The relative autonomy of the petty bourgeoisie

Nicos Poulantzas

Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning came to people's attention in early 2018 with their book, "The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars". Seeking to account for an SJW phenomenon increasingly dominant in the western world, they distinguished between three kinds of culture: Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood.

Campbell and Manning over-abstracted these cultural categories, representing them almost as menu choices, or contingent way-points on the arc of history. This was mostly corrected in Tanner Greer's commentary at "The Scholar's Stage" (which features on the sidebar in the web version of this blog).

Rather than having me summarise his impressive analysis, please review it for yourself: "Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood: A Tour Through Three Centuries of American Political Culture"

Greer's analysis was not perfect.

"The transition from honor to dignity reflected a deeper shift in the basic building blocks of society. Had Western Europeans not shifted away from clan based to citizen based communities, there would not have been any Culture of Dignity. The shift from dignity to victimhood reflects a similar change in the societal distribution of power. ...

The federal government assumes powers traditionally reserved to local and state governments. Local businesses have been pushed out of existence by international conglomerates. The businesses, associations, congregations, and clubs that once made up American society are gone. America has been atomized; her citizens live alone, connected but weakly one to another. Arrayed against each is a set of vast, impersonal bureaucracies that cannot be controlled, only appealed to.

A "Culture of Victimhood" is a perfectly natural response to this shift in the distribution of power. Remember that the central purpose of moral cultures is to help resolve or deter disputes. Dignity cultures provide a moral code to regulate disputes among equals from the same community. They also help individuals in a community--citizens--organize to protect their joint interests.

21st century America has lost this ability to organize and solve problems at the local level. The most effective way to resolve disputes is appeal to the powerful third parties: corporations, the federal government, or the great mass of people weakly connected by social media. The easiest way to earn the sympathy of these powers is to be the unambiguous victim in the dispute.

Victim culture is here to stay."

In fact this 'atomisation' has to be interpreted more dynamically, in class terms. After all, not everyone identifies as a 'victim'.

Peter Turchin has correctly linked neoliberal atomisation with the 'overproduction of elites', the mass production of (social science and humanities) graduates with inflated expectations and entitlements, but for whom no place exists within the real elite, the top 1% or 0.1%. They are angry and febrile and in the mass a cause of political instability. It's not a new phenomenon: some of us remember the late sixties and early seventies.

This (now vastly enlarged) intermediate layer between the traditional working class and the high bourgeoisie is termed by Marxists the petty bourgeoisie. This brought to mind the seminal work of theorist Nicos Poulantzas and I reviewed with interest his chapter 13, "The New Petty Bourgeoisie" in "The Poulantzas Reader" (PDF) .

Poulantzas was an interesting guy and I also reviewed his bio, nodding along, until I came to this:

"He killed himself in 1979 by jumping from the window of a friend's flat in Paris."

He was 43.

There was something about the mental stability of continental Marxists in the late twentieth century. His more famous contemporary, Louis Althusser,  killed his wife Hélène Rytmann the following year and was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years.

Why are the new petty bourgeoisie so restless again? Because a decade of economic stagnation with the increasing gap between their circumstances and those of the top 1% has left them feeling abandoned. They experience a dislocating lack of prospects and purpose.

The old-time (pre-1980s) working class had a historic cultural identity forged through tenement communities, monolithic employers, trade unionism and social-democratic activism. The modern petty bourgeoisie by contrast is a collection of isolates, expressing their angst through faddish identity-issues.

None of these campaigns ever address the real causes of their dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, their heartfelt herd-activism is always destabilising .. and from the bourgeoisie's point of view, always with a risk of triggering wider unrest. Consequently, the elites attempt to manipulate and co-opt them (eg the moralising campaign against plastic pollution which carefully fails to discuss the true sources of said pollution).

The classic Marxist texts (Lenin, Trotsky) recognised the febrile and changeable nature of the radicalised petty bourgeoisie. Their works discuss methods of creating an alliance with the proletariat in the struggle for socialism.

How times have changed now that the tail wags the dog: the era of Momentum and the death of the dream .. .

"Why do they hate us?"

Consider a tough gang. You, an outsider and by yourself, choose to walk up to the gang leader in front of fellow gang members and indulge yourself in a series of choice insults.

What happens to you?

Most countries have (or had) laws of lèse-majesté, which formalise penalties for disrespect to leaders. You may protest you have a right to free speech, but rights do not grow on trees. They're no more than agreements to permit certain kinds of behaviour, backed up by the powers of a State.

Absent such a State .. there are no rights.

And why would different communities agree on what should be morally permitted?

Whether it's Charlie Hebdo or that German comedian and President Erdogan, Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory sheds some light.

Here's TheReformedMind post: "Applying Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory to responses to “The Innocence of Muslims”:

"At a lawyers conference I attended recently, the conversation turned to “The Innocence of Muslims,” the offensive YouTube video that has sparked riots throughout the Muslim world. “Why do they react this way?” a partner at a major law firm asked, referring to Muslim societies.

"The idea that people would take such offense at an inept video, and blame American society in general rather than the individuals who produced the film, was incomprehensible to this American lawyer: “We would never react that way.” The other lawyers agreed.

This conversation came back to me this week as I read Jonathan Haidt’s very worthwhile new book, The Righteous Mind. Mostly, the book explores the different moral psychologies of American conservatives and liberals.  (Haidt argues that the differences are largely innate — “pre-wired,” he says — thus confirming Iolanthe’s famous observation that “every boy and every gal/ That’s born into the world alive/Is either a little Liberal /Or else a little Conservative!”).

"One chapter, though, compares American moral intuitions with those of other societies. America, Haidt says, has what psychologists call a WEIRD culture — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. WEIRD cultures have a strong “ethic of autonomy”: they hold that “people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences” which, barring direct harm to others, should be fulfilled.

"In such cultures, as Jean Bethke Elshtain remarked at the annual Erasmus Lecture this week, “loyalty” principally means “being true to oneself.” The First Amendment reflects this ethic: it promotes the widest possible range of individual expression and advises offended listeners to avoid harm by turning away.

Largely through American influence, WEIRD values increasingly dominate international human rights discourse. This is ironic, because WEIRD cultures are global outliers — and America is the farthest outlier of all. Most of the world does not see autonomy as the most important value and does not privilege individual expression to the extent we do. Many cultures, Haidt says, have an “ethic of community” that sees people principally as members of collectives — families, tribes, and nations — with strong claims to loyalty. And many cultures have an “ethic of divinity,” which holds that people’s principal duty is to God, not themselves.

“In such societies,” Haidt writes, “the personal liberty of secular Western nations” — including the unrestrained freedom of expression — “looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity’s baser instincts.”

Haidt’s account explains much of the incomprehension on display at that lawyers conference. To someone in a WEIRD cultural environment — and the educated upper-middle class in America, Haidt claims, is the WEIRDest environment of all — it is very hard to understand how people could feel morally outraged by an inept video that insults divinity. It seems so counter-intuitive.

"The incomprehension works the other way, too. To someone in a non-WEIRD environment, it is very hard to understand how people could feel morally justified defending sacrilegious expression. Haidt’s account suggests that the differences between these cultures are going to be extremely difficult to negotiate. Intuitions are stubborn things."

Moral parochialism is very tempting. Haidt says, "Morality binds and blinds." We're right and the other guys are wrong. He believes modern democratic states are a better solution to organising society than those that preceded them, and that their organising principle of rule-based utilitarianism is for the best ;-).

However, we should do better than blank incomprehension, let alone gratuitous provocation, when we encounter cultures which are not so WEIRD. And if people choose not to, there will be consequences - even if you personally believe on moral grounds that there shouldn't be. *

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Further reading:

• Jonathan Haidt and Moral Foundations Theory
• Jonathan Haidt in pictures (MFT)
• Matthew Parris, Brexit and MFT

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* Very relevant to all this is the incomprehension between honour cultures and dignity cultures. The EU is a dignity culture; the Middle-East and Turkey are honour cultures.

Culture: Honour vs. Dignity vs. Victimhood

By way of introduction, if you are unfamiliar with the concepts of 'microaggressions' and 'trigger warnings' you should take a look at this first.

OK, to business. Interesting (if somewhat repetitive and breathless) article here, by way of Marginal Revolution.

In the article, Jonathan Haidt writes:

"I just read the most extraordinary paper by two sociologists - Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning - explaining why concerns about microaggressions have erupted on many American college campuses in just the past few years.

In brief: We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They forswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized.

It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses) that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and aggrieved victim. This is why we have seen the recent explosion of concerns about microaggressions, combined with demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces, that Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in The Coddling of the American Mind."

In the cited article, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning describe the three cultures thus (slightly edited below, mostly to remove citations).

"THE EVOLUTION OF MORAL CULTURE

Social scientists have long recognized a distinction between societies with a “culture of honor” and those with a “culture of dignity”…. The moral evolution of modern Western society can be understood as a transition between these two cultures.

Culture of Honor

Honor is a kind of status attached to physical bravery and the unwillingness to be dominated by anyone. Honor in this sense is a status that depends on the evaluations of others, and members of honor societies are expected to display their bravery by engaging in violent retaliation against those who offend them. Accordingly, those who engage in such violence often say that the opinions of others left them no choice at all … .

In honor cultures, it is one’s reputation that makes one honorable or not, and one must respond aggressively to insults, aggressions, and challenges or lose honor. Not to fight back is itself a kind of moral failing, such that “in honor cultures, people are shunned or criticized not for exacting vengeance but for failing to do so”. Honorable people must guard their reputations, so they are highly sensitive to insult, often responding aggressively to what might seem to outsiders as minor slights.

Cultures of honor tend to arise in places where legal authority is weak or nonexistent and where a reputation for toughness is perhaps the only effective deterrent against predation or attack. Because of their belief in the value of personal bravery and capability, people socialized into a culture of honor will often shun reliance on law or any other authority even when it is available, refusing to lower their standing by depending on another to handle their affairs.

But historically, as state authority has expanded and reliance on the law has increased, honor culture has given way to something else: a culture of dignity.

Culture of Dignity

The prevailing culture in the modern West is one whose moral code is nearly the exact opposite of that of an honor culture. Rather than honor, a status based primarily on public opinion, people are said to have dignity, a kind of inherent worth that cannot be alienated by others.

Dignity exists independently of what others think, so a culture of dignity is one in which public reputation is less important. Insults might provoke offense, but they no longer have the same importance as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery. It is even commendable to have “thick skin” that allows one to shrug off slights and even serious insults, and in a dignity-based society parents might teach children some version of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” – an idea that would be alien in a culture of honor.

People are to avoid insulting others, too, whether intentionally or not, and in general an ethic of self-restraint prevails. When intolerable conflicts do arise, dignity cultures prescribe direct but non-violent actions, such as negotiated compromise geared toward solving the problem. Failing this, or if the offense is sufficiently severe, people are to go to the police or appeal to the courts. Unlike the honorable, the dignified approve of appeals to third parties and condemn those who “take the law into their own hands.”

For offenses like theft, assault, or breach of contract, people in a dignity culture will use law without shame. But in keeping with their ethic of restraint and toleration, it is not necessarily their first resort, and they might condemn many uses of the authorities as frivolous. People might even be expected to tolerate serious but accidental personal injuries … .

The ideal in dignity cultures is thus to use the courts as quickly, quietly, and rarely as possible. The growth of law, order, and commerce in the modern world facilitated the rise of the culture of dignity, which largely supplanted the culture of honor among the middle and upper classes of the West … . But the rise of microaggression complaints suggests a new direction in the evolution of moral culture.

Culture of Victimhood

Microaggression complaints have characteristics that put them at odds with both honor and dignity cultures. Honorable people are sensitive to insult, and so they would understand that microaggressions, even if unintentional, are severe offenses that demand a serious response. But honor cultures value unilateral aggression and disparage appeals for help. Public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one’s own victimization and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor – tantamount to showing that one had no honor at all.

Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses. Instead they would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue, or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether.

A culture of victimhood is one characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties. People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large. Domination is the main form of deviance, and victimization a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization. …

Under such conditions complaint to third parties has supplanted both toleration and negotiation. People increasingly demand help from others, and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance. Thus we might call this moral culture a culture of victimhood because the moral status of the victim, at its nadir in honor cultures, has risen to new heights. ...

That victimhood culture is so evident among campus activists might lead the reader to believe this is entirely a phenomenon of the political left, and indeed, the narrative of oppression and victimization is especially congenial to the leftist worldview. But insofar as they share a social environment, the same conditions that lead the aggrieved to use a tactic against their adversaries encourage their adversaries to use that tactic as well. For instance, hate crime hoaxes do not all come from the left."

The problem with cultures of honour is that they don't scale well. Large enterprises, whether of government or industry, require a certain predictability, formality and impersonality of behaviour. Not much works if people keep getting offended all the time and spend their lives fighting or at the very least threatening. But at least the powerful and successful tend to win.

Victimhood is arguably worse: people keep getting offended all the time and then waste everyone's time complaining and seeking sanctions. This levelling down stops almost any behaviour leading to success, which by its nature leads to inegalitarian outcomes of privilege and power. Economists, by the way, have a name for this: it's called rent-seeking behaviour.

If you believe that the future depends upon social and technological progress, then I'm afraid that the dignity culture, with all its faults, is the way to go.