Fear of Falling, Ehrenreich

Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Excerpts

It was in this new and emerging self-consciousness as an elite that the middle class, or signficant segments of it, turned right….

This book is about what could be called the class-consciousness of the professional middle class….

This class can be defined, somewhat abstractly, as all those people whose economic and social status is based on education…..

Here …are some points of commonality…
Occupation…must work for a living….
Defining experiences: The professional and managerial occupations have a guildlike quality. They are open, for the most part, only to people who have completed a lengthy education and attained certain credentials…..
Income: …earn “upper-middle” incomes…..
Lifestyle and tastes: ….uses consumption to establish its status, especially relative to the working class…

…afraid…of misfortunes that might lead to a downward slide [and] a fear of inner weakness, of growing soft, of failing to strive, of losing discipline and will…hedonism and self-indulgence…..

Many factors conspire to isolate the classes and keep the middle class from noticing the “others,” much less addressing them as fellow citizens…. And even when they are in our presence, we tend to screen out the “unimportant” people: busboy, messengers, nurse’s aides, ticket agents, secretaries…..

…commodities are “signifiers” in a “language” of status, telling us, for example, who is worth knowing and who may be safely neglected…..

Strangely, for a society so tightly linked by mass communication, a kind of language barrier divides the classes. From the vantage point of the professional middle class, those “below” do not speak clearly, or intelligible, or interestingly. Hence the all-too-common, unconsciously patronizing judgment that a particular representative of the poor or the working class is “articulate,” implying that the rest are not…..or not worth listening to….

Relative to the vernacular, [middle class] critical discourse operates at a high level of abstraction, always seeking to absorb the particular into the general, the personal into the impersonal. This is its strength. But the rudely undemocratic consequence is that individual statements from “below” come to seem almost weightless, fragmentary, unprocessed. Since ordinary speech does not aspire to universality and does not hide the speaker in a gauze of impersonal rhetoric, it is easily dismissed as limited and “anecdotal.”

But there is one thing that should not be scarce, that should in fact increase, and that is good and pleasurable and decent work: the work of caring, healing, building, teaching, planning, learning…. The middle class’s anxious sense of scarcity is in no small part self-imposed. There is potentially no limit to the demand for skilled, creative, and caring people, no limit to the problems to be solved, the needs to be met by human craft and agency….

This, very simply, should be the program of the professional middle class and the agenda it brings to any broader movement for equality and social justice: to expand the class, welcoming everyone, until there remains no other class.