That's right. Who needs the middle class? I have a suspicion that I know the answer. I wonder if yours is anything like mine.
First, why is there a middle class in the first place? What exactly is the Middle class?
The middle class is a class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class. The common measures of what constitutes middle class vary significantly among cultures.
Here's just one way of identifying a "middle class" (there are certainly others.):
The modern usage of the term "middle class", however, dates to the 1913 UK Registrar-General's report, in which the statistician T.H.C. Stevenson identified the middle class as that falling between the upper class and the working class.[citation needed] Included as belonging to the middle class are professionals, managers, and senior civil servants. The chief defining characteristic of membership in the middle class is possession of significant human capital.
Within capitalism, "middle class" initially referred to the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie. However, with the impoverisation and proletarianisation of much of the petit bourgeois world, and the growth of finance capitalism, "middle class" came to refer to the combination of the labour aristocracy, the professionals, and the white collar workers.
President obama has spoken repeatedly of "middle class economics". He has defined it in many of his speeches including the recent State of the Union.
Read on below and let's look deeper into this idea.
We can't begin to discuss this without reference to Marx:
In Marxism, which defines social classes according to their relationship with the means of production, the "middle class" is said to be the class below the ruling class and above the proletariat in the Marxist social schema. Marxist writers have used the term in two distinct but related ways. In the first sense it is used for the bourgeoisie, the urban merchant and professional class that stood between the aristocracy and the proletariat in the Marxist model. However, in modern developed countries, some Marxist writers specify the petite bourgeoisie – either owners of small property who may not employ wage labor or laboring managers – as the "middle class" between the ruling and working classes.Marx himself regarded this version of the "middle class" simultaneously as exploited workers and supervisors of exploitation.
Pioneer 20th Century American Marxist theoretician Louis C. Fraina (Lewis Corey) defined the middle class as "the class of independent small enterprisers, owners of productive property from which a livelihood is derived." Included in this social category, from Fraina's perspective, were "propertied farmers" but not propertyless tenant farmers. Middle class also included salaried managerial and supervisory employees but not "the masses of propertyless, dependent salaried employees.Fraina speculated that the entire category of salaried employees might be adequately described as a "new middle class" in economic terms, although this remained a social grouping in which "most of whose members are a new proletariat."
The fact that recent decades have seen a large section of small businessmen (shopkeepers, restaurants) replaced by wage-workers (in supermarkets or chains of restaurants) has led most Marxists to theorize an expansion of the working class at the expense of the middle class.
The context in which Marx wrote has changed and is changing. In fact it is the changing context that motivated my question in the first place. Here's a view that suggests things it probably was not intended to suggest:
There's Nothing "Normal" About A Middle Class
There is nothing "normal" about a nation having a middle class, even though it is vital to the survival of democracy.
As twenty-three years of conservative economic policies have now shown millions of un- and underemployed Americans, what's "normal" in a "free and unfettered" economy is the rapid evolution of a small but fabulously wealthy ownership class, and a large but poor working class. In the entire history of civilization, outside of a small mercantilist class and the very few skilled tradesmen who'd managed to organize in guilds (the earliest unions) like the ancient Masons, the middle class was an aberration.
There's a clue in the sentence: "There is nothing "normal" about a nation having a middle class, even though it is vital to the survival of democracy." Let's think about this. The survival of "democracy" depends on the existence of democracy. If democracy has ceased to exist, if it ever did, then how can it's survival be a reason for anything? If this sounds silly to you maybe you need to look at our situation a little harder.
I remember campaigning and giving speeches during presidential campaigns before the Raygun revolution. I remember trying to convince people that as globalization progressed there was only one way things could go. It seemed so obvious that with the majority of the people in the world working for so little the American wage structure was more than just vulnerable. Now we see that the inevitable has been progressing as we often seem to forget that it was predicted and more or less had to come.
The existence of a global economy is the existence of a very complex system that can absorb any potential threat to its stability. Piketty has more or less established that the WWII and post war era was an anomaly in the way capitalism develops. The United States has held on to a very unique and precarious position within that system. A small percentage of the world's population has managed to swim against a rising tide of entropy tending to erase the differences. Now that the post WWII situation has all but disappeared, there is no reason to believe that the entropic forces won't prevail.
Have you wondered why the oligarchy can deny global warming? Do you really believe they are so stupid as to miss what is so obvious? No, they are ready. They have plans and they know how they will survive. Meanwhile a lot of their problems will be solved as the catastrophe progresses.
They also probably scoff at the "rebuilding" of the American economy for it is too much an economy that is going extinct like so much of the life on earth. The system has forced itself into a corner where change is inevitable and it won't be pretty.
Meanwhile we are framing our politics around a series of obvious myths. The middle class has nothing in this system to sustain it. What kind of economic system will allow it to just go on as in the past? If I could ever find reason to believe that our political activity had any chance of changing what is happening I would feel a lot better.
So who does need the middle class? Clearly the present leadership of the democratic party professes to. Yet as the scenario plays itself out I wonder how much they believe in this idea. It seems clear to me that there is a lot of mythology out there and very little facing the facts. Yes there are climate deniers and they are dangerous. More dangerous in some ways are those who deny the realities of our time. We can not just go back to the kind of economy we had. It is destroying the planet's ability to sustain us.
So what needs to be done? We need to think about how we can live on the planet without making the conditions for that life impossible. That means very radical changes in the way we feed and house and clothe ourselves. That means that toys are too expensive to use as a means of driving the economy.
Hope for solar and wind energy are a mixed bag if that energy is used in ways that worsen the situation. First and foremost we need to provide food and shelter and sensible health care to everyone and there can be no class distinctions here. Never have I mentioned "jobs" for they are part of what is bringing us down. Sustaining is not a "job" it is living.
The middle class is living in a dream world and is part of the problem. It certainly is not the solution. The context in which the concept has meaning is lethal. We need radical change and we need it to start in the way we are thinking about these things.
We could run this by some Native people or others who are not so deeply caught up into the myths that drive us. I don't think they would have a problem getting my point. We really have little time but we have some. Or we can wait and let what is coming sweep over us. We really do not need a weather man to know which way the wind is blowing.