periods of unemployment or underemployment, in terms of "wins," lightning in a bottle, unless, of course, we're talking about winning the lottery.

You know, our friend, the investment pizza delivery man, has every reason to be hopeful. The entire resources and power of the federal government is clearly devoted to the recovery of the financial sector, as we see, and which I understand comprises twenty percent of the economy, and which is far more than can be said for manufacturing - refugees from which must undergo the indignity of "retraining," seminars on writing winning resumes and interviewing and keeping a "stiff upper lip," and so on and so forth. And if this green jobs bubble ever takes off, why the investment opportunities should be limitless.

What about the upper middle class? Do they need perseverance? The upper middle class is made up of lawyers, doctors, college professors, journalists of radio, television, and print, accountants; politicians (my reckoning is informal and imprecise): they are generally, in terms of income of income and wealth are in this area, upper middle class/petty bourgeoisie, depending on their office they hold; and depending on their status in their party and the political system in general, they may reside at the power nexus of the bourgeoisie itself.

These are not sectors of the economy that tend to be cut back. We are familiar with the incumbency rates of American politicians and we have seen how the mayor of New York and the city council decree themselves a third term despite the wishes reflected by voters in two public referendums. These are not people, who, should they "lose" a position need to undergo "retraining." They may undergo retraining, but it is by and large because they wish to make a career change for personal reasons; it is not because they find their whole world crumbled down around them because of deindustrialization, the offshoring of productive capacity to areas with less expensive "labor costs," and mass layoffs, plant closures which seem to close down whole town and cities as well, and so forth.

The Lower Middle Class: police officers, fire fighters, public school k-12 teachers, unionized public sector employees, small entrepreneurs, nurses, x-ray technicians, EMTs, and the like. Here is where we begin to have need of the abstract universal human quality of perseverance. City and state budgets go through periodic cycles of "belt tightening," and so on and so forth. But these are "skilled" workers (I put the word "skilled" in quotes because I do not believe any human being, by definition, can be unskilled). There will always be need for emergency services, especially the police, and not to mention the prison complex, as long as economic inequality continues to deepen. There always be a need for educators, presumably, even in the privatized, corporate world of private and charter schools. Small entrepreneurs are on a more precarious ledge, as their business might ebb and flow with the seasons, and be constricted by other factors. And so on and so forth. But because there folks are skilled labor in trades that cannot be easily outsourced and offshored, we don't think it is likely that they have persevere in this political economy as the next two groups we'll look at, but I hope we are coming recognize, even now, that these supposedly universal human qualities are abstract because they are not imperative across the board; the different classes experience them or not, in vastly different ways.

Its important to say that these values we are examining were handed down to the rest of us from the bourgeoisie, and were necessary for us to "believe in" in order to make the capitalist system work for the ruling class; but because of this, almost by definition, they not only see themselves as bound by them (in terms of the political economy), but, again, almost by definition, they, as a matter of course, practice the very opposites of these values; and it is vital to note that each of us claim to draw on these values much more than we actually do, as everybody knows, America is the land of the "rugged individual." This gulf between the claim and the reality will come into stark relief when we acquaint ourselves, very briefly, with the analysis of Noam Chomsky, concerning the actual nature of the free market, and we will see how, in addition to the structure of our political economy, the very nature of what we think of as the component parts of our sense of values, were, in fact, handed down to us by the bourgeoisie, in a kind of paternalistic, do as I say not as I do form.

Working Class: people who work in the "unskilled" or "low skilled" service sector, all the lower echelons of retail, all non-supervisory personnel certainly; people work in factories - most likely lost them to offshoring as America transforms itself into the "knowledge" society, and so forth. Construction workers, mechanics, plumber, electricians: especially non-union workers in these trades; landscaping workers; people who work in restaurants, hotels, airports.

But what about perseverance? What need of perseverance do we, working class people, have? Much more than the classes above. It is this class who must persevere, who are told that they must "update [their] skills," and the like, when their world crumbles around them with the plant shutting down, as has already been discussed.

The Poor: here it is important to note the difference between what is called the competent poor and the abject poor (it makes a world of difference when you have access to some land on which you can do a little hunting and fishing, maybe grow some vegetables, to sustain yourself and your family - which what is called the abject poor do not have, of course).

The abject poor, of course, have the most need for perseverance, for obvious reasons; and they make for a compliant potential labor pool, naturally.

We're going to go to another post on this.

wingedcentaur.