The proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is matched at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers (irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company’s success). Rather than submit these trends to moralising criticism, we should read them as signs that the capitalist system is no longer capable of self-regulated stability – it threatens, in other words, to run out of control.
Slavish Žižek, The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie. Žižek’s discussion of the “surplus wage” by which the “new bourgeoisie” has appropriated surplus value - and whose threatened removal lies behind many of the strikes and protests of the past year - is particularly useful.
