99%
By Henry Farrell puts out the call for suggestions/donations for the Occupy Wall Street library. I can’t argue with his primary suggestion, Hacker and Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics, which does an excellent job of telling the story of the great divergence. (For good overviews, see Kevin Drum and Farrell, again. The companion article in Politics and Society appears to not be firewalled). I’ve been teaching this book over the last few weeks as the OWS/99% movement unfolded, which turned out to be excellent timing. Hacker and Pierson do an excellent job of, amongst other things, demonstrating that the story of the changes in the US economy since the 70’s can’t be fully grasped by a number of common but less fine-grained approaches to measuring economic inequality. Other ways of carving up the population–deciles, quintiles, college vs. non-college, skilled vs. unskilled, etc–show growing inequality as well, but they obscure the full scope of it by lumping in the 1% with a number of other people whose circumstances have changed but not as dramatically.
There’s been some pushback here, arguing (correctly) that the same period of time has been reasonably kind to more than just the top 1%; that (roughly) 10% have seen their standard of living improve in non-trivial ways over the same period of time. (Matthew Yglesias here, Jonas Pontusson’s review of WTAP in the latest Perspectives on Politics). They’ve got a point; I’m not sure it should be taken as a criticism of H&P as much as a reminder that the existing data doesn’t conform perfectly to any one narrative.
More importantly, though, I think it’s a mistake to think about the 99% too literally, for reasons gmack articulated nicely in a comment on this post:
Personally, I think it’s somewhat misleading to think of “the 99%” as a demographic group; it is, rather, a political designation, more akin to a declaration of faith and principles than a reference to one’s factual income. To declare oneself as part of the 99% is not to say that I make less than X amount of money; it is to declare that I am in opposition to the existing order of things, which has effectively written out large percentages of the population as not really relevant to the political community. Thus, for instance, I think that Warren Buffet could declare himself too to be of the 99%, and I would welcome it. So while its true that the 99% don’t share a common interest, it is equally true that the one core purpose of the movement is to transform things, to bring into being a new political subjectivity, which in theory at least, could contain anyone and everyone.
To think about this a bit more–in my own perusal of the narratives on the 99% blog, one theme that really strikes me is the conscious, astute, and political awareness of precariousness. Indeed, this seems to be one of the principle ways those who are doing more or less OK at the moment relate their status to this movement. On the one hand, two trends in addition to the massive job loss of the last four years would seem to be important contributors to the current sense of precariousness: one a long term trend (rising health care/insurance costs) and a short term one (the massive loss of home-based wealth that’s left people underwater and unmoveable). But there’s an important political dimension to this as well.
The notion of the ‘precariat’ as a political identity, as Mika Lavaque-Manty observes, has had some success in Europe, but has thus far failed to catch on in any meaningful way (which is unsurprising, for reasons Mika’s essay discusses). There are good reasons to be hesitant about this as a political identity, but the failure of more traditional classed based political identities have failed to provide a successful path toward politicizing economic conditions for a long time. A heightened and politicized awareness of precarity as a consequence of the 99% movement could turn out to be a valuable engine of a much-needed solidarity.