Defining class purely as a matter of income or wealth results in several obvious difficulties. A goal of workers organizing together in a union, for instance, is for them to raise their standard of living. If class were simply a matter of how much money you took home at the end of the week, then it would seem that the more successful the working class was at organizing to get a bigger share of the products of its labor, then the more it would actually cease to be the working class. Viewing class struggle strictly through the lens of wealth versus poverty also seriously narrows our understanding of the stakes: the dignity of working conditions, guarantees of steady employment, the right to grievance, and the intensity of the working day are all classic concerns of working-class struggle—and all of them are about more than the number on a paycheck.
At the same time, certain members of society who would intuitively seem to fit our definition of “middle class,” upon consideration, turn out to be not necessarily better off than their working-class kin. Think of small business owners. Family shops or restaurants often have the proprietor or her family members doing a large portion of the work themselves, pushing themselves to work long hours for little compensation besides the reward of keeping the enterprise going. Peasant farmers, one of the enduring examples of the petite bourgeoisie, are often dirt poor.
What, then, is a more productive way to think about class? The paradoxes listed above resolve themselves if you accept that class position relates not to how much one happens to be paid but to the kind of labor one does and how this labor relates to the economy. The working class is distinguished from the middle class not by how its members have more modest houses or watch different TV shows but by the level of authority they have over the conditions of their own work. Working-class people, in this definition, share a special characteristic: they have to sell their labor power as an abstract thing in order to earn a wage. As for the middle class, here is Zweig’s rough definition: “It includes professional people, small business owners, and managers and supervisors who have authority over others at work. . . . Instead of seeing them as people with middling income, we will see them as people with middling authority.”15 (I’m using Zweig because of the clarity of his explanation, but actually this is a fundamental aspect of how Marxists see the world.)16
What, then, distinguishes middle-class business owners from out-and-out capitalists? While popular outrage justly dwells on the lavish bonuses of bankers and the lifestyles of the megarich, the factor that makes a capitalist a capitalist is also not a question of wealth or income—if a CEO proclaims that he is going to work for one dollar a year, that does not suddenly mean that he has been thrown into the working class; he has obviously not sacrificed his authority. Greed is part of what greases the wheels of the capitalist system, but there are people who are simply ideological evangelists for the good of the free market (this is, in fact, the classical meaning of “liberalism”).
Zweig explains the difference between middle-class business owners and capitalists as relating to whether or not the owner works alongside her employees.17 I think, however, that we can be even more precise. Marx defines the capitalist as being one who acts as “capital personified,” as the agent who carries out capitalism’s logic. In volume 1 of Capital, he makes a surprising remark: the ideal image of the capitalist is not the lavish-spending libertine, but the “miser,” that is, someone who hoards profits for future investment rather than spending them on himself.18
Marx’s formula for capital is M-C-M', by which he meant that a quantity of money (M) becomes capital when it is invested in the production of a commodity (C), which is then sold again for more money (M'), in order to begin the cycle again on an expanded level. Ultimately, he remarks, in its purest form the capitalist mindset is represented by the formula M-M'. The specific form of business involved (the C, the form of commodity involved in the process) ceases to seem important; all that matters is that investments return profits so that the cycle can be started once more.19 A capitalist, therefore, is not just someone who has a say in how a business is run, but someone whose motivation is to run a business for the sake of profit.
That may sound quite general, but in fact it represents a mindset very different than that of the average small business owner. As a 2011 Brookings Institution study puts it, “most small businesses have little desire to grow big or to innovate in any observable way.” Instead, the authors write, surveys indicate that such people as “skilled craftsmen, lawyers, real estate agents, doctors, small shopkeepers, and restaurateurs” are motivated more by “nonpecuniary” factors such as “being one’s own boss, having flexibility of hours, etc.”20 Consequently, a fairly clear line of demarcation exists between middle-class and capitalist mentalities: middle-class agents are focused on their own needs or simply maintaining their autonomy; capitalist business people act in the name of profit, as “capital personified.”
As an example, Zweig mentions the family doctor, a traditional representative of the middle class. Organized around private practices, doctors have had a great deal of independence and freedom. But as more and more doctors work for large health-care conglomerates, their position has changed, dragging the medical profession toward the working class. Conversely, if a doctor’s personal practice grows to the point where she is more concerned with administering the labor of others and maximizing the profit of the whole enterprise in the name of competition, then she has ceased to function as a middle-class agent and become a full-on representative of capital.
As Zweig writes, “classes are not simply boxes or static categories into which we pigeonhole people.” They are by their nature “a bit messy”—and indeed the particular class composition of any given professional sphere is dynamic and in constant evolution.21
“A Different Order of Freedom”
How does this schema apply to the visual arts sphere? More than most other creative spheres—or most contemporary “industries,” period—the production of visual art is tied to the middle-class form of labor. In fact, I’d put this point in a stronger way still: the contemporary artist is the representative of middle-class creative labor par excellence.
Artists function as their own creative franchises, and are expected to have their own creative signatures or styles. Uniqueness and independence of mind are selling points when it comes to art—values that are antithetical to what is expected of ordinary workers, who must take direction and are treated as ever more disposable (evidence is scant that the neoliberal economy, whatever its claims to celebrate creativity, has freed the average worker from these pressures). People decide to become artists—and continue to identify as artists, despite the limited prospects for success—for exactly the kind of “nonpecuniary” benefits that animate the other middle-class professionals the Brookings Institution paper mentions: the opportunity to make money doing something in which they are personally invested; freedom from the grind of an office job or more regimented forms of work; the belief that they have found a “calling” that is uniquely their own.22
In 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) identified 2.1 million “artists” living in the United States.23 However, of this total, considerably fewer than one in ten were “fine artists.”24 About 10 percent of these so-called creative laborers worked in architecture and about 17 percent in the performing arts. By far the largest portion of creative laborers—close to 40 percent—were classified as “designers” of various kinds (“graphic, commercial, and industrial designers, fashion designers, floral designers, interior designers, merchandise displayers, and set and exhibit designers”).
Consequently, most of the workers in the “creative economy” of the United States are not artists in the sense we are familiar with from the visual arts sphere, creating unique art objects to be sold through galleries or seen in museums. Their working conditions are quite distinct. Industrial designers working for manufacturers or merchandise displayers working for department stores do indeed use creativity in their jobs. However, all but a lucky few superstars have no personal claim on the products of their creativity and must produce according to very specific corporate