Sobre el "Capitalismo simbólico"...
https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-symbolic-capitalistsFunctioning Capitalists
Karl Marx argued that capitalism was fated to break down almost all other social ties and divisions other than the core class conflict between workers (the proletariat) and capitalists (the bourgeoisie). Inevitably, he argued, the workers would rise up and overthrow the capitalists, It was a question of ‘when’ and ‘where’ not ‘if’ the revolution would occur.
In Capital Vol. III, Marx divided the bourgeoisie into two core blocs: “functioning capitalists” and “money capitalists.”
The former term referred to professionals, managers and administrators — the people who run things, but don’t own things. The latter term referred to people who own businesses, resources, etc. but don’t directly manage most of the decisions for the enterprises and assets under their domain (they have people for that: the functioning capitalists).
Marx noted there are often tensions, sometimes outright conflict, between these different blocs of elites — although typically the former works to advance the will and interests of the latter. Across the board, they share an interest (and collaborate) in exploiting and oppressing the working class — and in siphoning ‘surplus value’ produced by people whose labor is tied to physical goods and services ‘upwards’ to people like themselves.
The New Class
Capital, Vol. III was published posthumously in 1894. Over the next several years, and especially in the interwar period (that is, the years between World Wars I and II), the influence of “functioning capitalists” grew rapidly. As institutions grew ever more complex, and operated at every larger scales, the separation between ownership and control grew more and more pronounced.
Shortly after the outbreak of the second world war in Europe, American political theorist James Burnham published a milestone book, The Managerial Revolution, analyzing the ascendence of this new elite formation, which he argued was no longer just a subset of the capitalists, but had come to constitute a “new class.” -- distinct from owners and producers alike.
Somewhat to Burnham’s consternation, his book sparked a genre of important texts charting the shifts in the global economy and how they relate to the growing cultural, economic and political power of those Marx referred to as “functioning capitalists.” Among them:
Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class.
Daniel Bell, The Coming of a Post-Industrial Society.
Christopher Jencks & David Riesman, The Academic Revolution.
Steven Brint, In an Age of Experts.
Over time, however, Burnham’s simple description of these elites as a “new class” was supplanted by more refined and descriptive terms.
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The Professional Managerial Class
In a prescient series of essays for Radical America in 1977 (Part I, Part II), Barbara and John Ehenreich introduced the term “The Professional-Managerial Class” (PMC) to refer to the new class whose arrival had been heralded by Burnham.
The Ehrenreichs defined the PMC as “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” In laymen’s terms, the major roles they play in society are to
Keep the capitalist machine running (in the present and in perpetuity),
Maximize its efficiency and productivity, and
Justify any inequalities or impositions that are required in order to achieve these ends.
These functions the PMC serve in society, the Ehrenreichs noted, tend to lie at odds with their values. A disproportionate share of the PMC identified with the “new left” (which was, from the outset, a PMC ideology, as C. Wright Mills emphasized back in 1960). They supported feminism, the black power movement, the sexual revolution, environmentalism, the antiwar movement, etc. in addition to possessing more generic left egalitarian economic leanings. PMC attempts to reconcile these views with the role they actually played in society gave rise to a series of contradictions that has come to define this elite formation.
In the years since the Ehenreichs published these seminal essays, the ‘professional-managerial class’ has become perhaps the most popular means of referring to the new elites. However, it is also a term loaded with baggage. As Barbara Ehenriech noted in her 1989 Fear of Falling, the term (and derivatives thereof, such as ‘managerial elites’ or the ‘new class’) became something of a pejorative within the political ‘right’ during the Reagan years. Today, contemporary leftists (intellectuals associated with the Democratic Socialists of America, for instance) have similarly come to use the term as a slur against banal Democrats – even though most critics are, themselves, members of that same group.
Others have criticized the term as being conceptually unclear. For instance, some have argued that a term that seems to encompass the manager of a local Applebee’s, nurses, police officers, journalists, and investment bankers – as though all of these groups share a common set of values and interests – cannot be particularly coherent or useful. This criticism, while not uncommon, is frankly a misread of the concept – perhaps a response to others using it in an overly loose fashion.
According to the Ehenreichs’ original formulation, the PMC did not include anyone who happened to be salaried, or who worked in bureaucracies, or whose jobs required some kind of post-secondary education. The crux of the definition is that they were mental workers. Cops and nurses, who provide primarily physical services, would therefore not be included in the PMC. Similarly, the manager of a local Applebee’s branch – a salaried employee who is typically ‘on the floor’ ensuring customer satisfaction, managing employee disputes, ensuring productivity and compliance with company rules and standards, ensuring the proper production and delivery of a physical good (customers’ meals) – would not be part of the PMC. The people who work at the Applebee’s corporate offices (observing the productivity of stores across the country via spreadsheets – far removed from the point of sale of actual food for particular customers in a particular location) would be part of the PMC.
The Creative Class
Some scholars have tried coming up with alternative labels to refer to the new elites, both to avoid the baggage associated with PMC and to explore different dimensions of what sets them apart from others. Most have continued to refer to them as a class – for instance, as “Class X,” or “The Aspirational Class.” Perhaps the most popular alternative to PMC was developed by urbanist Richard Florida: the creative class.
In my view, although there are many virtues to Florida’s alternative conception, it is also unsatisfying in many respects. As Florida himself acknowledges, creativity is hardly just the purview of those who do what the Ehenreichs refer to as ‘mental’ work. All sort of practical, physical, tasks require ingenuity, innovation and improvisation – from fixing a malfunctioning device, to closing a sale at a retail store (speaking as someone who worked for more than a decade and a half at restaurants and retail stores), to navigating inclement weather conditions as a truckers.
Moreover, while ‘PMC’ has been undermined in some respects due to the pejorative connotations that have developed around it, ‘creative class’ almost suffers from the opposite issue: its valence is perhaps overly positive. Indeed, although the The Rise of the Creative Class is, on balance, a really fantastic and important work of scholarship, it also happens to be filled with praise for the creative class and seems to accept many of their cherished narratives at face value. Florida’s main criticism is that the “creative class” has largely failed to understand themselves as a class or organize as a class. However, this may be less a problem in how these elites behave than in how they are conceptualized.
On the one hand, it seems sensible to talk and think about them as a class – their own self-understandings notwithstanding. After all, these elites have distinctive and convergent interests around issues like intellectual property laws, public trust in education, science and expertise, or continued investments in science, technology, research and the arts. They concentrate in the same urban hubs. They broadly share certain ideological and cultural dispositions. They have been largely consolidated into a single political party. However, at best, they could be understood as a class in statu nascendi — that is, a class still in the process of being formed. This process has been consistently undermined, most notably by changes in the economy that have created growing inequalities within and between the symbolic professions — generating often-intense internal struggles over resources and prestige, claims and counterclaims for authority and jurisdiction, etc. As We Have Never Been Woke illustrates at length (in Chapter 2), Great Awokenings are largely manifestations of these internal tensions.
Symbolic Analysts
Instead of talking about these new elites as a “class,” former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich sought to define them more narrowly by the type of labor they do. In The Work of Nations he coined the term ‘symbolic analysts’ to describe those whose work is primary oriented around the production and manipulation of data, symbols, images, narratives, abstractions, ideas and analysis. While Reich’s text was similarly criticized for being perhaps too flattering of symbolic analysts, his framework is nonetheless quite effective at isolating what sets these new elites apart from others in society (in a way that does not include, say, hairdressers, Applebee’s managers, cops, etc.), and avoids the baggage associated with various ‘class’ based analyses (given that these workers are not a class per se).
However, a shortcoming of Reich’s analysis and, indeed, most others since Marx, is an absence of considerations about power. This is perhaps, in part, because works in the genre are near-unanimously composed by and for the very elites in question, and we tend not to be super reflexive. Instead, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu emphasized, “Being professionals of discourse and explication… intellectuals have a much greater than average capacity to transform their spontaneous sociology, their self-interested vision of the social world, into the appearance of a scientific sociology.” And that’s precisely what many of these works have tended to do.
To his credit, in later works, Richard Florida grew much more critical of the role the creative class has played in fomenting inequality. As did David Brooks. His Bobos in Paradise occasionally mocked ‘bourgeois bohemians’ but largely praised them. By 2021, however, he had come around to arguing that the “bobos broke America.”
The Ehrenreichs grew more critical too. In earlier works they had posited that, because the PMC was pulled in two different directions, it was an open question whether they would ultimately align with other elites in order to fulfill their core social function (leading to increased inequalities as their prominence in society grew), or whether they would side with the genuinely marginalized, disadvantaged and vulnerable in society (in accordance with their New Left beliefs, leading to greater social egalitarianism). By the 2010s, they viewed that question as largely settled. As Olufemi Taiwo and Enzo Rossi aptly put it, we ended up with a synthesis: greater cultural egalitarianism paired with growing socioeconomic inequality.
Robert Reich, for his part, has become much more aggressive in condemning inequality. However, he continues to focus largely on superelites and the GOP to explain social problems, largely excluding “symbolic analysts,” the knowledge economy, and the Democratic Party from critique.
Across the board, the ways scholars and pundits conceptualize this elite formation continues to largely avoid considerations of power. Power is something that millionaires and billionaires have. It’s something that the President of the United States has. It’s not something that people like “us” possess. We’re not the problem. We’re just helpless cogs in an exploitative system trying to live our “social justice” beliefs as best we can. Or so our preferred narratives go. The truth, however, is far more complicated and uncomfortable.
Symbolic Capital(ists)
Synthesizing Bourdieu and Reich, I came up with an alternative way to conceptualize the “winners” in the knowledge economy that
Helps distinguish symbolic economy elites from other elites,
Captures and integrates most of the important stuff from the other conceptions,
Foregrounds the power dynamics that have been largely downplayed in analyses of this elite constellation since Marx (and as an added bonus, harkens back to Marx’s original formulation).
I refer to them (us) as “symbolic capitalists.”
In sociological terms, a capitalist is not someone who simply favors capitalism, but rather someone who possesses financial resources (capital) that used to acquire, exert control over, and extract profits from, the means of (material) production. Drawing on Bourdieu, we can define a symbolic capitalist as someone who possesses a high level of symbolic capital, and exerts control over, and extracts profits from, the means of symbolic (re)production. They are elites whose social position is tied to the production, distribution and transformation of symbolic capital.
[Think: People who work in fields like advertising and entertainment, education and journalism, design and the arts, science and technology, politics and activism, finance and philanthropy, consulting and administration, religion, law, and so on].
Bourdieu expounded on the idea of symbolic capital in his 1979 book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. In contrast with more traditional resources associated with wealth, material assets, etc., Bourdieu defined symbolic capital as the resources available to someone on the basis of honor, prestige, celebrity, consecration, and recognition. These symbolic aspects of social life are intimately bound up with power and wealth, or with material and political needs and aspirations. According to Bourdieu, the roles people are assigned to on the basis of their symbolic capital (or lack thereof) may actually be more important than more conventional economic forces in determining how hierarchies of power are arranged within a society. And regardless of how inequalities come about, it is primarily through symbolic capital that they are legitimized and maintained.
However, symbolic capital operates much more subtly than other forms of power and wealth. Indeed, when deployed effectively, neither the person wielding this capital nor the people it is exercised upon will consciously recognize the power dynamics at play. Instead, interactions, relationships and states of affairs will seem natural, necessary, inevitable, or in any case, normal, for all parties involved. Even those at the bottom of social hierarchies will often acquiesce or resign themselves to their own domination. As Bourdieu put it, “symbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it.”
Over the years, academics have proliferated new forms of symbolic capital. However, in his initial formulation, Bourdieu highlighted three core varieties: cultural, academic and political. Each of these, he argued, could be converted to the others under the right circumstances — and symbolic capital can also be converted into financial capital (indeed, this is precisely how intellectual or cultural elites ‘make a living’). Collectively, these different forms of symbolic capital serve as the basis of defining others as insiders or intruders, experts or amateurs, leaders or brutes, authentic or posers, geniuses or hacks, sincere or cynical, worthy or unworthy, etc. To briefly walk through them:
Political capital includes the trust, goodwill, relationships, and institutional authority that can used to mobilize others in the service of particular goals. One’s formal title within an organizational hierarchy, one’s perceived credibility, reliability, efficacy, experience and virtue — these are all resources that can be drawn upon to convince others to throw their lot in with someone, to trust their vision, to run with their plan, to pursue their priorities.
Academic capital, on the other hand, is about getting others to defer to one’s judgment based on special knowledge, intellect, skill or expertise. Academic capital is mainly derived from one’s credentials, degrees, formal training, etc. One of the most frequent means though which people demonstrate their academic capital is by drawing attention to their book-knowledge (for instance, name checking scholars or academic texts or deploying academic concepts in communications), through appeals to epistemic authority (‘I have a PhD in x,’ or ‘As an expert on y…’), or through evoking one’s association with institutions or professions that are bound up with academic knowledge (i.e. professor, researcher, analyst, specialist, doctor, lawyer, consultant, journalist).
Finally, cultural capital is about demonstrating oneself as interesting, cool, sophisticated, charismatic, charming, etc. People reveal their cultural capital through how they talk, how they carry themselves, their dress, their manners, their tastes and expressed opinions — all of which provide strong cues as to one’s level of education, socioeconomic background, ideological and political alignments, place of origin, etc.
Of these three main forms of symbolic capital, it is cultural capital that is the least accessible to non-elites. As Bourdieu emphasized, it is only those with “distance from necessity” who tend to have the luxury of cultivating the “long-lasting dispositions of mind and body” associated with high status.
A core argument of We Have Never Been Woke is that ‘wokeness’ has become key a source of cultural capital among contemporary elites—especially among symbolic capitalists. The idiosyncratic understanding of social justice, and attendant dispositions and modes of engagement discursively associated with ‘being woke’ are popular almost exclusively among symbolic capitalists. Those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized, disadvantaged or impoverished don’t think or talk in these ways. And that’s part of the point.
Among symbolic capitalists, ‘wokeness’ has come to serve as sign that someone is of an elite background or is well-educated. Through espousing ‘woke’ beliefs, symbolic capitalists (and aspirants to the symbolic professions) demonstrate that they the kind of person who ‘plays ball’ — they are aware of, and are willing and able to competently execute, the appropriate scripts for cultural and intellectual elites in response to various cues. That is, ‘wokeness’ is increasingly a means of identifying who is part of ‘the club’ — and it provides a basis for deeming those who are not part of the club as being unworthy of symbolic capital (i.e. people who fail to embrace elite conceptions of ‘social justice’ are held to be underserving of honor, fame, prestige, deference, etc.).
This is just the tip of the iceberg, however. To find out more about symbolic capitalists, our idiosyncratic lifestyles and social position, and how these relate to our distinctive political and ideological alignments – and to the narratives we use to legitimize our bids for more power and resources (and to delegitimize our rivals) – you should definitely check out the full book, which is now available for pre-order. And stay tuned to this Substack for essays exploring the growing socioeconomic, cultural and political divides between symbolic capitalists and most other Americans – and the conflicts that have been created and, in some cases, transformed as a result of this rift. If you’re not already signed up, consider subscribing now.
