Slavoj Žižek’s latest, “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie” [ht: ke] is a bit of a hodgepodge, containing powerful insights and a political economic analysis cobbled together from Marx, Jameson, and Hardt and Negri.
It’s well worth a read but I do want to pick a bone with one aspect of his argument: what he calls the “salaried bourgeoisie.”
Žižek’s argument is that many of the recent protests, from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street, represent a revolt of the “salaried bourgeoisie” (or, at least, in the case of students, of those who fear they won’t be able to join that particular class).
In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only recourse, if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are nominally directed at the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting against the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place. Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shruggedof 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.
It’s not only a revolt of the “salaried bourgeoisie,” since Žižek is more careful than that, as he explains:
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 do think Žižek minimizes the role of workers, both employed and unemployed, in and behind those protests. For example, workers did join the Egyptian protests en masse, and the high levels of unemployment in the United States and elsewhere are an important part of the background of the Occupy movement (whether or not the jobless make up a larger or smaller percentage of the actual occupards).
But it’s the notion of the “salaried bourgeoisie” itself that I want to focus on. It’s a bit like the old “professional managerial class” in attempting to make sense of all those employees who seem, at least at first glance, not to fit into the traditional industrial proletariat (Žižek’s textile workers) or the traditional bourgeoisie (who, in his view, owned the means of production). In Žižek’s usage, it includes everyone who receives what he calls a “surplus wage,” from CEOs to teachers, public transport workers, and police.
One problem with the concept is that he identifies the “new bourgeoisie” with corporate managers (a category which he then extends to include many others).
This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value, but in the (mystified) form of what has been called ‘surplus wage’: they are paid rather more than the proletarian ‘minimum wage’ (an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia), and it is this distinction from common proletarians which determines their status. The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities in earnings). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus they get takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc).
In my view, Žižek makes the mistake of conflating a receipt of some portion of the surplus—which CEOs and other corporate managers do in fact receive—with the appropriation of the surplus—which, for the most part, they don’t participate in. So, then, who is the bourgeoisie? Who is the personification of capital? Within the terms of Marx’s critique of political economy, the members of the boards of directors of capitalist corporations form the capitalist class. They are the bourgeoisie—a much smaller class than what Žižek defines as the “new bourgeoisie.” Those who get a cut of the surplus may identify with the bourgeoisie but they do not occupy the class position of capitalists.
And many of the others Žižek includes in the “salaried bourgeoisie”—the public-sector employees, for example—may be able to strike pay and benefit packages that are higher than many employees in the private sector but that doesn’t mean they are getting a cut of the surplus. Their “surplus wages” are because they have unions not because they occupy the same class position as corporate managers.
It’s true that changes within contemporary capitalism require that we revise and update our class categories and think about all the different forms of labor and remuneration that have appeared in recent years. But throwing them all together into the category of the “salaried bourgeoisie” just confuses the issue and serves as a poor guide for a political analysis of the conditions and consequences of the struggles that erupted during the Arab Spring and have now spread around the world.
