Some things should have been left in 2011, the mystifying 99 percent slogan is one.
We are the 99% was the rallying cry of the Occupy movement. While its usage has slipped since 2011, we’re starting to see efforts to revive the slogan as protests against Trump gather pace. This may be because people want to revive the spirit of Occupy itself, whether they just like the slogan, or because the phrase has slipped into the common vocabulary of class analysis and activism in the meantime.
Rather than explaining class relations in an accessible way, the 99% mystifies how capitalism works and leads to a very confusing interpretation of class struggle. It leaves the door open for a conspiratorial view of how capitalism works, and often acts as a cover for reformist, social democratic methods for how to fight it.
First let’s look at the 1%. This generally means the top 1% richest people in the world. Presidents, CEOs, Wall Street Traders. As Naomi Klein recently put it, the Davos Class.
The 99% is literally everyone who isn’t in this group. By design this includes the CEOs of quite a lot of small and medium enterprises, low- to mid-level managers in corporations, trade union bosses and NGO executives, police, prison guards, journalists, aspiring politicians, academics, as well as regular workers and the unemployed. Some early occupy protests had chants like “Cops are the 99%!" "We're fighting for your pensions, too!", usually shouted shortly before the cops tear gassed people rather than afterwards.
The 1% are the billionaires, the tech oligarchs, the Wall Street traders.
The 99% are the people, the vast majority of society.
The 99% has recently been used by the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign , in a recent Guardian article calling for a Global Womens’ Strike on March 8th which mentions it three times, “a feminism of the 99%” counterposed to the feminism of “Lean In”, and was defended vigorously by Conor Kilpatrick in Jacobin as a simple way to figure out what class you’re in.
Capitalism however is not maintained by the actions of the Davos class or the 1%. Rather it’s a hegemonic social system that is maintained primarily through the social relationships of wage labour and commodities.
You have to earn wages to get money.
You have spend that money on rent, utilities and food in order to survive.
Your work either involves the creation/distribution of commodities, or the maintenance (or management) of the workforce itself if you work in sectors like education and health.
If you’re unemployed or imprisoned, you may be working anyway via workfare and prison labour, just on wages and benefits below the rate of subsistence.
Robots might be taking your job, but they aren’t delivering food free of charge to your door each week to make up for it, or wiping your arse when you get old.
These are not hard concepts to grasp, every time you wake up on Monday morning or look at your bank balance they confront you. Every hour you spend at work reinforces the system you’re fighting against one way or the other.
How do we struggle against the 1%? Unless you live in San Francisco, London or New York (or even if you do), you might never see a member of the 1% in real life. What we’re left with is usually symbolic protests inside or outside civic and financial institutions, which locate the source of power as something unattainable and remote. At its worst, talk of ‘bankers’ tends towards structural anti-semitism and locates all the world’s problems in the shadowy conspiratorial meetings held at international summits. Often it results in coalescing around left populist electoral campaigns, which need as broad a constituency as they can possibly have to hoover up disaffected voters.
Despite these limitations, Occupy did get involved with protests that disrupted capital and especially in Oakland made links with workers including the November 2nd 2011 demonstration. These aspects of the movement should be revisited as the reaction to Brexit and Trump gathers pace, but the idea of the 99% should be left behind in 2011 where it should have stayed in the first place. We should also be looking at other recent movements such as the 2010 student occupations and protests in the UK, the 2006 movement against the CPE in France, the 2012 student occupations in Quebec, the 2015 prison strike in the US, the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore against police violence in 2014/15, and the 2006 immigrant strikes in the US.
When you struggle against work via strikes, slow downs, and slacking off, you confront capitalism at the point of production. When you struggle against police violence, evictions, immigration raids and homelessness you confront capital as it maintains property relations and social control. This is class struggle against the processes of class reproduction, counterposed to the static categories and redistributionism of the mainstream left.
Rather than the 1%, these struggles come against the letting agent, the HR department, the police, immigration authorities, property developers, local government officials. Those who enforce borders, wage cuts, gentrification, rent hikes, criminalisation of communities and all the other shit. They cannot be mobilised as part of the 99%, if at all by rejecting their role entirely. The abolition of the police, not their co-operation as we saw at Occupy Sandy. The expropriation of tech CEOs, not their incorporation into cross-class liberal #resistance.
Focusing on the 99% or the 1%, rather than encouraging class analysis, focuses attention away from class struggle and towards protests against abstract and remote actors. Even when owners of companies and housing are far away, the offices, shops, warehouses and housing blocks they own are the places we live, work and shop.
- Mike Harman's blog
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Comments
Mike, it needed to be written. Thanks for doing it.
You say:
"the 99% mystifies how capitalism works and leads to a very confusing interpretation of class struggle."
As a slogan, 'we are the 99%' encapsulates a number of important class realities;
1) the system we oppose is one in which the vast majority is dominated and dispossessed by a small elite. Recent scholarship has shown just how small this elite has become due to corporate globalization ("structural adjustment", "free trade agreements", "intellectual property" and other euphemisms).
2) the people we are talking to, despite their diversity, are all part of an oppressed class, a meta-class which transcends and includes Marxist categories like "lumpenproletariat", "petit--bourgeois", and the "middle class" (public servants, teachers, security guards, soldiers etc) who are increasingly subject to the same kinds of workplace stresses (overwork, casualization etc) as other workers. Guy Standing has called this meta-class 'the precariat'.
3) when the majority refuse to continue passively participating in the system that benefits the 1%, and move their energy into "building a new world in the shell of the old", the 1%'s system cannot continue, and most of us will be better off.
4) we, who call for this revolutionary transition, are not speaking to the listener/ reader as a vanguard party, requiring "the proletariat" to follow us so we can defeat capitalism on their behalf of. We are speaking as equals, desiring the participation of as many people as possible in a shared project of creating and defending new social forms.
You think a less confusing description of a class perspective is...
"...a hegemonic social system that is maintained primarily through the social relationships of wage labour and commodities."
I suspect that to those who don't have a liberal arts education or years spent reading revolutionary literature (ie most people), this sentence would be meaningless. Having read 'Society of the Spectacle', I do know what your sentence means, which is basically what I described above, and what 'we are the 99%' communicates in a simple phrase of everyday language.
The fact that electoral populists like Sanders have appropriated the phrase from the anarchists who coined and popularized it (Graeber et al) just shows that they understand what a broad appeal it has. To reject the phrase on this basis is like rejecting all science technology just because it's been appropriated by the state and capital.
Just briefly, my last boss - owner of the company - made a point of talking about the 1%. She was a good Bernie Sanders supporter and considered herself a good employer. In fact, when we raised some issues collectively, we rec'd an email telling us (and I'm basically quoting here) how if we - the staff - were doing this against Wal-Mart, the owners would support us. But they're just a small mom and pop and how well they treat us, blah, blah, blah...
And, it's true, my boss was definitely not in the 1%, but her class relationship to us was one of exploitation. So I really don't think the fact that me and my last boss were in the 99% encapsulates anything about class realities, I'm afraid.
Don't know about you, but most of the times I've had a direct class conflict, it's been with a member of the 99%:
Landlords: (raising rent, not doing repairs, evicting me)
Senior managers and bosses: (increasing workload, making it hard not to do unpaid overtime, trying to steal wages etc.)
Police: (kettling, protecting fascist marches, stopping/questioning me outside protest situations for things like 'cycling in daylight', and 'sitting on a park bench with some friends').
If you focus on an 'elite' and absolve everyone else, then you're not in a position to deal with these things. Also you'll end up focusing on redistribution rather than social transformation, i.e. to 'make the elite less powerful' or similar.
I didn't mention 'lumpenproletariat, 'petit-bourgeios' or 'middle class' once in the post. However it's interesting you bring those up, because when Marx talked about the 'middle class' he meant capitalists (literally the bourgeios), not teachers and librarians. He mostly talks about the capitalist class and the proletariat in Capital, sometimes about landowners and peasants.
Regardless, whatever emphasis or lack of emphasis you want to put on strata within the working class, he didn't say that bosses of companies employing tens or hundreds of people were going to make the revolution. The people who went on and on about petit-bourgeios and 'middle class' were the Bolsheviks in Russia (often while they were putting Tsarist factory owners back in charge of their factories as managers), not Marx himself so much. Similarly we can recognise that the police rely on wage labour, but not treat them as people it's possible to organise with - this is not a hard concept for most people that have ever actually come into contact with the police.
Most previous uprisings and revolutions were carried out by large, active minorities, with 'the majority' not necessarily on one side or the other. The main barrier to their success was making alliances with representatives of capital like social democratic parties (i.e. exactly what the 99 percent theory encourages) which then ruthlessly crushed them, and/or failing to spread internationally and getting ruthlessly crushed by armies from other countries. It's never been that they didn't include bosses and police in their lists of who to work with in order to get their numbers up.
You missed out the next two sentences, I think these are pretty clear:
Unlike, say, the 'precariat', which is just describing the position of the proletariat as it's always been, but claiming it's a recent phenomenon and creating yet more jargon. That's covered pretty well here https://libcom.org/library/19-proletariat-precariat
I think Mike Harman has got it basically right. It may be true that a libertarian communist society would be most beneficial to humanity as a whole (maybe even the 1%?) and there is a 'humanist' element to the communist project but this doesn't get us very far when trying to analyse the class structures of the modern world or understand how different classes and and social layers are motivated to struggle in practice against the detrimental and dehumanising effects of capitalism on their lives. A moral appeal to the majority 99% on the basis of 'we are all in it together' ignores and confuses the contradictory process of developing and extending collective struggle through conflict. The material basis, motivation, timing and forms of struggle of the different layers of the working class, middle class owners and professionals,, genuine peasants, tribal people and so on are not all the same. And... 'Building' class struggle is not the same as trying to 'build' a new collective property base in the shell of the old. We cannot expect to start a process where we hope to end it.
This is great! Cheers for writing. Coherent and accessible too, which is important