*A version of this piece originally appeared under a different title in UnHerd magazine in 2024.
…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…
Lines from J.G. Ballard’s 2003 London novel Millennial People. Thought-provoking but not wholly convincing twenty-three years ago, they’ve arguably 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, for some years now middle classes throughout the world have been struggling to resist downward mobility and proletarianisation. This trend is especially marked among the young of the middle class and aspirational working class. Graduates have found themselves saddled with increasingly oppressive debt burdens as education and housing costs soar. What’s more, offshoring and automation mean middle-income jobs have become scarcer in Western nations.
As a 2019 OECD report, Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class, noted:
One-in-six current middle-income jobs face high risk of automation. More than one-in-five middle-income households spend more than they earn. Over-indebtedness is higher for middle-income than for both low- and high-income households. As a result, today the middle class looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters.
None of this would’ve surprised Ballard. Right from the beginning of his career in the mid-Fifties, the forward-looking novelist was a close observer of the bourgeoisie, ”society’s keel and anchor”. The typical Ballard protagonist is a doctor, a psychiatrist, an architect or a TV producer—a comfortably middle-class professional. Very often, the author 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 disgruntlement and even straitened circumstances among sections of the bourgeoisie, portents he examined in Millennium People. A tale of a middle-class uprising in England’s capital (with the strong dose of black comedy that premise would suggest), it was well received by critics. The novel represented a welcome return to the London terrain he’d mapped so evocatively in three novels of the Seventies: Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise. An interview printed in the Millennium People paperback offered insight into how Ballard came to write MP and the other “sociological” novels of his late period, Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000) and Kingdom Come (2006):
“Your mature fiction focuses on what is just about to happen in a given community. What kind of real-life event will suggest a novel to you?”
“I just have a feeling in my bones: there’s something odd going on, and I explore that by writing a novel, by trying to find the unconscious logic that runs below the surface and looking for the hidden wiring. It’s as if there are all these strange lights, and I’m looking for the wiring and the fuse box.”
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.
Through his attendance of a demo that turns mildly violent Markham meets Chelsea Marina resident Kay Churchill, a film studies lecturer who becomes his landlady and lover. A vivacious woman of “chaotic enthusiasms”, Kay is one of the most passionate revolutionaries. Yet the psychologist discovers another side to her: she lives with the wound of her separation from her teenage daughter, who for years has been in the custody of her ex-husband in Australia.
Later Markham gets to know the troubled and messianic Richard Gould, leader of the revolution. This pallid, dishevelled paediatrician is another of Ballard’s driven visionaries, characters the author said reflected his own dark side. Like The Atrocity Exhibition’s Traven and Crash’s Vaughan, Gould is preoccupied with the cruelty and apparent meaninglessness of the world. The origin of this obsession seems to be his former job caring for terminally sick, handicapped children, a role he was forced to relinquish by a General Medical Council displeased with his methods. Now radicalised, the good doctor believes destroying symbols of middle-class culture—video rental stores, the National Film Theatre (known since 2007 as BFI Southbank), Tate Modern—will spur the docile English bourgeoisie into revolt against a hidebound and exploitative Establishment. Later Gould will come to prefer seemingly random, meaningless targets, as a way to sow confusion and unsettle those who believe in a meaningful world. The wayward paediatrician will believe he can liberate the middle classes by leading them to his philosophy, which for me is best described as a nihilistic kind of mysticism:
“Even a meaningless universe has meaning. Accept that and everything makes a new kind of sense.”
..
“‘There are bridges in the mind.’ Gould raised a white hand, gesturing me towards the runway. ‘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. He and Markham establish an ambiguous friendship, an uneasy closeness over which the question of the Heathrow bomb continues to hang. The psychologist’s quest to find his ex-wife’s murderer thereby succumbs to mission creep and, while at first he intends only to observe the revolution, before long he has drifted into active, though uncomfortable, participation. Ballard serves up his trademark ambiguity: while the protagonist embraces the suburban guerrillas’ 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.
Reading it today, Millennium People strikes me as doubly prophetic. Firstly, the attacks on art carried out by Ballard’s rebels uncannily anticipate the soup-throwing stunts of well-to-do protest group Just Stop Oil, while Richard 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 analysed in a recent book by American academic Joel Kotkin, a specialist in urban studies. The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (2020) focuses on the present-day struggles and future prospects of the bourgeoisie, in the United States and elsewhere.
Kotkin’s thesis is that, unless we act now to change course, ever-widening inequality will transform our 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 (“the yeomanry” in Kotkin’s book, underscoring the idea of a return of sorts to the Middle Ages). 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:
In a world growing more bifurcated, elite communities are surrounded by urban poor and by small towns that are fading and becoming destitute. Globalization “has revived the citadels of medieval France,” writes Christophe Guilluy, a leftist geographer. Like the castle towns of Japan or the walled cities of medieval Italy, a few choice locales are enclaves of privilege, while the less appealing places are inhabited by the newly servile classes.
Given the ever-starker contrast between such secure enclaves and their surroundings, it’s clear Ballard was right to highlight the spread of the gated community as a highly significant, and worrying, development. This he did in his novella Running Wild (1988), the longer novels Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, and in interviews, including one broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1998:
I think the way in which the gated community is springing up all over the world now is an ominous sign. It’s a sign that something is deeply wrong with the societies that have evolved at the end of the 20th Century ... 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, that’s the curious thing. [Because] inside most gated communities there’s very little social life; people are happy to enter their executive houses and stay there.
Though troubled by it, Ballard was also fascinated by this new phenomenon. In particular, the psychology of gated communities intrigued him. In Running Wild, the adult residents of Pangborne, an “exclusive estate to the west of London”, have been massacred by person or persons unknown, and all the children have disappeared. The narrator, a psychiatric advisor to the Metropolitan Police, 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 civilized and eventless world.
For me, Ballard put 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 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, prominent thinkers of the Right.
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 people at those levels, such beliefs are a form of self-harm. Or, to use a term Ballard was fond of, a mass psychopathology.
Returning to the bifurcation noted by Kotkin and others, the partition line would seem to run through the bourgeoisie. The middle class is dividing. Those fortunate enough to already belong to, or to 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.
For me Millennium People is the best book of Ballard’s late period, the one most deserving of being called a classic. If the novel has a message, 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 BFI Southbank or the blowing up of Tate Modern. There are certainly more than a few obstacles to the initiation of such action: lack of class consciousness, 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. Formidable obstacles, these, perhaps crossable only by means of Richard Gould’s enigmatic bridges of the mind.