Hollow Bargains: How Middle-Class Professionals Sign a One-Sided Contract with American Elites

• In Event: Theorizing Capitalist Crisis & Middle-Class Politics

Abstract

This paper examines how class keeping, the relation between class elites and the middle-class professionals who run their lives, becomes a hollow bargain for the middle-class. In a social context in which class mobility has become more difficult, class inequality has grown, dignity has become tied to elite status and consumption, and middle-class jobs have become less likely to afford social respect and a middle-class lifestyle, middle-class professionals seek social elevation by working for the elite. Class keeping can be a pathway to privilege, allowing class keepers to enjoy social recognition, passionate work, and the good life, three social goals that are difficult to access via legitimate means for those who are not class elites. Access to this pathway, however, requires class keepers to cede control over their own lives to elites who are not required to commit to them in return. Class keeping is negotiated on unequal grounds, and it ultimately reinscribes the very dynamics that motivate class keepers in the first place. This hollow bargain makes sense only if elite domination is inevitable; as I show in the paper, class keeping helps explain why it’s not.

Author

• Taylor Laemmli, Baylor University