It feels like I am being relentlessly assailed in this pre-election cycle of promises, cant, taunts and other nonsense. All five major parties talk about the middle class as if they are the only group that count. Middle-class this and middle-class that. It's a whole a lot of hooey!
I understand why the Harper Conservatives want to make that appeal: they've been courting this segment of the population, particularly in communities of colour, for quite some time. It seems they are succeeding.
The Liberals? Well, they're Liberals. I believe they will say (and do)anything that will get them votes and power. Policy is simply a stirrup that helps them climb into the saddle.
I'll leave the Greens and the Bloc Québécois out of this particular screed, just so I can get to my point. And my point is this: the middle class don't identify with workers and worker issues. This means they won't support the party that supports workers.
The middle class have been successfully manipulated for decades (or longer) to believe they are millionaires in waiting. I didn't coin the saying, but the saying bears repeating.
Middle-class people not only don't identify with working-class values, they also don't understand them. I believe you can be a bank manager and still be a working-class person. It's about understanding the issues — working people's issues. You have to have the consciousness.
Georg Lukács famously described the proletariat as the first class in history to achieve true class consciousness. I believe that consciousness allows us to see and understand the dynamics of exploitation in basic terms: commodification, reification, alienation — all these occur freely within the capitalist system. Capitalism seeks always to mask the functions and results of its exploitative philosophy and practice, while working-class conscience seeks to strip people's blinders away.
In standard terms, the middle class are positioned in between the upper classes and the working class. They are the transitional layer. The upper classes want to convince them they can have everything, if only they're willing to work hard. They can have the house, the picket fence, two cars in the driveway, 2.3 kids! The middle class want to climb the ladder — or simply stay where they are.
And this brings me to the NDP. I understand the need to expand the audience we talk to. That's part of this thing we call the electoral process. But I feel strongly that the NDP needs to start talking the language of the working class. And we should start by using the term "working class."
Let's not pretend we can counter more than a century of the glorification of wealth combined with the exploitation and vilification of workers. We're not going to do that. What we, the NDP, should start doing instead is shoring up our support.
Frankly, we act so much like Liberals — selling ourselves for votes — that sometimes it feels like we've joined them. So I call on supporters of the NDP
to stop saying "middle class." I call on all of us to use the term "working class." Not only leading into the next federal election, but also from now on!
Frank Saptel is communications representative with the Machinists Union in Canada. His views are his own. Frank is also a member of Our Times' advisory board.
