Slavoj Žižek on the Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2012/01/11/slavoj-zizek/the-revolt-of-the-salaried-bourgeoisie

An excellent short essay by Žižek, the excerpt below being especially telling of what is really going on around the world and in our own country in regard to such movements as Occupy Wall Street.

“Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, which are mostly strikes on the part of a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their privilege (their surplus over the minimum wage). These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job has itself become a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers with guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life.

At the same time it is clear that the huge revival of protests over the past year, from the Arab Spring to Western Europe, from Occupy Wall Street to China, from Spain to Greece, should not be dismissed as merely a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie. Each case has to be taken on its own merits. The student protests against university reform in the UK were clearly different from August’s riots, which were a consumerist carnival of destruction, a true outburst of the excluded. One can argue that the uprisings in Egypt began in part as a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie (educated young people protesting about their lack of prospects), but this was only one aspect of a larger protest against an oppressive regime. On the other hand, the protest hardly mobilised poor workers and peasants and the electoral victory of the Islamists is an indication of the narrow social base of the original secular protest. Greece is a special case: in the last decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) was created thanks to EU financial help and loans, and the protests were motivated in large part by the threat of losing this privilege."

I agree completely with this.

It's kind of sad, really, though understandable.

I often find aspects of Žižek's sociological examinations insightful, but his economic analysis is nearly always flawed. Worse, he truly believes he's providing insights traditional Marxian analysis fails to address—primarily because he's under the delusion that capitalism has somehow evolved in some profound sense. (He's not the only contemporary social critic engaged in this, individuals such as Jodi Dean are just as guilty.)

Take, for his example, his claim that exploitation is no longer the primary source of wealth. He frequently qualifies this by stating something along the lines of: 'workers at Microsoft and Google are paid handsomely for their work.' Yes, of course they are, but the amount of a worker's wage has nothing to do with whether they're being exploited or not. (House slaves enjoyed a better material existence than their counterparts in the field, but were they not still chattel?) We may consider the market method of remuneration to be unethical, but that's an entirely different argument. His belief that intellectual property is now the main source of wealth is, at best, partially correct. Patents have existed for virtually as long as capitalism itself, and the fact that genes, entertainment, etc. are now patented just as inventions are isn't a major development. Patents allow capitalists to charge a monopoly price for their products, yes, but those products couldn't be produced and profited from unless laborers were being exploited.

Now, let's turn to his theory of a "surplus wage" and the emergence of the "salaried bourgeoisie." In the article, Žižek explains how the traditional bourgeoisie (i.e., owners of means of production who directly control their firms) have largely been replaced by corporate executives—a process which has been underway for well over a century—who don't own the companies they work in, but nevertheless appropriate surplus value. By virtue of their status as autonomous leaders of their enterprises, they are also in a position to remunerate themselves at exorbitant rates. This is all very important, and chiefly why socialists tend to consider corporate executives de facto capitalists. It is here where I have no problem with Žižek's (not very original) concept of a salaried bourgeoisie. However, when he includes public sector employees, doctors, lawyers, journalists, etc. into this class, he begins muddying the waters, as it were. If you define a surplus wage as anything above the minimum wage, as Žižek does, then it's true that most of the workers in those sectors are recipients of said surplus, but that shouldn't include them among the salaried bourgeoisie. While being non-productive workers, and therefore owing their existence to the value produced in the productive sector, they play absolutely no part in the extraction and appropriation of surplus value. Moreover, their role is critical to the production and distribution of value under capitalism nonetheless. And what of the numerous skilled productive workers (such as those in the few remaining manufacturing industries in the United States) who, while exploited, earn significantly more than, say, a post office clerk or school teacher? In my opinion, Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel's theory of the "coordinator class" is far more useful for economic analysis than Žižek's salaried bourgeoisie.

As for his contention that many of the participants in Occupy Wall Street are anxious members (or aspiring members) of the salaried bourgeoisie—by which he means middle class workers, in this context—who fear becoming proletarianized, that's undoubtedly true. There are many reasons why movements like Occupy are primarily middle class and student orientated at this point, and I've discussed several of them elsewhere. However, while there may be a disproportionate amount of students or public sector employees at these demonstrations, you most definitely will not find CEOs or hedge fund managers among the crowds.

In conclusion, Žižek would do well to distinguish between de facto capitalists and non-productive workers, regardless of how better paid or how much more leisure time the latter group receives relative to minimum wage workers. And, most importantly, he should cease in marginalizing the continued relevance of exploitation under capitalism.