Streeck, Taking Back Control (2024)

If we apply the class concept in an appropriately flexible way, defining class in the Weberian sense by an individual’s market situation, the new class division can be understood as a result of divergent interests vis-àvis globalisation: a definition of the new middle class as a group who are believed to, or actually do, profit from globalisation, who have an interest in open international markets for their human capital, and who do not want to be held responsible for satisfying the parochial demands of the losers of globalisation for material or cultural compensation. Their world is the planet, not the nation, at least in their self-image, and they see their opportunity in a progressive opening of national societies, both for themselves and, through migration from outside, for people ready to perform basic, menial services for low pay. As always, the discovery of collective material interests goes hand in hand with the construction of appropriate cultural justifications, including positive images of self and negative ones of others. In this case, what is involved is a moral elevation of universalist social orientations and a corresponding depreciation of localist-particularistic ones, emigrating from the nation-state’s context of obligations towards a morally superior, but at the same time largely obligation-free, context of commitment. With Weber, again, we might speak of an estate-type (ständisch) milieu, which endows itself with a particular concept of honour, one that is linked by elective affinity to its economic interests. The conflict between the old working class and its former allies, now feeling themselves to be cosmopolitans, is exacerbated by a particular asymmetry. In so-called post-industrial society’s economic division of labour and social class structure, it is typically the representatives of the new middle class who end up in possession, or, in any case, in control, of the means of cultural production and communication. This enables them to present and express their particular perspective as a general one – which is, of course, exactly what is meant by the production of ideology. As a result, in the ideal image of globalist politics the representation of the underclass in a democracy conceived as a system of institutions is replaced by the education of the underclass in democracy as a system of values. This reversal in the direction of political communication is additionally favoured by the fact that a large part of the new class works in the field of education, where they believe their task to be to dissuade the less learned by friendly encouragement or bad examination marks from holding erroneous opinions. The resulting culture wars, in which a newly standardised way of writing and speaking sometimes becomes a requirement for full moral citizenship, are conducted with a passion and emotion which is all the greater because the two hostile camps were previously allies, or at least thought they were. --Wolfgang Streeck, Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism (2024) pp48-49 hugzu ;-p