4 XI 2007
“The average worker, upon whom so many lowly salaried employees like to look down, often enjoys not merely a material but also an existential superiority over them. His life as a class-conscious proletarian is roofed over with vulgar-Marxist concepts that do at least tell him what his intended role is. Admittedly the whole roof is nowadays riddled with holes.
The mass of salaried employees differ from the worker proletariat in that they are spiritually homeless. For the time being they cannot find their way to their comrades, and the house of bourgeois ideas and feelings in which they used to live has collapsed, its foundations eroded by economic development. They are living at present without a doctrine to look up at or a goal they might ascertain. So they live in fear of looking up and asking their way to the destination.”
-Siegfried Kracauer The Salaried Masses (London: Verso, 1998: pg. 88)
S. Kracauer raises an important point of middle class life in an industrial (and also post-industrial) society: that it is spiritually homeless. The politically radical, penniless, counter-cultural hippies of 1960s turned into the indifferent, affluent, white-collared “yuppies” of 1980s, whose dominance of the market coined a less-charged “affluent professional” for their title in the 2000s. We will become the salaried mass. That is the concern of the American society, and the fate of most members of my social stratum: we are to become educated, financially-secure, self-reliant “individualists” whose extravagance lifestyle will be justified by our income, and political indifference or conservatism, our wits. In the name of upward mobility we exhibit our virtue, ambition, to place ourselves before the countless steps of a ladder infinite in height. In the name of opportunity we flock from one “economic development” to the next; as mercenaries the highest bidding employer shall have our labor, at a price high enough to support our decadent lifestyle, of course. Or not: we could become misers–but that will only beget us condescensions from our peers; better spend than keep, so long as numbers in our accounts grows. And a belief, an ideology? That means little: Marxism in day one can turn into Trotskite-revisionism in day two. So long as it profits we rather remain homeless in spirit, and find our prospects pseudo-shelters good enough for quite a while.
And what if it fails? No matter, countless other will join; in anonymity we will find the comfort of our individualist-collective more than bearable.
