We're the ones who aren't quite comfortable with the idea of the middle class, though more often than not, we come from it.
We're the ones that could be championing the idea of a new and envigorated middle class through business models based on our ethic, our belief in common intellectual property and a common workspace where the most important thing is the exchange of ideas as opposed to who's keeping who in line so that they actually do their demeaning job - a job that they could accomplish in a fraction of the time if it wasn't for the heirarchy and the disrespect. Why should one perform for those who don't respect their work?
WE are the generation that has lost the labor movement. We are the generation that has failed, by and large, to demand redress from the government, to demand accountability. We have failed to really put ourselves on the line.
We are Gen X.
We are the people struggling to make our way through life right now, with kids or without, with success or with failure, working for our ideals or working to eat. Kos is Gen X [though I don't know if such categories really apply to immigrants in our age group - after all Markos went through so much more horror than any of us have. He didn't imagine it, he didn't view it from a distance, growing up in Central America, I think, excuses him from the Gen X curse]. Many of us here are Gen X. Many of us are doing great things. Many of us are struggling to make our lives. From the sense of the Kossack meetings I've had, we predominantly have that middle class background. And that background, for many of my compatriots in my generation, breeds above all suspicion.
We are uncomfortable with the world in which we grew up. We find the 'hivism' of middle class life strange, anti-individual [and ironically anti-social], or just outright escapism. While many in my generation have embraced the life that they felt entitled to do to their ancestry and their education, many others have rejected this, for better or for worse. Maybe we are the new hippies in a way, the people who use their skills to live, but somehow still fight to live by another standard, an idealistic standard - that life is not worth living unless it is lived, not planned. Our life does not appear before us as a formed pathway that though it may twist, turn, and even depart the path is still the way we must go. Even many of us that do follow this do it with a motive that is different from that of many generations before. Well, maybe it is not so different, but it is certainly more a part of our ethic. We do what we do because doing it will further the goal of what we really want to do. We are the generation of defered achievement. We seem to never achieve what we want because the bar is always moved somewhere else.
Gen X'ers like me are children of priveledge. Though we might have been wanting for affection, we were not lacking for opportunity, education, and a breadth of cultural experience. In my case, my parents came from exceedgingly poor families who survived the great depression through either hard work or education. I was raised with both and they are still central to my life, but with that Gen X quirk - I never want to live a life or live in a world where work occludes our [yes selfishness] higher purpose, where work compromises our artistic vision of our lives. Because, as a Gen X'er, I believe, wholeheatedly, that life is art and we are the artists. It is a position of leasure. It is the ultimate illusion of the bourgeoise. It ignores the staggering reality of poverty that surrounds and supports those of us who can have these fantasies. But I believe it is the truth of humanity. I think that we should focus on making conditions possible so that every human being, from every walk of life believes, no, KNOWS that they are the author of their life.
But even with this core belief, my generation has struggled so hard with political identity and its integration into the increasingly corporate world. Our humor reflects it, our riduclous dating scene exposes the underlying uncomfortability with our lives, our retreat into pleasureless materiality bespeaks our inability to deal with our position as those experienced enough to make a difference, but those too apathetic, or too busy, or too pure to exercise that position.
Maybe I speak for myself here. I am notoriously caught up in myself, in my head - thinking my thoughts, writing my music - living a life that only relates to the real world when I need to make money - which I unfortunately need to do often. But I know that I am not alone. And the people around me, who are the same age, do the same. We don't want to give up on the dream that our lives can be grand. We don't want to give up on the idea of making ourselves, working for ourselves, doing what makes us feel passionate, and actually making a living at it.
Though I am politically very pro-union, and the first one to suggest that the problem with our economy is the lack of a unified voice everywhere, in every field for fair compensation that is not only commensurate with management, but also commensurate with ownership, though I am for a very stiff estate tax, as I think every generation must prove itself, I also believe in the distinctly anti-professional, wankerific, and hopelessly idealistic idea that, somehow, we should be able to make a living doing what we are passionate about.
We, as leftists, should raise the bar. We shouldn't just be advocates for fair labor practices, or the right of workers to collectively organize and demand recognition for their work from the largely lazy class that profits from them. [And they really are a lazy class - it never ceases to amaze me in the course of working for successful small businesses in NYC how ungrateful and lazy those that profit from the enterprises are. They often work for 30 hours a week and rely on underpaid but incredibly over-qualified and overworked administrators to run their businesses. They never want to fully staff the business because it would cut into their annual take, nor do they ever want to capitalize the business because that would be bad tax planning - they live in this nether world where they could care less if people actually make their living, save the key employees who keep the business from going under, and they worry that if margins fall, their prima donna paycheck that keeps up their property in the Hamptons might have to be revoked for a few weeks... Jesus I got off on a whole other topic... but not really].
This is the lazy class. And I have no bones about calling them out. What people in my generation, well not all, but a lot, hate is the idea of an idle class that we support with meaningless labor. We believe that work should mean something. That what we choose to do should be furthering not just the company's goals, but our own. We are loath to support a world in which the only outcome of our labor is the support of an idle class, a class of investors, a class of speculators, a class that produces nothing of their own, but simply redirects wealth from the poor to the rich.
We believe that work, whatever work we do, should benefit everyone involved. Work should be the will of everyone involved. It should not be an alienation, a hard earned paycheck to pay the rent in exchange for the support of an owner class that could care less about your struggle. And yes, I am being radical here, and yes maybe I don't seem to speak for my generation - as we're hardly communists, but if I see anything in our demographic trends, from political, to economic, to social, it is that we dont want to inherit a world and take our place in it; we want to find the world that we want. We are willing to sacrifice the joys that the last generations of priveledged people have enjoyed to find a life on our own terms.
And in some roundabout way, through the rambling of my thoughts on 'my generation', I come to a point on the democratic party. 'My generation' is largely anti-corporate. We work for them, because we have to live. We don't see these jobs as anything other than the minimum wage jobs we worked as teenagers, with the small exception that we're actually supporting ourselves and/or our families with them. So we can't just quit if we don't get along with the new manager. Though we are incredibly lucky to be in the middle class [as and aside, what generation that has been 'classfied', and named by the media isn't in the middle class? What media exists outside the 'middle class'? With very few exceptions, people like Amy Goodman come to mind, or the work that Al Giordano does with narconews (and for those of you reading this you should be grateful for him winning the very first case for the rights of 'citizen-jounalists' - not to mention he was the reason I first came to this blog, well I guess some of you would rather I hadn't come in the first place, but whatever), media is the middle class].
Again since that last sentence turned into a paragraph, Though we are exceedingly lucky to be in the middle class, We don't want it. We want something better. We were priveledged enough in our upbringings to want something better. In some cases this has resulted in the insane and selfish retreat to materiality, homes in the exurbs, fancy cars, the newest technological gadgets - we make our world as comfortable as we can make it, fuck everything else, it's too much to deal with in the short span of our lives. In other cases, like mine, we shun everything that is valued in that middle class existence in favor of our, again very selfish, desire to do what we want to do, to pursue our ideals, everything else be damned.
But there is a way between these two. And I think it is the way forward for the democratic party. No one wants their work to be a meaningless means to either subsistence or empty luxury. Both choices deny the truth that we feel every day as a living being yearning for the recognition that we are, we exist, we and the life we envision for ourselves are worthy of recognition. The Democrats must become the party of 'recognition'. We must be the party that endeavors to make a world where the work people do expresses them, as human beings. We must have and communicate a vision in which we aren't all struggling to go from poverty to the middle class or from the middle class to the aristocracy, but the creation of a world in which not only are we all justly compensated, but our work is also not a dead end. We need to envision a world beyond the 'company man', beyond 'loyalty', beyond 'trade', and yes, 'beyond unions'. We need to have the boldness to envision a world in which all educational resources are available to everyone, so that whoever chooses to do something, can actually do it. We need to return to the 'capitalism' of Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, or even Teddy Roosevelt in which the small was defended against the large, in which the market was actually free because pre-existing and longstanding financial interests were broken up and stripped of their power to manipulate exchange in their favor. We need to have the foresight [as an aside, I love the fact the 'foresight' derives from the German word for television - 'to see far', oh the irony] to create a world in which each 'can do their due', can do what they are and contribute to the general economy by expressing their own truth.
This is radical. This is idealism of the highest kind. But it is also the most basic desire, no, demand of our being as human. Beyond our mere subsistence, which is also hopelessly compromised now and forever by cronyism run amuck, what we as living, rational, self-conscious beings crave is 'recognition'; recognition of who we are; recognition of the talents upon which we thrive; recognition that what we are is worth our struggling to be alive - if there is any central truth to what we know about life in its history on this planet, life is just the struggle to be alive. And we as beings conscious of that inherent struggle want to be recognized for enduring it, for trying to make something more of it than the struggle itself. We, as human beings, want to be recognized most fundamentally for our imagination, for that mental world we build out of our struggle to simply exist. We want to be recognized for how we 'envision life'.
Some would say that this isn't the realm of politics, but it precisely is. As the citizen of a country, the way in which one 'envisions life' is inextricably linked with the reality of one's life in that country. They say that Reagan made everyone 'feel good about America', while he quietly robbed the middle class and endowed a new aristocracy. Even while this injustice was done, people 'envisioned' their lives as being better, as meeting the ends they sought, as expressing who they were. While this is as deluded as the Bush mantra that 'shopping' expresses our 'freedom' as a people, and makes for a patriotic stance against our 'enemies', it is an aspect of our existence that the Democratic Party has forgotten.
We need, ultimately, to help people become social beings, to seek out the recognition that is so readily available in the community of their peers. Rather than catering to the insecurities and desolate and lonely bankruptcy of 'middle class' values, the Democratic Party needs to spearhead a new civics. We need to put 'the we' back on the table. We need to help people see that what they seek as individuals is not just the personal or familial 'fulfillment' of their dreams, but the public recognition of those dreams; the public acknowledgement that what they 'imagine' above and beyond their struggle to simply exist is worthy of that struggle. It is an ancient Greek concept actually; time, the accounting of one's worth in the public sphere. For the Greeks, this was the only way that a social economy functioned in a 'just' manner. We need to help people understand that 'their dreams' are not just 'their own', they are shared with all of us that live on this exceedingly crazy planet. And they are all worth having.