by Jose Luis Carretero Miramar
translated by the Center for Especifismo Studies [1]
The Spanish middle class is languishing, or at least that social group that called itself “middle class” for the last fifty years. Its main outlets for development and growth are looking less and less reliable (academic degrees, public employment, the Welfare State, “family” real estate speculation). The proletarianization and growing precariousness of younger generations has continued at a steady pace since the 2008 crisis. This means there’s a disturbance in the political culture of the diverse social melting-pot that for decades was best known for its strong identification with modernization, parliamentary democracy, and civil rights.
In his brilliant book “The Middle-Class Effect, Critique and Crisis of Social Peace” [2], Emmanuel Rodriguez details the historical process that produced that part of society which became the self-proclaimed majority after the Transition. The result was a cultural and social fabric that provided stability to Spanish parliamentary democracy, while at the same time hiding and pushing aside the revolutionary tendencies of the working class.
Rodriguez asserts that, in the classical Marxist sense of the word, “the middle class is more an effect than a class”. It’s a majority social stratum that considers itself both the leader of modernization and, at the same time, a safeguard against both the possibility of encroaching fascism and the recurring shadow of revolutionary rupture. This conformist majority has sustained the new regime for decades since it relies on the decisive actions of the State for its own material existence. Emmanuel clearly tells us: “The middle class is the State”. By this, he means that without repeated and systematic public policies to feed the economic base of this diverse and fragmented conglomeration, the “middle class” would never have been able to reproduce the perceived “effect” of social peace for so long, something which has characterized Spanish democracy since the Transition.
In Spain, public policies were behind the two major periods of middle-class formation. The first was the period of Franco’s developmentalism leading up to the Transition, which combined the expansion of public spending and employment with a new educational system, allowing massive access to academic degrees and facilitating the “declassing” of working class youth; and the construction of a “society of owners” through the development of an extensive housing policy oriented towards family ownership rather than rental or cooperative forms of housing found in other places in Northern Europe.
Parallel to the deployment of the neoliberal measures that became dominant later on, “asset price Keynesianism” replaced the already weary developmentalist-style Keynesianism. It was a public policy destined to generate repeated real estate bubbles. In a context of homeowners besieged by constant pressures on wages and Welfare State resources, “middle class” families became small “investment cells” that managed to compensate for the loss of purchasing power that had come to be associated with more neoliberal policies. They turned themselves into “amateur” real estate speculators trying to ensure the rise in prices of assets in their possession.
While this powerful stabilization did maintain the social majority’s affinity for watered-down progressivism and unflinchingly moderate bipartisanship policy, it eventually broke down during the 2008 crisis. When the real estate bubble burst, the Welfare State went into crisis mode, bringing on a wave of cuts in Health, Education, and Social Services. The credentials granted by the educational system lost their social value. The durability of the whole Social Security system was in question, and neoliberal policies took advantage of the flexible dynamics of the labor market. During the waves of proletarianization, more and more sectors of what used to be “the silent and stable majority of democracy” started to feel the effects. It was in this context that the “middle class” youth began to understand that their future would be full of precarity.
The first political manifestation of this cascading breakdown was 15-M. Also called the “Movement of the Plazas”, it was hegemonized and spoken-for fundamentally by “middle class” youth living through a process of proletarianization. Despite its poetic presentation, the basic demand was the reconstruction of a social agreement that had been lost. A re-founding of Spanish democracy was proposed as a way of giving new life to the “middle class”, to the Welfare State, and to the culture of “modernization and dialogue”. However, with the exception of very specific places, the town squares didn’t see a movement that championed a sustained form of anti-capitalism or a determined drive toward rupture with the system. They lacked any proposal for how to overcome the narratives of parliamentary democracy and the right to free enterprise. Instead, what was present was the will to generate a new horizon for middle class youth, a way around proletarianization by recovering public spending, expanding civil rights, and reevaluating the technical qualifications of “young professionals” (managing networks, group dynamics, etc).
Although Emmanuel Rodriguez denies it, there was also a workers’ 15-M. In fact, it’s rather symptomatic that he denies it. It’s another example of the hegemony of the narrative about middle-class youth and the movement’s subsequent conversion into an academic study topic. During 15-M, the combative unions mobilized in a way they hadn’t since the Transition. They called for united “days of struggle” and convened demonstrations with massive participation. The workers of the public sector fueled the “waves” of defense of the Welfare State. Assemblies in working class neighborhoods outlined transformative demands, occupied spaces to transform them into social centers, and kept the struggle alive when other sectors had already moved on. Militant trade unionism became one of the central pillars of the “Marches de la Dignidad” that mobilized hundreds of thousands of people (and which Emmanuel doesn’t even mention). But this workers’ 15-M is always kept on the margins, denied legitimacy by the one-sided narrative of a middle-class youth movement. It’s always talked about like some kind of ghostly element, like an uninvited and threatening guest. The hegemonic discourse is stuck in place, delineating the political limits of what is thought to be possible for a movement as well as what it’s given credit for publicly.
Since that time, the ongoing disintegration of the “middle class effect” has continued unfazed. Proletarianization started reaching into new sectors, negatively impacting the living conditions of those that never imagined being affected by neoliberalism’s productive innovations. Two major socio-economic shocks (the pandemic and the war in Ukraine) signaled a change from security and stability to economic precariousness for increasingly large sectors of the population.
The “middle class” has tried to defend itself in two main ways. The “progressive” current, largely heir to the “movement of the Plazas” is calling for a modified revitalization of the social pact from the Transition era. This means rebuilding the Welfare State to guarantee universal public services but with an even greater extension of civil rights to include women, sexual minorities, and those traditionally invisible groups that have been denied full rights in previous decades. The “sovereigntist” current, on the other hand, wants to create a future social pact between the proletarianized middle class and the ruling classes. While this is more declarative than material, it does aim to revive the concept of the “national” as well as the rights of “lineage”, converting the rights of the old, subsisting middle class into legal privileges that would exclude the new proletariat and other “dangerous classes”, made up mostly of migrants and minorities of all kinds. Its aim is to reconstruct a diminished middle class based on inherited lines of nationality, tradition and “blood”.
Both of these visions have clashed with the growing demands of a rapidly changing reality.
“Progressivism” continues to struggle for a new Keynesianism, undertaking ‘Sysyphean tasks’ on the social level. When it succeeds in plugging one leak in the great ship of Spanish society, four new ones appear somewhere else. This prevents the development of coherent, long-term policy. When attempting to regulate food delivery platforms, the “collaborative” apps expanded completely unchecked into every possible sector. Some delivery platforms even practiced open forms of civil disobedience against the new progressive regulations. When trying to approve a minimum subsistence income for the vulnerable, everything was derailed by the pressures that have consistently been put on public spending over the last decade, leading to weak and collapsing public services. When proposing new academic degrees and vocational training as a way of maintaining the class status of future generations, and faced with the devaluation of university degrees generally, “progressives” were forced to acknowledge that the salaries and social position of future generations won’t be able to reproduce the “middle class effect” to the same degree.
“Sovereigntism” also has its limits as a movement. It oscillates between ultra-liberalism and a return to fascist statism. The ultra-liberalism aims to dismantle the middle class, but the fascist statism still faces the same practical challenges as progressive Keynesianism (just look at what happened with the bank tax approved by Giorgia Meloni in Italy that was substantially reduced after only 48 hours due to market pressures). Policies based on “rights for Spaniards only” (the idea of lineage as the basis for social services) are difficult to implement given the aging population in Spanish society, and the “sovereigntist” deal with the ruling class hasn’t really played out as promised. They haven’t provided stability in the countries where they’ve come into power. In reality, what’s been produced is total chaos everywhere it’s been deployed (Brazil with Bolsonaro, the United States with Trump…).
Meanwhile, owing to the expanded precariousness felt by new generations, the degradation of working conditions in Public Administration, Spain’s productive specialization in cheap and low-skilled labor, and the importing of migrant workers to cover a large part of the unskilled labor in the service sectors, a new working class is emerging. While it’s true that this new working class is diverse, fragmented, and full of contradictions, it’s also putting more and more effort into organization.
Of course, no one’s talking about this new working class. It continues to be seen as a nameless ghost, an unwelcome visitor. Still, it’s often given lip service by forces that want to hijack the narrative. “Sovereigntism” is centered on the “national working class” with a false and idealized vision of workers from the past, but “progressivism” is more focused on the “precariat” and the “cognitariat”. While pulling from multiple sectors of a much more complex class, it’s still concerned with maintaining its hegemony over the discourse. Both of these tendencies talk about the current working class using the “old” narrative of muscular guys working in a forge (an image which “middle class” intellectuals have been wrongfully focused on for decades). They see it either as the “pinnacle” of the national-proletariat or as something outdated that must be left out of the modernization process.
This new working class, like the original one studied by E.P. Thompson, is a composite class, bringing together lots of diverse fragments: remnants of the traditional factory proletariat (subjected to increasing precariousness through subcontracting mechanisms found everywhere in today’s value chains); migrant labor doing services for companies and individuals; precarious youth from the offshoots of the middle class who belong more and more to the self-employed sectors and are burdened by the deployment of investment funds (like cab drivers, small urban merchants, small farmers); casual public workers who support a large part of the services necessary for the Welfare State; as well as seasonal and undocumented workers.
It’s a working class in the process of formation. It’s a class that’s incredibly diverse and pluralistic, that’s full of contradictions and ambiguities. A class that’s fragmented by the individuation of experiences and cultures, which is the fundamental basis of the new business models. A class that cuts across social tensions (race, gender, sexual behavior, qualifications, etc.).
This new working class, like the original one studied by E.P. Thompson, is a composite class, bringing together lots of diverse fragments: remnants of the traditional factory proletariat (subjected to increasing precariousness through subcontracting mechanisms found everywhere in today’s value chains); migrant labor doing services for companies and individuals; precarious youth from the offshoots of the middle class who belong more and more to the self-employed sectors and are burdened by the deployment of investment funds (like cab drivers, small urban merchants, small farmers); casual public workers who support a large part of the services necessary for the Welfare State; as well as seasonal and undocumented workers.
It’s a working class in the process of formation. It’s a class that’s incredibly diverse and pluralistic, that’s full of contradictions and ambiguities. A class that’s fragmented by the individuation of experiences and cultures, which is the fundamental basis of the new business models. A class that cuts across social tensions (race, gender, sexual behavior, qualifications, etc.).
Emmanuel Rodriguez emphasizes the difficulties of organizing this diverse amalgam. However, his vision does still borrow from a certain kind of Marxism practiced by middle-class intellectuals, even when his own work has shown that it’s not necessary to have a “subject” in order to generate an “effect”, at least not in the classical radical sense of “subject” (a completely homogenized, coherent and conscious social subject that fits perfectly into both the way of life and the correlating position in the production process). The “middle class effect” that he himself identifies isn’t based on a coherent class following from classical analysis. Within what has for decades described itself as Spanish democracy, there are specialized workers, liberal professionals, farmers, businessmen, public workers, young people subjected to temporary precariousness, retirees, urban landlords… These diverse, contradictory and very different sectors have repeatedly self-identified as “middle class”.
In fact, the “working class effect” is a matter of praxis that requires a certain coherence in the productive world (like what’s coming from the growing precariousness of a broad strata of the population) but that is constructed and elaborated on consciously in everyday life. This means the “subject”, which does undoubtedly exist, doesn’t necessarily create the “effect”. The “effect” can be produced from a contradictory, multiplied, or pluralized “subject”. It might only have a “basic” but absolutely “fundamental” coherence (like in the real history of the workers’ movement in our country before the civil war and in the liberation struggles of the people of the global South, outside of and beyond “Marxist” orthodoxy).
So, continuing to develop a process for the self-organization of this new working class is also a matter of praxis. Theoretical research should illuminate and scrutinize this praxis. It must advance it, but it can’t replace it. There’s not, nor can there be, a “theoretical magic wand” that solves all the problems of current praxis. There are no “scriptures” of the movement that grant certainties, and even though some claim to be enlightened experts, there’s never been a “science of workers’ organization”. There are only attempts, tests, experiments, situated analyses, concrete hypotheses. This might seem too “amateurish” for those who have tended to misclassify themselves, or at least pretended to declass themselves on the basis of their technical knowledge and academic credentials.
These include things like: the organization of new autonomous protest platforms in sectors like the Kelly’s, doing domestic work or caring for dependents; experiments like new combative unions radicalizing labor relations in industrial sectors made precarious by subcontracting and multiservice companies, such as the CMT (Coordinadora de Trabajadores del Metal de la Bahia de Cadiz); projects like the “Food for the unemployed” program promoted by Solidaridad Obrera, which has distributed tens of thousands of euros among self-managed food banks in several working-class neighborhoods in Madrid in recent years; initiatives such as those of the Movimeiento Panafricanista or the Sindicato Nacional de Artistas Afroespañoles, seeking to raise awareness and create community among African migrants and giving them a discourse of their own.
In reality, the “effect” can only come about if the “subject” is nurtured by diligent work. A “subject” without enough willpower can’t drive the train of history. Ideas must be nourished with sweat. They must be fought for; they must be fertilized and cared for. They require sacrifice and daily commitment. Despite what’s often said, history isn’t blindly deterministic. “Effects” are produced by will. Of course, certain approaches might be wrong, but they can only be assessed through experience, by other people who will choose for themselves what to reject and what to fight for in a changing world.
1 Original Spanish text available here:
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2024/04/03/pasion-y-martirio-de-la-clase-media/
2 “El efecto clase media. Crítica y crisis de la paz social”, published by Traficantes de Sueños in 2022; title translated by CES
CES 