Straight to the point

“…Cheap holidays, over-priced housing, educations that no longer buy security…

…[The middle classes] are the new proletariat, like factory workers a hundred years ago…

…Anyone earning less than £300,000 a year scarcely counts. You’re just a prole in a three-button suit…”

These lines from J.G. Ballard’s 2003 novel Millennium People were thought-provoking, yet not wholly convincing 21 years ago. They have, however, become more and more plausible with the passing of time. In a development whose causes and significance have been obscured by the reign of identity politics, the middle classes have been struggling to resist downward mobility and proletarianisation. It’s felt especially by the young as graduates have found themselves saddled with increasingly oppressive debt burdens while education and housing costs are soaring. Meanwhile, offshoring and automation have meant that middle-income jobs have become scarcer — resulting in something referred to online as “the overproduction of elites”. It’s a trend in which, according to a 2019 OECD report, “the middle class looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters”.

None of this would have surprised Ballard. Right from the beginning of his career in the mid-Fifties, he was a close observer of the bourgeoisie: “society’s keel and anchor”. His typical protagonist is a doctor, psychiatrist, architect or TV producer — a comfortably middle-class professional. Ballard was among the first to note and analyse a significant change to middle-class life: the flight to the suburbs; the rise of an intensely moralistic illiberalism among some middle-class youth; the importance of home video, the camcorder and later the internet to the isolated suburban lifestyle; the bunkering of the upper middle class in gated communities.

By the early 2000s, Ballard was seeing evidence of increased disgruntlement and straitened circumstances among sections of the middle class — portents which he examined in Millennium People, his tale of a middle-class uprising in England’s capital. With a strong dose of black comedy, it represented a welcome return to the London terrain he’d mapped so evocatively in the Seventies. But the more realistic, “sociological” fiction of his late period was more concerned with “what is just about to happen in a given community”, and “trying to find the unconscious logic that runs below the surface”. As he put it: “there’s something odd going on [in society], and I explore that by writing a novel.”

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There are certainly odd goings-on at Millennium People’s fictional estate of Chelsea Marina. What began as a dispute over rising maintenance fees has developed into something bigger and stranger. Now scores of residents, professionals of every stamp, are joining the rebellion — going on marches, disrupting events (an Earl’s Court cat show is ruined) and refusing to pay their bills. They seem to be protesting the ongoing impoverishment — both material and spiritual — of bourgeois life.

Into the estate, the police infiltrate psychologist David Markham: a deep-cover spy, so deep he’s unaware of his assignment. Markham has personal reasons for investigating the rebellion. Clues point to a connection between an unclaimed bombing at Heathrow, which killed his ex-wife Laura, and the middle-income insurgents of the Marina.

Markham strikes up an ambiguous friendship with the leader of the revolution, the troubled and messianic Richard Gould. This pallid, dishevelled paediatrician is one of Ballard’s driven visionaries, characters the author said reflected his own dark side. Gould is preoccupied with the cruelty and apparent meaninglessness of the world and believes, at least initially, that destroying symbols of middle-class culture — video rental stores, the National Film Theatre, Tate Modern — will spur the docile English bourgeoisie into revolt against a hidebound and exploitative Establishment.

Later he arrives at a more radical view, seeing attacks on wholly meaningless targets as propaganda of the deed of a more disquieting, and thus more effective, kind. It will take this more extreme philosophy, a nihilistic kind of mysticism, to truly liberate the middle classes. Markham notes this change: “From now on, only meaningless targets should be chosen, each one a conundrum that the public would struggle to solve.” Gould hints gnomically at the purpose of such puzzles and mysteries: “There are bridges in the mind…They carry us to a more real world, a richer sense of who we are. Once those bridges are there, it’s our duty to cross them.”

This being a Ballard novel, the morally dubious but seductive Gould isn’t exactly a villain, nor even really an antagonist. And as Markham embraces the suburban guerrilla’s cause he seems to be in two minds about their methods — thrilled at the destruction, alarmed and later appalled at the harm done to innocents. As the campaign intensifies, Markham seems uncertain what level of violence he can countenance.

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JG Ballard was not a prophet

By Mark Blacklock

Reading it today, Millennium People strikes me as doubly prophetic. First, the methods of the revolutionaries mirror the activism of today. The attacks on art carried out by Ballard’s rebels uncannily anticipate the soup-throwing stunts of Just Stop Oil, while Gould’s preference for meaningless targets likewise finds its echo in the spray-paint attack on Stonehenge. Secondly, Ballard’s vision of a middle class beginning to struggle financially, even facing proletarianisation, has clear relevance today. In Britain and elsewhere, substantial numbers of middle-class households can be numbered among “the precariat”, oppressed by chronic insecurity, only one large unexpected expense away from serious trouble. The days when middle-class status guaranteed economic security are receding into the past.

This disquieting state of affairs has been deftly analysed by Joel Kotkin in The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. Focusing on the present-day struggles and future prospects of the bourgeoisie in the United States, Kotkin argues that ever-widening inequality threatens to transform the democratic social order into something resembling medieval feudalism. Social mobility will all but disappear and we shall witness the dwindling or even disappearance of the middle class, or as he calls them, “the yeomanry”. Under neo-feudalism, the majority will live under serf-like conditions, surviving on gig work and handouts and with next to no opportunity to improve their station. Wealth, property ownership and independence will be the near-exclusive preserve of a new gentry enjoying de facto hereditary privilege.

For Kotkin, the lineaments of a neo-feudal future can already be seen in the urban and suburban landscape where “elite communities are surrounded by urban poor and by small towns that are fading and becoming destitute”. He draws on the French geographer Christophe Guilluy who believes that globalisation has “revived the citadels of medieval France”. Given the ever-starker contrast between such secure enclaves, which are “like the castle towns of Japan or the walled cities of medieval Italy”, it’s clear Ballard was right to highlight the spread of the gated community as a highly significant, and worrying, development. In interviews, as well as in his later novels, he commented on how “the way in which the gated community is springing up all over the world now is an ominous sign”. “People aren’t moving into gated communities simply to avoid muggers and housebreakers, they’re moving into gated communities to get away from other people. Even people like themselves.”

Though troubled by it, Ballard was also fascinated by this new phenomenon. In particular, the psychology of gated communities intrigued him. In his novella Running Wild, the adult residents of an “exclusive estate to the west of London” have been massacred by persons unknown, and all the children have disappeared. The narrator reflects on the unusual psychological conditions that prevailed on the estate prior to the unexplained eruption of violence: “The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity they existed in a civilised and eventless world.”

For me, Ballard puts his finger on something crucial there. Today, the rich are arguably the people most alienated from the past, most severed from its values and traditions. Hence the rise of “luxury beliefs”, the new political radicalisms of the Left and Right whose natural habitat is the upper echelons of society. There, DEI and degrowth Leftism competes with the sort of hyper-capitalist vision promoted by Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land.

Of course, it’s true that the new radical Leftist beliefs win plenty of adherents from the working and lower middle classes. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that, for those supporters, such beliefs are a form of self-harm. Or, to use a term Ballard was fond of, a “mass psychopathology”.

The partition line would seem to run through the bourgeoisie. The middle class is dividing. Those fortunate enough to already belong to, or be ascending to, the upper middle class will find themselves rising still further. They will grow more disposed towards luxury beliefs, whether of the Left or Right. Their children can even look forward to joining the rarefied ranks of the elite.

Prospects for the rest of the middle class, and in particular their children and grandchildren, look less rosy. Compounding the problems associated with steeply rising costs, Boris Johnson’s controversial reform of the immigration system has made middle-class Britons much more exposed to foreign competition for professional jobs and quality university places than before. And longer term, proletarianisation will see the former middle classes competing with migrants for lower-paid work, housing and social services in much the same way as the working class is now. That, of course, is likely to greatly increase ethnic tensions and opposition to immigration, and these, as the protests and riots of the past few weeks have powerfully demonstrated, are already at crisis point.

If Millennium People has a message, then, maybe it is that, if the decline of a greater part of the middle class is to be arrested, organised and sustained action of some kind is required — though probably not the torching of the Southbank or the blowing up of Tate Modern. There are more than a few obstacles to this action, and for the most part, they are to do with the ways of thinking and perceiving particular to today’s middle class: the lack of class consciousness and the hegemony of identity politics; a culture dominated by presentism and trivia; the withering of the traditional bourgeois values of prudence, forward-planning and self-reliance. Clearly these obstacles are formidable, perhaps only to be crossed by means of Richard Gould’s enigmatic bridges of the mind.

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