The problem with Marx and the middle class

Last month, in a conversation with some activists I stressed the need to overcome tensions between the working and middle class in the environmental movement, as it’s a critical step towards building cross-class coalitions. A middle class activist claimed that it “didn’t make sense” to talk about this because we’re all working class as we have to sell our labour for wages – even university professors.

For a long time myself and others have noticed a perturbing habit amongst middle class environmentalists: through their use of Marxist thought to determine that our class positioning depends on our relationship to the means of production, ‘middle class’ is rendered as an obsolete formation, which has resulted in people downplaying and dismissing the importance of addressing classism. But as the economist Samir Amin reminds us:

“To be a Marxist is to continue the work that Marx merely began… It is not to stop at Marx but to start from him. For Marx is not a prophet whose conclusions… are all necessarily “correct” or “final”… Marx is boundless, because the radical critique that he initiated is itself boundless, always incomplete, and must always be the object of its own critique.”

For decades, class scholarship and personal testimonies have stressed that culture and taste are just as important as economic factors when establishing class structures. The class struggle isn’t just a binary fight between the world’s workers and its ruling class – it manifests itself between the working and middle class too. If the environmental movement continues to brush this to one side, the only outcome on our horizon is abject failure. 

Class isn’t just a relation of economic exploitation; it’s also a relation of social and cultural exploitation. To be working class is to experience a distinct form of subjugation that the middle class are broadly sheltered from enduring – classism. 

Although it’s something the former certainly do encounter, it’s the working class whose exposure to it leads to their disempowerment and subsequent exclusion from mainstream society. Classism has seeped into every facet of society to the extent that working class people can’t escape its impacts, no matter where they are.

They’re routinely denied jobs on the basis that they look or sound “too common”.  The Othering of working class bodies remains a deeply racialised process too, inseparable from colonialism and white supremacy – despite the official end to apartheid in 1994, South African students continue to racially segregate themselves in schools. Facilitated by the continued stigmatisation of poverty that disproportionately impacts the black population, black students are often labelled as inferior – treated as if their lack of access to material resources means that they have nothing of value to add to conversations or group activities. As one student was cruelly told by another: “What do you know? The only thing you know is to stay in your squatter camps at Umlazi.”

This process of marginalisation has created the conditions for working class people to be treated as nothing more than a joke. It wasn’t surprising to hear that  an English university hockey team hosted a chav themed night out as it’s become such a common pastime for some.

Our ways of living are constantly under attack on all fronts and the environmental movement is no different. Malthusianism sees overpopulation as a threat to the health of the environment – a dangerous, incorrect belief which makes the working class vulnerable to programmes of forced sterilisation – an easy way to deflect attention away from the true culprits of the climate crisis and global inequalities – the ruling class.

The fact that working class people just can’t get it right – that we can’t even exist no matter what we do – is sorely noticed and anticipated: they expect the middle class to look down upon them for their lifestyle choices, and they believe their presence in the green movement isn't valued. As one activist said to me, “it feels as if we don’t have a discourse in the movement.” Many feel as if the two classes occupy completely different worlds, evidenced by the academic Karen Bell in her book Working Class Environmentalism: 

“It is significant that the working-class people I spoke to almost all felt that environmental organisations are populated and dominated by middle-class people that would not understand their lives.”

This resonates with my own encounters with working class people over the years – both in their attitudes towards environmental professionals and the broader environmental movement. Working class people feel dominated, disrespected, excluded and devalued.

If the middle classes truly wish to have a reasonable chance at fighting the class war and becoming an environmental mass movement capable of change, they must understand that reducing contemporary class positions to mere labour relations misses the point entirely. Establishing relatability amongst the general population isn’t a process of homogenising the class struggle and by extension, ourselves – after all, our struggles shape us into who we are. 

It’s a process of recognising the distinct life-courses and forms of oppression that emerge in accordance with someone’s social faction. It’s about celebrating differences. It’s about learning how these differences provide us with different skills that can be collectively pooled to strengthen campaigns. It’s about resisting middle class appropriations of working class livelihoods, respecting working class histories and everything that our predecessors fought for – for the right to independent working class power and for this to be recognised by the broader middle class. It’s fundamentally classist to believe otherwise, because doing so undermines our autonomy and authority within the environmental movement.

So, rather than us having to endure the arduous process of middle class activists claiming to have boundless knowledge about class politics based on their claims to be well-versed in Marx, can we all just encourage them to pick up a book that’s been written by a working class person in the present? Can we get them to understand that Marxism doesn’t have to stand in opposition to more relational approaches to understanding the world? 

Can we banish this manifestation of the class struggle – the erasure of working class histories and appropriations of working class struggles – to the past and move on to bigger and better things together? 

We can’t afford to keep ourselves only confined to criticism that we find comfortable. Given that the eradication of classism is a core movement-building strategy in itself, how we approach this is a matter of success or failure.

Emma River-Roberts is a working class environmental activist. She is studying for a masters degree in degrowth, ecology, economics and policy at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and has a social anthropology masters from Sussex University. She works at the Post Growth Institute.

Feature image: Montecruz Foto/Flickr.