One of the most persistent puzzles of American politics is the tendency for workers who occupy a proletarian class position to embrace political ideologies that appear to serve the interests of capital, whether that be in the form of overt conservative anti-tax and anti-union policies or a preference for the liberal “market solutions” that take collectivist ideas regarding healthcare and social welfare and weaken them in the name of market stability. Furthermore, from a Marxist perspective, the question arises of why repeated crises have not created a more collectively oriented consciousness among the working class, but rather less of one. An essential ingredient of this contradiction was the emergence of an economic and cultural structure that created both a material incentive to engage with the stock market for the few with access and a moral imperative to participate for all: the portfolio proletariat

The idea of the portfolio proletariat extends beyond a materially privileged class that participates in markets successfully to describe the form of political consciousness that has arisen under financialization. Originating with Fordism, the concept of a “good job with a pension” promised not just high wages but overall stability. This idea has all but withered away in the age of financialization, eliminating a once-reliable path to security and replacing it with individualized market investments, engendering an anxiety around markets as the only path to security and stability across the whole working class.^[1]

The result was the emergence of an ideological orientation centered around market participation. From postwar suburbanization to the financialized present and the asset-oriented economy, the restructuring of social reproduction became tied to financial markets and “personal responsibility”. This reorganized the political subjectivity of broad layers of the American working class: Those who already own assets seek to prevent loss, and those who don't seek an entry into market participation.

Recent analysis of class in the financialized era, such as The Asset Economy^[2], by Adkins et al., similarly identifies asset accumulation under financialization as central to understanding current class dynamics. However, their analysis is focused on showing how inequality arises through uneven access to assets and the politics inherent to the material interests of those asset owners. What should be examined further is the hegemonic dimensions deriving not just from increased access to financial assets in the privileged strata, but also in the coercive nature of the reimagined retirement narrative. This extends beyond the unequal distribution of assets to the ways in which financialization reshapes working-class consciousness itself.

Origins in Fordism

In Americanism and Fordism^[3], Antonio Gramsci proposes Fordism as a means of remaking the American laborer for the new era of capitalist production. The key elements are a focus on decomposing manufacturing tasks into routine behaviors, control of the worker’s personal lives and morality, and sustainment through wages high enough to participate in consumption. Ford’s stated desire in initiating higher wages was to create a workforce able to buy the products they produced, thus driving consumption. This was also a direct coercive tool to incentivize the workers to submit to the strict working environments as well as follow the morality codes required by Ford, namely those surrounding alcohol, sex, and “rational” spending. This process succeeded in creating a mass market for products, which would eventually lead to mass real estate property ownership through suburbanization, as well as a labor aristocracy that would both materially gain from this arrangement and help sustain a Fordist concept of morality. Simultaneously, those outside this group would see participation within this ecosystem as aspirational, and wanted in.

Throughout the Fordist era, the symbiosis between the disciplined worker and the factory owner would remain and even strengthen. Through defined-benefit pensions, employee health insurance, and general investment in worker welfare (often negotiated through unions increasingly integrated into the Fordist compromise), the social contract between worker and capital was rewritten. The worker would devote their adult life to work, and in exchange, they would have a comfortable life even past retirement. Outside of this contract, FHA loans, the GI bill, and redlining would all help solidify who was deserving of this contract: a white man, dedicated to his country, who never drank or gambled and never missed a mortgage payment. Consequently, any non-success could be explained through insufficient discipline.

Rewriting the Terms of the Contract

The Fordist social contract remained the status quo throughout the post-war years. The cracks began to show with the dissolution of Studebaker. When the Studebaker automobile company started to struggle, it laid off thousands of workers and dissolved pension plans. The realization hit that this was not an equal relationship, and that workers were at risk of losing the gains they had negotiated whenever a company found itself unable to pay out anymore. It would take 10 more years for Congress to pass the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and create the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insured pensions through the government.^[4] The ERISA created a salve for the immediate problem, but the saga had shown how fragile the contract was. Later, stagflation would squeeze wage gains, and corporations came under increased pressure to restructure and increase layoffs. This culminated in the profitability crisis for corporations in the 70s, which now had massive pensions on their balance sheets.^[5] Due to these economic pressures, the social welfare policies of the 60s gave way to corporate welfare policies in the 70s and 80s. Meanwhile, ERISA had itself created a problem of a check the government did not want to cash. The Fordist system had become untenable for the corporations, and they needed to dictate new terms.

Acceleration in the Neoliberal Era

In the 1978 Revenue Act, section 401(k) created a loophole whereby taxes on compensation could be deferred until the funds were actually pulled out of the account. This was a very enticing tool for executives being taxed at a 70% marginal rate who would otherwise be putting that money in very similar investment accounts anyway. By deferring the taxes until the money was withdrawn, these executives could allow their wealth to grow while also only being taxed on the money they used. Initially, this stuck around as simply a loophole for the wealthy, but with Ted Benna’s formulation of a retirement account based on this exclusion, corporations began to realize that this could answer their pension problem.^[6] By offering a retirement plan that frontloaded costs, but released them from their obligation, they rebalanced the contract in their favor while making the worker feel less beholden to those corporations. Within a few years of the official greenlighting of these policies by the IRS in 1981, half of all large corporations had instituted 401k retirement plans. However, the markets were still not particularly enticing to the worker, as the previous 20 years had shown their weakness. If the corporations wanted buy-in on this new idea, the public had to see opportunity in the markets. This would require a few more pieces to fall into place.

With deregulation gaining ground under Carter, along with Volcker’s intense interest rate moves to battle inflation, a new era for the markets would soon commence. In the name of trickle-down economics, the Reagan-era embrace of further neoliberal policies would transform the nation. The S&P 500 would more than double during his time in office. Previously, this would have been of limited interest to even the privileged portions of the working class, who would have derived only abstract benefits. However, those who had investment retirement accounts suddenly had real nest eggs, making the 401k an acceptable alternative to pensions for the worker.

Full Financialization

Financialization, as Greta Krippner defines it, is “a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production."^[7] This process represents a sharp inflection point in transforming a labor aristocracy bribed with stock investments to a precarious position of class contradiction, materially dependent on the very forces responsible for its decline. With profitability becoming less directly tied to production, these same workers were becoming victims of downsizing, outsourcing, and the weakening of union power, while still benefiting from the appreciation of their retirement portfolios; though these would be largely inaccessible to them for years due to tax rules. Meanwhile, the structure of 401ks and the relatively small stakes these workers held in individual companies across the whole market left them simultaneously dependent on the profitability of these companies, yet without any control over them.

Stock potential was becoming untethered to immediate revenue, and speculative investment skyrocketed, no longer bound by the pesky fundamentals of bygone eras. As debt itself became a profit vector, entire asset classes were built upon the expansion of subprime loans. These loans were billed as democratizing asset welfare, but ultimately increased the precarity of those previously locked out of homeownership: typically poor, Black, or Hispanic. Pension funds increasingly relied on these same financial tools to keep up, becoming some of the largest institutional investors. All the ingredients were in place for the final collapse of pensions. The dot-com bubble and crash would be the first shot. Pension funds that were heavily invested in speculative assets took huge hits. Many of the firms still offering pensions stopped at this point, having sufficient cover to release their obligations in the name of budget stress.^[8] The great recession, caused in no small part by the abstraction of profit from value inherent in Financialization, would serve as the final nail in the coffin. Outside of a very small subset of largely government, police, and military employers, the collective defined benefit pension was effectively dead. All that remained were private retirement funds and an ever-in-crisis social security system.

After the Dust Settled

The great recession in 2008 represented a cultural turning point, not just due to the loss of pensions, but also a notable increase in anxiety around job stability and retirement. The private retirement account did not emerge as a clear winner for the worker; in fact, many private retirement accounts were devastated. Rather, it emerged as the survivor. With defined benefit pensions disappearing, social safety nets threatened, and union power at a historic low, the most viable path to security came through stronger participation in markets over collective bargaining or social programs. The result was a broader cultural shift in which investment became understood as a moral and practical imperative. Financial “literacy” came to signify responsible citizenship itself, while failure to save or invest was reframed as personal irresponsibility rather than a structural consequence of declining social provision.

The advice to maintain an emergency fund reflected this transformation. The common recommendation is to have a few months’ salary saved for the specific contingency of losing your job. This fund should also be sufficient to replace your transportation, pay your healthcare bills, or respond to any other random disaster you encounter. A responsible citizen was expected to function as their own insurer, retirement manager, and unemployment fund. It normalized insecurity itself as a permanent condition of life under capitalism while redefining successful adaptation to that insecurity as a matter of personal responsibility.

Existing investment instruments, initially utilized primarily by the wealthy, became the answer to most economic anxieties. 529 plans covered your child's education, and HSAs would cover your health expenses. Most recently, “Trump accounts” would set your kid up to enter adulthood generally. While most of these vehicles are still primarily effectively utilized by the wealthy and privileged labor, they represent a shift in government policy from providing direct material support to providing subsidies to participate in markets. This form of asset-based welfare falls short of the idealized version described by advocates^[9] which goes beyond mere tax subsidies, but still shows its primary weakness: its precarity in regard to market movements. Instead of providing true autonomy, it provides further entrenchment and literal and figurative investment in the system.

Investment as Morality

While the Fordist era had given rise to a morality of a conformist, patriotic, and sober ideal, the transition to the era of financialization would expand this to more directly equate financial security with morality itself. If the Fordist hegemonic project was to remake the worker into the productive consumer, the neoliberal one would be to remake the worker into the private investor.

One of the most intriguing developments in this regard is prosperity theology. With roots in various threads of evangelical thought, its formation would originate with Oral Roberts and his development of “Seed Faith” doctrine, wherein tithes and offerings would be returned to the donor through faith – appropriately mirroring investment itself. By the 2000s, large swaths of American Christians would directly identify with prosperity theology, and its influence would be immediately apparent in the growth of megachurches throughout the Sun Belt.^[10] As a primarily Pentecostal movement, this was not relegated to rich white Americans who wanted to justify their wealth. Prosperity theology would be a powerful aspirational movement with broad reach among poor white, Black, and Hispanic Americans.

The evangelical movement would largely embrace utilizing the financial system to achieve these goals with faith. In many American churches, congregants encountered financial self-help literature alongside devotional materials: Dave Ramsey and Rich Dad, Poor Dad would share space with C.S. Lewis and Knowing God. A large portion of American society was being directly told that you must save and invest, and if that fails, it was because you weren't godly enough.

Investment morality would not be relegated to evangelical revivals. Public schools started teaching “Financial Literacy,” which explicitly taught children that to live a successful life, they must save and invest.^[11] The loaded usage of “literacy” implied that if you did not follow their instructions, you just simply didn’t understand finances. These programs often reframed structural economic insecurity as a problem of individual financial behavior rather than political-economy itself, a logic that was on full display in public discourse when housing prices rose, and young workers were squeezed out of the market. Structural answers were ignored while the media focused on Millennials’ spending habits, most famously on Starbucks coffee and avocado toast. This discourse frequently drew on the racialized moralism that was weaponized in the Fordist era, which attributed poverty and precarity to personal irresponsibility rather than structural exclusion.

Dreams of Autonomy

In order to move beyond explaining the historical throughline of coercive market participation toward comprehending the political character of the modern working class, it is important to understand the evolving aspirations and related anxieties of the portfolio proletariat. While a strong cultural throughline has long been related to the good job in the Fordist mode, escape hatches needed to be developed as that security was lost. These evolved from the lottery ticket as a literal ticket out of wage labor, to multi-level marketing schemes offering supposed entrepreneurship, to modern meme-stock culture and retail options trading. What these all have in common is the fantasy of autonomy within the system; signifiers of a classic formulation of petite-bourgeois consciousness.^[12] This should be distinguished from a simple abandonment of proletarian consciousness and adoption of a false one through ideological seduction. The erosion of more collectively oriented institutional conditions and the move towards individualized security as a moral imperative created the conditions for a rational reorientation in working-class consciousness.

Idealized liberation from precarity became personal rather than collective. The first of these escape fantasies came in the form of lotteries. Initially, minor instant lotteries and sweepstakes, originating amid the growing instability of the late-Fordist era, would grow into massive windfalls that inspired cultural events each time the jackpot got larger. These represent the purest form of the fantasy. Even those with a “system” largely recognize the reality that the actual likelihood of winning is incredibly minor. What they are purchasing with each ticket is the thrill of imagining walking into their job and saying, “I don’t need this anymore”.

Among the looming precarity of the neoliberal era, workers chased the aspiration of being their own boss. The most readily available forms of this emerged in force through the explosion of franchising and multi-level marketing schemes. Franchising began in earnest in the Fordist era, but exploded as a form of corporate “control without responsibility”^[13] in this era. Despite their orientation in favor of corporations, franchises still provided a real opportunity for business ownership and petite-bourgeois stability. However, with the substantial capital needed to purchase franchises, coupled with any additional rules each corporation may impose on the applicant, this path forward was only realistic for a small subset of workers and the professional-managerial class that was already doing well. Enter multi-level marketing (MLM). Sharing a similar trajectory of invention in the Fordist era and acceleration in the neoliberal one, MLMs provided a simulation of franchising where, for a relatively paltry sum, anyone could become their own boss just by selling merchandise to friends and family. Sold on the dream exemplified by an overwhelming minority of participants at the very top of the pyramid,^[14] workers –and often, stay-at-home mothers– were drawn into a system which promised individual autonomy but took the franchising concept of control without responsibility to its extreme. MLMs would be perpetuated and enhanced by influencer culture in the 2010s, wherein the parasocial relationship of the creator and consumer, combined with the facade of success often present in social media, would create an ecosystem that broadly sold the idea of being your own boss and working out of your home, often without real payout. Regardless of the actual successes and failures of either project, the popularity of both showed a real yearning for this type of promised autonomy in the absence of social stability.

While these never went away entirely, franchising became unrealistic for even the privileged workers, and awareness of the predatory nature of MLMs became widespread. After years of establishing the moral imperative of investment, the markets were becoming the remaining outlet, combining ease of entry and the potential for real autonomy. Amid a backdrop of media like The Big Short, which simultaneously demonized the financial system while also showing that intelligent investment could be used to survive crises, an intelligible yet contradictory ideology was taking shape. This ideology displayed intense distrust of the financial system, while also leaving participation through asset ownership as the primary means of success. A powerful manifestation of this mindset is in the evolution of cryptocurrencies, which were explicitly sold as a decentralized alternative supposedly immune to the issues of the financial system. Alongside this, meme stocks and modern options trading discourse often centers around not just making it rich, but making it rich while spitting in the face of institutional investors.

A powerful synthesis of these ideas is the financial independence, retire early (FIRE) movement. The FIRE movement combines this ideology of anti-capital rebellion through market participation with the moralization of frugality by proposing that anyone can escape the grind of wage labor through extreme savings and proper investment. The central thrust of FIRE is that through saving large portions of your income and placing them in broad market-indexed investments, one can simultaneously build the financial means to escape from dependence on corporations while conditioning oneself to the same frugality.^[15] An ecosystem of influencers, messageboards, and journalistic treatment has arisen around the idea, attracting an ultimately small but significant audience from all walks of life. Within this ecosystem, discussions are centered around managing expenses to put away more savings, managing healthcare costs, debating safe withdrawal rates, and determining whether they have finally accumulated enough to escape wage labor. Bubbling under the surface is an intense anxiety of market volatility that reveals the primary problem with this imagined autonomy. Discussion vacillates between confidence in the average rise of the S&P 500 and figuring out what’s needed to survive a theoretical great depression followed by a decade of stagflation.

FIRE is not a dominant cultural idea that all workers participate in, but it captures the logic of the modern worker’s political consciousness exceptionally well: when faced with the pressures of modern precarity, markets provide the primary rational way out. The result is a form of working-class political consciousness that seeks autonomy through participation in markets rather than through collective transformation of social relations. Like the petite bourgeoisie, it fears both proletarianization and dependency, yet unlike the petite bourgeoisie, it remains structurally dependent through asset holdings that are illiquid, time-deferred, and tied to the market as a whole, resulting in a condition marked by a need for both ongoing wages for survival today and long-term market performance for survival tomorrow. This simultaneous dependence on wage labor and market performance creates the crucial contradiction of workers aligned with policies that create more precarity but preserve market stability.

Political Implications

To properly discuss the political consequences of portfolio proletariat ideology, we must distinguish between workers for whom asset ownership has partially fulfilled its promise of security and those for whom that promise remains largely aspirational. These will be separated into realized and aspirational forms for discussion. These forms do not strictly map to wealth; a well-compensated software engineer working at a startup and renting in New York City could be considered aspirational, while a schoolteacher with a modest 401k and a house in Akron would be considered realized. The way these forms manifest as political tendencies will vary across race, gender, and even personal history, but these tendencies may be drawn nonetheless.

In Dimensions of the Asset Economy, Konings et al. discuss the temporal nature of many assets and asset appreciation.^[16] More specifically, financialized assets like property and stock investments are not static objects that retain the same value over time like gold or commodities. The value they hold is directly attributable to economic events and interventions. This creates a real concern for the realized form that their material stability can be effectively wiped out by the wrong market moves. Accordingly, they will respond to actual and potential crises with fear centered around how to ensure the value of their assets is maintained. This contrasts distinctly with the aspirational form’s approach to volatility. Since they don’t own many assets already, massive stock drops are seen as opportunities, and a housing market crash is anticipated with glee. The key, however, is volatility and not dissolution. The aspirational form seeks entry into the markets rather than liberation from dependence on them. They are still dependent on wage labor and, therefore, are fearful of the impacts of total collapse, but every market fall followed by an upswing reinvigorates their personal and ideological investment in the market. Their orientation is skeptical of the status quo but decidedly pro-market.

The formal similarity of the portfolio proletariat consciousness to the petite bourgeois one has real implications for political engagement. As historically noted,^[17] the petite bourgeoisie are drawn into fascism by the anxieties surrounding their class position. Their desire for autonomy makes them skeptical of the ruling class, but perhaps even more skeptical of collective solutions perceived as leveling. Today, much of the mass base of modern authoritarian movements has come not just from the small proprietors and independent artisans, but from large portions of a predominantly white section of the working class that define their grievances in the very same anxieties that define the portfolio proletariat consciousness. This group cannot be ignored as simply being unaware of their class position and must be met head-on with compelling answers to their anxieties.

Marx and Engels characterized a specific material mechanism for the transition from capitalism to socialism: the necessity of increasingly socialized production under capitalism would lead to a proletarian class consciousness, sowing the seeds for the overthrow of capital.^[18] Financialization undermined this trend towards socialization of society by atomizing and individualizing social reproduction. By making everyone their own safety net, the individual becomes more atomized and loses the social consciousness they might have gained from socialized production alone. If workers do not believe that problems can be solved collectively, socialism cannot succeed. Socialists must have the immediate goal of showing a viable alternative to capitalism through all available means. By replacing the structures generating the portfolio proletariat’s formed consciousness, we may develop the socialized consciousness necessary for progress.

Conclusion

In the shift from the Fordist era, what had once been supplied collectively through pensions, welfare systems, union bargaining, and relatively stable employment was privatized and redirected into markets. This was not a simple reversal to pre-Fordist relations. The real benefits some workers experienced through this system and the moral apparatus that surrounded it created pressures to participate that were unique to this era.

The modern worker remains structurally dependent on wage labor, often intensely so. Yet the weakening of collective institutions and the privatization of social reproduction encourage a political orientation that resembles petite-bourgeois consciousness: fear of downward mobility, fixation on autonomy, resentment toward concentrated capital paired with skepticism toward collective politics, and fantasies of escaping wage labor through disciplined market participation. The ideology of investment as morality emerges naturally from these conditions. Under financialization, austerity, saving, and market participation cease to appear as choices and instead become framed as moral obligations of responsible adulthood itself. What emerges is a form of class consciousness defined by individualized risk management. When the worker has internalized this consciousness, crises cease to be opportunities to take collective action and become random natural disasters that must be prepared for or leveraged in any way possible.

If socialism is to gain broad support in the United States, it cannot simply denounce workers for failing to act according to an imputed revolutionary consciousness formed under entirely different historical conditions. It cannot also rely exclusively on negative critiques of capitalism while leaving individualized survival as the only realistic strategy for navigating everyday life. So long as markets remain the primary mechanism through which workers envision stability, market logic will continue to shape political consciousness accordingly. Financialization atomized workers by making each person their own insurer, retirement manager, and safety net. Socialists must determine how a collective consciousness may be developed under these conditions.

1. Doonan, Dan, and Kelly Kenneally. 2024. “RETIREMENT INSECURITY 2024 AMERICANS’ VIEWS of RETIREMENT.” https://www.nirsonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/FINAL-2024-Public-Opinion-Research-1.pdf).

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2. Adkins, Lisa, Martijn Konings, and Melinda Cooper. 2020. The Asset Economy : Property Ownership and the New Logic of Inequality. Cambridge; Medford: Polity Press.

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3. Gramsci, Antonio, Ronen P Palan, Quintin Hoare, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. 1971. Americanism and Fordism.

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4. “History | Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.” 2025. Pbgc.gov. July 21, 2025. https://www.pbgc.gov/about/who-we-are/history.

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8. Alicia Haydock Munnell, and SundénAnnika. 2005. Coming up Short : The Challenge of 401(K) Plans. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

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10. Thumma, Scott, Dave Travis, and Rick Warren. 2007. Beyond Megachurch Myths : What We Can Learn from America’s Largest Churches. San Francisco: Wiley.

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11. Arthur, Chris. 2014. “Financial Literacy Education as Public Pedagogy for the Capitalist Debt Economy.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 30-31 (April): 147–64. https://doi.org/10.3138/topia.30-31.147.

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12. Georg Lukacs. (1923) 1967. History and Class Consciousness. Merlin Press.

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13. CALLACI, BRIAN. 2020. “Control without Responsibility: The Legal Creation of Franchising, 1960–1980.” Enterprise & Society 22 (1): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2019.58.

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14. Taylor, Jon. 1999. “The Case (for And) against Multi-Level Marketing.” https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_comments/trade-regulation-rule-disclosure-requirements-and-prohibitions-concerning-business-opportunities-ftc.r511993-00008%C2%A0/00008-57281.pdf.

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15. “Getting Rich: From Zero to Hero in One Blog Post.” 2013. Mr. Money Mustache. February 22, 2013. https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from-zero-to-hero-in-one-blog-post/.

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16. Konings, Martijn, Lisa Adkins, Monique de Jong McKenzie, and Dan Woodman. 2022. “Dimensions of the Asset Economy.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 23 (1): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2022.2058718.

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17. Trotsky, Leon. 1972. The Struggle against Fascism in Germany.

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18. Engels, Friedrich. 1892. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.

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