Volume I-ism versus Volume II and III-ism in Class-Critique: A Jihadi DSA Gentrification Story

As more data emerges on the 23 June elections in New York, Hakeem Jeffries' observation that districts where jihadi DSA candidates won are the most gentrified in New York proves to be ever more salient.

(I say 'jihadi' both because of DSA funding sources now, as distinguished from when I was a member, and because these candidates' answers to virtually all questions in the pre-primary debates were the locally irrelevant and hate-criminally Blood-Libelous words 'gatha,' 'Zionism,' 'apartheid,' or 'genocide.')

The gentrification story might be one of the only helpful observations that Jeffries has ever made. But you know the bit about broken clocks...

No one has ever suggested that all and only the relevant 'gentry' voted for the DSA jihadis; some non-gentry voted for them too, and some gentry voted for non-DSA candidates.

But the cardinal, uncontested, and now incontestable fact is that gentrification made all the difference. The jihadis lost big among non-gentry demographic segments within largely gentrified districts, and lost altogether in non-gentried districts like that of Ritchie Torres.

This fact has led, to my mind at least initially surprisingly, to something of a divide among some of us of the Marxian persuasion like myself in interpreting what has happened. But it now occurs to me that the divide is explicable by differing degrees of seriousness about Marx.

Specifically, it is explicable by the difference between mere casual pseudo-Marxian 'social critics' and faculty lounge Marxists who tend at most to read parts of Kapital Volume I, on the one hand, and people who read all of Kapital - Volume II and III as much as I - on the other hand.

Let me first, then, briefly specify the divide to which I allude - that between two different takes upon 'gentry' and 'non-gentry' in gentrified voting districts. Then I can turn to why I think this other divide between what I'll call Volume I-ism and Volume II and III-ism can account for for the first divide.

First, those I am calling the relevant 'gentry' here: I have in mind members of what the great Catherine Liu dubs the 'Professional and Managerial Class' (PMC). First described in Kapital Volume III, these people earn their livings largely in the form of salaries rather than either rentier income like capitalists or wage income like the hardcore 'blue collar' proletariat.

Hence they're in one theoretically very important sense - a sense that's especially salient in Kapital's foundation-laying Volume I - non-capitalists. One might therefore be tempted to smuggle them in to 'the proletariat' on strict (and bivalent) theoretical grounds and thus tendentiously claim the jihadi DSA victories in gentrified voting districts two weeks ago as 'working class' triumphs.

Yet on the other hand, the aforementioned Catherine and others have singled out the PMC as something akin to a class, or what I'll call a crucial subclass, in its own right, relevantly distinct from the hard core proletariate subclass (or now 'precariat') as well as from the capitalist class for a reason...

While indeed salaried rather than unalloyed rentiers, these people are paid at very high rates in comparison to precariously employed wage-laborers, and often enjoy formal or informal job TENURE as well. (Note that the word 'tenure' descends from the law of estate ownership, as in 'land tenure.')

Moreover, many of these people are regularly given hefty lump-sum bonuses at various intervals of the year, especially during financially prosperous years (wage workers are not), and are often paid partly in capital shares as well - be it in stocks, stock options, or 401(k) and other pension contributions.

There is accordingly a very real sense, even if not a strict or 'essentialist' categorical sense, in which the 'gentry' of so-called 'gentrified' voting districts are 'gentry,' and are in any case so different from 'blue collar' wage workers as to amount to a politically, even if not for all purposes strictly production-theoretically distinct class as distinguished from subclass.

In short, then, the material lives and associated interests of these groups profoundly diverge - as seen perhaps most dramatically in the fact that gentrifiers' moving in to a previously blue collar neighborhood, a practice jovially called 'slumming it' by the gentrifier-'pioneers' themselves, always raises home prices and rents so high that wage workers cease to be able to live in the homes they've inhabited for years.These gentrifiers often become 'Champagne socialists.'

I've known enough of these locusts and where they have landed that I have come often to name them by neighborhood now. Hence I have known Park Slope and Cobble Hill socialists. A particularly silly self-flatterer I know is a Greenpoint socialist. And now, Heaven help us and some of my pro bono legal clients, there are coming to be even (of course non-Chinese) Chinatown socialists.

These are the new DSA voters (whereas when I was active in DSA it was wage labor that was its base). These are the 'working class heroes' whose 'socialism' requires no more than, between stints of Temu or Amazon shopping and streaming, to pronounce 'Gaza' as 'gatha,' casually misuse the words 'genocide' and 'apartheid' at the right casual moments, don a fashionable 'keffiyeh' when people are watching, play edgelord on Zoom or on social media platforms with a 'palestinian' flag hung in the background, and regularly install 'home improvements' from Ikea or Home Depot to drive local property values up high enough to purge out the last remaining actual working class people from the hood since these people are uncool, depress property values, and don't GAF about helping 7th century theocrats to kill Jews.

Proletarians they are not. Even if they draw part of their livings from very high salaries rather than golf courses like Ro Khanna's children. And even if they complain of 'affordability' just like Bill Clinton's voters all did, under the rubrics of 'soccer mom' and 'kitchen table' 'issues,' some thirty years back. For even what these people can afford - like their Park Slope or Green Point homes - be assured that the hardcore proletariat, the ever more precarious precariat, cannot. Yet they are calling their DSA victories 'socialist,' 'working class' victories.

That is just comical. But it's also charitably explicable, as I said earlier, by reference to my distinction between Volume I-ism and Volume II and III-ism where understanding Kapital is concerned.

So why do I think what I call Volume I-ism and Volume II and III-ism can play a role in determining how willing you are to call the Greenpointers 'working class,' and hence to call DSA jihadis 'socialists' rather than mere self-flattering bougie parasites financed by a capitalist petrostate on another continent?

Easy. As I noted above, Volume I lays out the basic theoretical structure and foundational categories of Marx's Kapital. And as a purely theoretical matter, the most decisive categorical distinction to draw where social classes are concerned is that between those who have nothing to sell in the market but their labor power, and those who can purchase that labor power and employ it with other inputs to produce for exchange and for profit.

The former are now typically called 'Labor,' the latter 'Capital.'

By those definitions, of course, even the Greenpoint Gentry are 'Labor,' as is anyone who is salaried - even a massively paid movie or basketball star on a multimillion dollar contract.

But these are not relevant definitions if we're talking about material living standards(hence 'affordability') and practical class-interest-based voting behavior rather than constitutive categories used in explaining the capitalist production process. For withinthe non-capitalist group strictu sensu there is a massively consequential distinction between the subclass of those who are paid only subsistence provisions to keep them able to work and be extracted from on the one hand, and the subclass of those who in time emerge to perform tasks in the stead of the capitalists themselves on the other hand.

An intuitively accessible entry way into this latter distinction is afforded by the case of a somewhat familiar pre-capitalist formation, one in whose ghostly afterlife I grew up in the American South ...

Even pre-capitalist feudal plantation-owners in the American South where I later spent my childhood knew a critical social and practical, if not basic productive, distinction between slaves they called 'House Staff' on the one hand and those they called 'mere Field [N-Word]s' on the other hand.

The former were often well educated, quite comfortable, and frequently assigned even high-end ministerial tasks (bookkeeping, quarter-mastering, inventory-tracking, farm and household management, etc.), while the latter were truly the wretched of the earth, given no more than subsistence provisions so that they could keep working for 'Massa.' And the House Staff, who often lived and 'identified' with their masters as the field hands did not, treated them accordingly.

Legally and for purposes of fundamentally understanding the primary production processof 'the plantation economy,' House Staff and Field Hands were of the same 'class' - they were all slaves. But socially and for purposes of functionally understanding the fuller productive process, along with differing material living standards and self-perceived interests and behavior, no one would confuse House Staff with mere 'Field [N-Word]s.' They constituted importantly different subclasses.

Now one way of reading much of Kapital Volumes II and III, I suggest, is as an extended elaboration of the multiple varieties of 'House Staff' that emerge, develop, further specialize, and then subdivide all the more as capitalist production advances and capitalist society correspondingly variegates.

If Volume I is about how capitalism's counterpart to the agricultural surplus is generated in the fields, as it were, then Volumes II and III are about all the other stuff that gets done 'in the house,' again as it were, to optimize all that field toil for the owner. And the functionaries who do all that 'house' stuff, we learn in Volumes II and III, are 'paid' according to very different principles than are those in the field, hence come to constitute the very different sub-classes that they do.

As more and more surplus is generated by capitalism's version of field hands, then - classic proletarian labor - more and more functions are developed to cycle and recycle it and thereby extract and produce all the more through those hands. (This is how Kapital's three volumes jointly interrelate.)

These functionaries - the 'House Staff' of capitalism - come over time to include superintendents ('managers,' capitalism's armed field foremen); wholesalers, retailers, jobbers and other commercial intermediaries; accountants; transaction lawyers ('solicitors'); bankers; financiers; and of course ancillary industrialists including those who manage the storage and transport of capitalist product.

Strictly speaking, few if any of these new (Volume II and III) functionaries are 'capitalists' when first they emerge, even if some come in time to amass savings that they can deploy as capital much as some salaried people do today. For they do not initially hire labor to produce, but are paid by the people who hire labor to produce, with a view to optimizing the circulation process (Volume II) that in turn keeps the process of profitable production and extraction (Volume I) going.

Now as I say, casuals about Marx tend at best to read parts of Volume I. These people will tend accordingly to fixate on the strict theoretical dichotomy between hirers and hirees.

More hardcore Marxians who read Volumes II and III along with Volume I are, by contrast, apt to hew both to the 'pure theory' dichotomy of Volume I, and the more fully elaborated and hence more variegated 'applied theory' distinctions of Volumes II and III - distinctions that now include subclasses as well as classes.

If you are of the latter disposition, you are far better situated to understand what the new DSA represents and what happened in primary elections two weeks ago ...

What happened was that the DSA-funding jihadi petrocapitalists and their quite comfortable resident 'House Staff' here - people well healed and comfortable enough to care far more about distant 'gatha' than anything here at home - did very well at the expense of the mere Field Hands in those voting districts where they are dominant.

And the Field Hands, the real Working Class, will now yet again pay for it.

Just as they did last time this happened: when Clinton won in the '90s.