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“Lumpen bourgeoisie”
I described this segment of the capitalist class in the following terms in a piece earlier this year, in noting educational attainment as an imperfect proxy for class position: “Both these political pundits and the authors of Deaths of Despair define the working class as comprising those who lack a bachelor’s degree. Though this definition may be largely rooted in the limitations of survey data, we should recognize its limitations as a general proxy for people’s relations to economic production. This is particularly true with regard to the small towns and rural hinterlands where Trump drew strong support and where people without a college degree include many small businesspersons, landlords, building trade contractors, cattle ranchers, and other proto-entrepreneurs and wannabe millionaires.”
That said, don’t you think that the dynamic you’re describing is still suggestive of broad class solidarity among capitalists? Basically, that it is accepted reflexively that the interests of any segment of capital should prevail over the interests of workers, even when the broader implications ultimately hinder economic productivity, growth, market stability, etc. in the longer run?
I’d say that the lumpen bourgeoisie has created a great deal of potential disunity among the capitalist class but to your point, as long as the capitalist class can always offload the cost, created by the lumpen bourgeoisie, onto workers and/or the state, the entire bourgeoisie will get along regardless of whether they happen to wear Patagonia vests or cowboy hats.
For instance, if we had powerful sectoral unions that demanded and got real cost of living adjustments, we’d see workers getting big raises simply to offset the massive increases in rent that we’ve seen in the last year.
That’s not the case right now. It’d be very unlikely for even the most self-styled progressive firms to raise the pay of their lower level employees and/or contracted support staff to match urban rent increases. So the “solution” is to have those employees take on some combination of longer commutes, more roommates, lower quality housing, or homelessness.
The big city employers get what they want, landlords get what they want and workers lose.
If workers could either demand and get big raises to offset the cost of housing and/or credibly threaten to seize and distribute all empty housing stock as well as empty commercial spaces and convert them into low cost housing, now we’d have the employers and landlords having to figure out a resolution that doesn’t involve immiserating the working class.
