Over the past thirty-five years, the American economy has shifted from being focused primarily on commodity production to one sustained by professional services. As the American economy has deindustrialized and redeveloped in new, “white-collar” economic sectors like healthcare, education, and technology, the socialist left would do well to analyze how this change has affected the nature of work and the class composition of the United States.

Throughout this historical process, one trend has made itself apparent: Unskilled and semi-skilled manual employment in production is either being automated away or shifted geographically to other nations. In its place, careers – requiring high levels of institutional education, giving the employee a sense that they are fulfilling some mission or purpose like healing the sick or educating children, and offering opportunity for advancing limited seemingly only by the employee’s own drive – dominate the new economy. These are the professions.

It is especially tempting to count professionals among the working-class given the situation the American labor movement finds itself in. When victories are scarcer to find from the once-titanic unions in the auto, steel and construction industries, and where the professionals’ associations in nursing and public education have delivered the most promising activity in the past decade, it would seem that we would be passing up a golden opportunity if we were to exclude the most successful labor unions from being included in the ranks of the working-class.

It is a trend that mirrors itself in the left’s culture as well: The American worker is too culturally backwards to be helped. He is rural, we are urban. He finds as much pride in manual labor as we find in our college diplomas. The left is culturally isolated from this section of the working-class, so it has migrated its fortunes to a new economic demographic – one which is better educated, more articulate, and altogether easier to understand from the perspective of any university socialist club.

The Working Class is Not “Anyone Who Works for a Living”



If for no other reason than to keep it simple for those unfamiliar with Marxist terminology, the socialist left has made it a habit to describe the working-class broadly as “anyone who sells their labor” or “anyone who works for a living.” These definitions may do us well when speaking in a general sense, but some elaboration is necessary.

The concept of work here is itself ambiguous. If you were to ask the owner of a small restaurant or the district manager of a chain of Wal-Marts why they show up to work every morning, they will probably give you an answer similar to the waitresses in the restaurant or the clerks in the Wal-Mart: to pay bills and to feed their family. Many different sections of society work for a living (depending on what you consider work), whether they are proletarian wage workers like food servers or production line workers or small capitalists like small business owners and intermediary corporate cogs.

Capitalist or otherwise, everyone in a society’s economy is forced to participate in it somehow – whether by doing a job someone else offers, hiring someone, buying property, or engaging in financial activities like the stock market – and most people engage with it through employment. Simple dependence on employment, or the necessity of participating in the capitalist economy (in whatever way) can’t be the criterion we use for assessing whether or not a person or their occupation is “working-class.”

Moreover, the concept of “work” is ambiguous in this definition because it does not seek to define what work (or, correctly, labor) actually is. The working-class labors for a living – or at least for a wage. This is an important distinction to make. Work cannot just mean time spent in between punching-in and punching-out, and “the sale of one’s labor” is an economic process much more specific than the exchange of someone’s time for a wage.

Labor is a productive human activity that combines raw materials to make something that fulfills a particular need or use. It is productive because it creates a definite amount of economic value. The combination of raw materials is not relegated to assembly-line work, but includes any scenario in which a person expends their creative energy on an object to change it into something usable. This constitutes fast-food workers preparing and serving meals and warehouse workers packaging Amazon shipments as much as it is about workers assembling automobiles in factories.

The point here is obviously that work, for the working-class, is not simply any tedious time you get paid for, and the subjective experience of work is not constitutive of the working-class identity.

The Nature of Work

It is not just that the working-class engages in labor, it is how they engage in labor. After all, there are many groups of artisans and owner-operators who certainly engage in labor, but are scarcely working-class. What separates a jeweler who assembles rings and trinkets to sell via Etsy or a general contractor who constructs a small house from the food-service worker, the warehouse worker, or the assembly-line grunt is that the work of the former is self-directed rather than mass-produced.

They may not decide exactly what to make, but they decide how to make it. This is in sharp contrast to the labor engaged in by the working-class: their activity is timed, disciplined, watched, corrected… they effectively lose control over all of their activity, from the way their fingers move to the exact words they repeat to customers, from the time they punch in to the time they leave.

This is a core feature of working-class life, as it is the alienation of the worker from the process of their work. This intense discipline of work is a material reality of the way that production is organized in a capitalist economy: as the owner (of the business the worker labors for, and the worker’s labor) has a dire interest in the maximization of profit, and because the source of profit is the creative activity of the worker, the owner must see to it that literally every second of labor-time is as productive as possible. The owner must squeeze as much value as possible out of the living activity of the worker.

What Are the Conditions of Life for the Professional?

So far we have examined some of the conditions of life for the working-class. The conditions of life for the professional sharply differ.

The worker, having whatever skills he or she might possess, finds employment wherever possible to fulfill the basic conditions of life for themselves. In the most skilled sections of the class, the worker belongs to a union that procures work on their behalf (as in the construction trades) or has somewhat reliable job security. In the most unskilled sections of the class, this means taking a job until the alienation is no longer bearable and then finding another (which causes the high turnover rate in retail and food service – workers escape the misery by finding another establishment to work at), working various odd jobs or informal employment situations (compare Uber), and so forth.

The professional seeks out a career that suitably matches his or her personal ambitions, whether it be healing the sick, educating youth, or designing a product. The professional then enters into years of institutional education to enter the field – education, for what it’s worth, which is so intellectual that it is unequivocal to the category of technical “skill” in manual-labor employment. Their tremendous level of education and professionalization equalizes the bargaining power between them and their employers to a degree unknown by any wage-worker. A salary subsidizes their entire lifestyle and negates the necessity that they must sell as much of their living time by the hour as they can bear. True, their salaries and benefits may be threatened by capital – as a school district or hospital is as eager to cut down on costs as any other organization – but their benefits packages are determined by much more than the bare amount of money necessary to allow them to punch the clock tomorrow.

The worker sells their labor by the hour, and the buyer expects to squeeze as much value out of that time as possible. In pursuit of such a goal, the employer utilizes every psychological and mechanical medium possible to rationalize the activity of the worker. The physical consciousness of the worker is rarely necessary. This naturally leads the worker to feelings of apathy, disdain, boredom, and misery.

The professional may not decide exactly what he/she is doing, but a large part of their job is deciding how to do it. The professional uses their superior education and knowledge to make decisions. It is not simply to divide these jobs between “manual” and “intellectual” labor. If a job affords the employee enough autonomy to make these “intellectual” decisions, i.e. how to teach a class and run a classroom, how to treat a patient, or how to design a product, the occupation already lacks the condition of alienation.

The oppressive nature of work under capitalism leads workers to either desperately seek an escape to the alienation and desperation that capitalism provides, most effectively and most destructively through drug usage and crime, or to unite with other members of their class to change the conditions of their work in their favor through strikes and labor unions. Whether or not the worker is conscious of it, the worker’s class has an irreconcilable interest in the abolition of capitalism. The conditions of their life can never prosper in capitalist society, and only through achieving a new society can they begin to reach their full human potential.

The material functions of capitalism do not impute a similar interest in the class of professionals. As a group, they tend to side with the working-class when economic recessions drive them into close quarters with the lot of burger-flippers and janitors, and side with the classes of landowners and business owners they seek to one day enter into when times are better.

Inside or Outside Our Class?

None of this is to say that the only occupations the working-class can find itself in are both productive and mass-produced. There are of course working-class occupations which are alienating, yet do not produce value (like janitors and some retail clerks); and there are still other occupations which produce value but are not as alienating (think the skilled construction trades).

Rather, the importance of this question lies in encouraging the left to begin thinking of these professional occupations outside the narrow mindset that since Marx implied that the majority of the population is working-class (in his own time), then of course the occupations that the majority of people must find themselves in today must be working-class occupations. Embracing a perspective that views these salaried careers as analogous and interchangeable with the wage-workers earlier socialists spoke about during the Gilded Age would result in a horribly confusing interpretation of socialist ideas.