Nicolas D Villarreal argues against populist appeals for a common front between the working-class and small business owners. Reading: Mick Labas.Â
Earlier this week Patrick Wyman, podcaster and historian, put up an article describing the American gentry in their historical context, their political and economic power, and their support for Trump. This gentry, in the modern American context, is defined by its ownership of both land and hard fixed assets which allow it to extract rents and run small to medium-sized businesses. Largely hereditary, reactionary, and sources of institutional power in many regions, Wyman’s intent appears to raise alarm bells about the danger of this class to the largely progressive readership who are more used to pointing the finger at big business monopolies like Amazon or Facebook. There was a quick retort from the unapologetic reactionaries, however, written by Declan Leary of The American Conservative.Â
Why shouldn’t we take the side of the gentry, with aristocracy being the logical conclusion of this power, when compared to the threat of distant Federal and corporate bureaucracies, he asks. This is a question scarcely answered by Wyman’s historical and anthropological account, which asserts, on the one hand, the transhistorical reality of gentry as local administrators and centers of power, and the reactionary nature of this class on the other. But this is exactly the question I’ll answer here.Â
After all, this was pretty much the subject of my 2020 essay in Palladium Magazine on the threat of this gentry to economic development and innovation. In particular, there is one incredibly absurd claim in the American Conservative essay that stands out:Â
But right-populism is not about egalitarianism. It’s about protecting the interests of the lower classes against the predation of the uppermost elites. For that, the underclasses need overclass allies, and the subset most likely to side with them by far is the one ordered around physical, local property and less influenced by the progressive institutions that form the professional and managerial factions.
This argument, that the lower class needs overclass allies, should be familiar on the left as it’s essentially the same as the one proposed by many national liberation movements; that the primary contradiction is the big imperial hegemon and, as a result, an alliance with the national bourgeoisie is necessary to overcome that oppressive force. However, this claim by Leary is simply not justifiable on the basis of class analysis. And the reason for this is very simple:Â
There is simply less share of the pie available for workers when they are being exploited by such gentry.
Small businesses are generally less profitable, with lower revenues and cash reserves compared to their behemoth cousins. But even when we are discussing profits, because there is a limit to what individuals can consume in a given amount of time, a smaller amount of capitalists mean less surplus necessarily going towards capitalist consumption. If you have the same amount of workers producing the same amount of surplus for one hundred capitalists vs one, there is more possible surplus that can be reclaimed through collective action such as unionization in the case of the producing for one capitalist. It’s no wonder then that support for higher minimum wages is greater among big businesses like Amazon and Walmart, who can afford to pay.Â
However, Leary’s argument isn’t truly economic, it’s political, suggesting that such a gentry would have the underclass’s real interests at heart, or would tend to take their side against the big capitalists. This is historically false and logically unlikely. There is one issue, and one issue alone, on which the working class and the petty bourgeoisie have aligned, and that is on the issue of antitrust legislation. However, this has been done on a basis that totally screwed over the workers’ movement. The bourgeois state electing to break up monopolies rather than expropriating them did nothing but ensure continued, and expanded, social surplus for capitalists at the expense of the working class.Â
On every other class-based issue conflict remains. When it comes to cultural and identity-based issues the split is just as well between small and medium-sized capitalists as it is with workers. What makes the Trump wing of the Republican party unique with regard to petty-bourgeois power is not necessarily the numbers of small business owners, which are only slightly over-represented (40% Republican, 29% Democrat1), it is their level of organization and militancy. With Trump’s right-populism they find an ideological current to match their economic one, an ideology that demands action from them and which they use to make demands on the state.Â
Leary’s claim, much like the claim of left-liberals who favor the cultivation of a racial bourgeoisie as an antidote to the social problems of a given racial group, is gratingly paternalistic. It’s the paternalism of what Slavoj Zizek called the post-modern father; of the boss which insists no, we really are all family, despite all the exploitation and petty tyranny. It is a crueler and more insidious form of social control than simply playing the cold administrator in those giant bureaucracies Leary so decries.Â
The height of these powerful bureaucracies also happened to be the height of the working class’s share of income in the US, partly for the reasons we’ve already outlined. The rise of the American gentry as a class was a direct result of breaking this working-class power. American corporations atomized production in order to protect profits and capitalist consumption potential, creating a massive wave of small businesses.2 The gentry really did not exist before this point, prior to the 70s, the only kind of small enterprises with any real number or economic power were family farms.Â
The aristocracy suggested by the deep thinkers at The American Conservative, an aristocracy of world-historical bourgeois mediocrities, is a society where creative destruction is replaced with stagnant decay. To perpetuate the atomization they cling to would require the abolition of both any disruption that would naturally form a market leader, as well as the accumulation required to fund expensive research, development, and investment in new technology production without state support. The world of the modern American aristocracy would be a world where the only excess is the excess afforded to the regional lords. Where once people suffered capitalism and its exploitation to see the great material progress brought about by its technical innovations, people will suffer brutal exploitation only so that the local Car Dealership owner can afford a new vacation home in British Columbia or throw money at the latest candidate promising to kill critical race theory or whatever the object of the current moral panic is.Â
This is no trivial hypothetical. The rise of Trump inaugurated a new antitrust regime in the federal government, one that has been continued by the Biden administration, which is more aggressive in going after the high-tech monopolies. This new tactic, which even has wide support in social-democratic circles, is one of the greatest obstacles to the development of working-class power.Â
Marx in the final chapters of Capital Volume 1 describes the process by which capitalism would be brought to its historical conclusion, updating what he had written many years earlier in the Manifesto. It is worth quoting here:
That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.3Â
With ever greater socialization of production, and ever fewer capitalists benefiting and actually administering, the working class can expropriate these enterprises which are no longer compatible with market coordination and private property. Working-class power itself, its political organization and strength, is, according to Marx, driven directly by this greater socialization of production which brings the whole working class of the world together in cooperation.
The American gentry and their class ideology of right-populism finds that their mission is to bring this process to a screeching halt, to break the wheel of Capital’s historical progress, to arrest the scientific rationalization of production, and to destroy the preconditions of working-class organization. They would rather the US become the new Austro-Hungarian Empire, the backwater of developed countries, than to allow workers to gain power and see that they can no longer make a living off their property titles alone.Â
The reactionaries would have us believe that it’s perfectly rational to side with the “MAGA-hatted boomer with a Beamer, McMansion, and 25-footer” over the big capitalists. We should have a common cause in our local quaintness, they say. But why should we? Even when we speak of local politics, it’s these same people who defund our schools, run draconian home-owner associations, and cheer on corrupt local police. Socialists in Vermont created land trusts and public spaces for everyone. The petty bourgeoisie, in contrast, fight for an endless sprawl of car washes, 7/11s and unaffordable, atomized housing. On a practical basis, it is this class that we confront in our communities much more than any other. Due to the desert of political participation in this country, in many places they rule largely unopposed, being the only class with the independent wealth necessary to pursue public life, a fact which sets up this bizarre hubris among the reactionary gentry with their claims of being the real representatives of the underclass.Â
We should absolutely take the side of the big monopolies against this gentry. In fact, the big capitalists like Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the Walton family are more ready allies than any of the political leadership of the Democratic Party (or the Republican Party for that matter), or even the vast state ideological apparatus in civil society, the universities, and non-profits. The reality of this is quite simple, the big capitalists have a structural role that entails the killing of other capitalists as economic entities. It is true the big capitalists are interested in crushing working-class political power, but then so is the ideological apparatus of the bourgeois state and the class power of this gentry. Indeed, one can argue that the others are far more effective at it. Whenever local pockets of working-class electoral action emerge, it is this gentry’s opposition that they encounter first, and then second the opposition of the larger state ideological apparatus. It’s only within these large firms themselves and their supply chains that the big capitalists concern themselves with local issues, as Amazon did in Bessemer Alabama to shut down a unionization drive.Â
In Marx’s time,4 there was still discussion of collaborating with petty-bourgeois parties to achieve bourgeois democracy, even while struggling for an independent workers’ party and moving beyond said bourgeois democracy. However, the petty bourgeoisie of today are no longer so interested in republican democracy, as evidenced by both the January 6th insurrection and even the article by Leary which openly advocated for aristocracy. So obsolete are they, having been made totally economically unnecessary over 50 years ago, that they can only enforce this order through pure repression.Â
The truth of this obsolescence is fundamentally what escapes the liberal progressive criticism provided by Wyman in the article that set all this off. Unable to articulate the historical particularity of the capitalist mode of production, its arc and limits, Wyman was simply left to offer historical comparisons and note the political support for Trump from this gentry. There is little possibility for actually doing anything about this reactionary social force in this framework from the perspective of ordinary people. One can either appeal to big capitalists themselves and those in their orbit, or one can resign to our fate as the real struggle takes place among these two factions of the capitalist class so long as we do not take it as our historical mission to create a workers’ party.Â
Ultimately, this is not simply a problem for the United States. The problem of allocating surplus with limited economic growth is one that has had a time-honored, consistent solution for those societies that are unable to give up the bloated excesses of their ruling classes: imperialism. It should be noted that Trump’s insistence on withdrawing the US military across the world wasn’t so much about non-intervention as securing better terms of payment for US support, to turn the US empire once again into a profit-making enterprise. Due to strategic nuclear arsenals, it is no longer possible to conduct the kind of wars that would vastly reduce foreign capital and competition to rubble, therefore saving profit rates from their inexorable decline. However, more extensive exploitation of natural resources and labor in Latin America and Africa is possible. The continued rise of petty-bourgeois power entails a movement away from the global trade system supported by the American military, and instead towards the old way of exclusive spheres of influence.Â
Because of this necessity of imperialism to support such an “aristocracy”, this paradise for the gentry will still entail massive financial monopolies, only ones that are pointed outward rather than inward. This is necessary to impose the vast rents on the countries within the empire’s sphere of influence, to gorge on ever more labor time and resources. A never-ending primitive accumulation is the sublime American dream they so desire. A stillborn world, one where capitalism’s explicit social relations are suspended in time and the real logic of capital suppressed so as to prevent any threat to those same relations.Â
In contrast, the gentry’s destruction can only entail a better world for pretty much everyone involved. As it turns out, we are actually quite lucky that Marx was wrong here. His claim, known as the immiseration thesis, that expanding monopoly resulting from consolidation and economic development would create ever more misery for the working class, turned out to be incorrect. The economies of scale and socialization of production that he correctly identified as nurturing working-class power also enabled labor to get more of surplus for itself as the economy expanded, adding rents to increase wages beyond their pure subsistence level. The battle for unionization against Amazon is a winnable battle. But such a battle against vast atomized networks of petty-bourgeois companies is not.Â
The working-class position in the developed world should be really quite simple:Â
“Expropriate! Expropriate! Expropriate!”
Capitalists expropriating capitalists. The state expropriating capitalists. The working class itself expropriating the state. We can skip steps where possible. Though the first step, of course, is to bury this American gentry.Â
- Nsba.biz. 2021. The Politics of Small Business Survey. [online] Available at: <https://nsba.biz/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Politics-Survey-2020.pdf> [Accessed 27 September 2021].
- BIRCH, D., 1987. The Atomization Of America. [online] Inc.com. Available at: <https://www.inc.com/magazine/19870301/524.html> [Accessed 29 September 2021].
- Â Marx, K., 2015. Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I – Chapter Thirty Two. [online] Marxists.org. Available at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm> [Accessed 27 September 2021].
- Engels, M., 2021. Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League by Marx and Engels. [online] Marxists.org. Available at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm> [Accessed 27 September 2021].