who are the middle class?

In a recent speech, President Barack Obama referred to the “middle class” 14 times, defining it as a family that makes up to $250,000 a year. Republican challenger Mitt Romney has looked at it from the other direction, saying that someone who falls into poverty “is still middle class.” In the fuzzy labels and loose speech of politicians “middle class” cover just about everyone.

"Politicians love to use the term, because it’s vague and connotes an image of regular American people.” said Dennis Gilbert, a sociology professor at Hamilton College and author of “The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality.” He said, the varying uses of “middle class” on the campaign trail are “dishonest, and it’s absurd.”

When it comes to earnings, the Census Bureau divides household income into quintiles, or groups of 20 percent. Some economists narrowly define the middle class as those in the middle 20 percent of the distribution, earning between $38,000 and $61,000. Others define it more broadly to include the middle 60 percent of the income distribution, between $20,000 and $100,000. Defining who is poor, by contrast, is officially more absolute. The federal poverty line is based on the minimum income needed to have what the government considers a basic standard of living. Two times the poverty line is often a cutoff for “low-income” families who may be eligible for government aid. The poverty line currently is $22,314 for a family of four, meaning that a family making $44,000 could be both “low income” and “middle class.” Yet another way to gauge class is what income tax bracket you’re in. The IRS has six of them. This year, the bottom bracket sets a tax rate of 10 percent for taxable income up to $17,400 for couples. The top bracket is 35 percent, applied to taxable income above $388,350. The middle class is commonly seen as falling in the 15 and 25 percent brackets, or couples whose taxable income is between $17,400 and $142,700. But some define it all the way up to the second-highest bracket, which is 33 percent and includes taxable income up to $388,350.

Krueger, who is chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, offered a precise definition: households with annual incomes within 50 percent of the national median income. The current median income is $49,445, putting middle-class earnings in a range from $25,000 to $75,000. Democrats from higher cost-of-living areas, such as Sen. Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have sought to push the “middle class” definition higher, arguing that some families earning between $250,000 and $1 million in big cities such as New York and San Francisco are more likely to be dual-income worker bees than a wealthy elite.

Sociologists take a broader view and focus not on income, but occupation: an “upper middle class” of white-collar specialists (lawyers, engineers, professors, economists and architects); and a “middle class” of lower-level white-collar workers (teachers, nurses, insurance sales and real estate agents). Together, these groups make up about 45 percent of households and sit near the upper end of the income distribution, just behind the top 1 percent. The meanings shift more dramatically when measured by self-identification and quality of life.

Few Americans label themselves as upper class or lower class, which are seen as either pretentious or demeaning. Roughly 95 percent of adults say they are middle class (50 percent), upper middle class (13 percent) or working class (32 percent), according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in May. Just 2 percent describe themselves as “better off” than upper middle class. A separate ABC News poll found that being “middle class” often meant more to people than specific income levels, which can be affected by family size, expenses and local costs of living. At least two-thirds of adults said being middle class meant owning a home, being able to save for the future and afford things like vacation travel, the occasional new car and various other little luxuries, according to the 2010 poll. “Middle class’ in politics is not a numerical value,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “When voters hear ‘middle class,’ they don’t hear people who make above or below this amount of money, they hear ‘us.’ It’s a way for politicians to signal to voters that ‘I share your values.”’ Politicians mirror definitions of “middle class” that voters want to hear.

So what does the term really mean? The World Socialist Movement simplifies the definition. In the socialist theory the working class is made up of all those who have to get a living by selling their ability to work. It may be popular to vaguely talk about the 'middle class', but it is the two classes defined here that are the key to understanding capitalism. If you don’t own any means of production yourself you are working class because you are dependent for a living on going out onto the labour market and trying to find an employer to buy your working skills. This, whatever your occupation or income.  It is not a question of social origins. An individual born in the working class may well enter the capitalist class (and vice versa). Nevertheless a class tends to perpetuate itself along the lines of its social origins.

When politicians and media refer to the ‘working class’ they use the narrower meaning of people with low incomes, little power and less “cultural capital” (or what could be called sophistication). This is contrasted with ‘middle-class’ people who are a notch above on each of these scales. The ‘middle class’ is living the American Dream of gleaming affluence and clean-cut leisure. Socialists would not deny that workers may have a different style of life. We would merely deny that this is in any way a valid or relevant criticism of a definition of class. The correct position is that classes are defined by their relationship to the means of production.

Nor as is popularly supposed is a class made up of people getting near enough the same income. Some highly paid workers may get as much or more than some small capitalists. It does not mean therefore that they have an identity of interests. If you are a member of the so-called “middle class”, is your life better than a member of the “working class”? Well, your income may be higher, and this may enable you to obtain a better home, a better car, better food, better electronic goods, a better pension, better child education, better holidays. But then again...keeping hold of that larger home and bigger car depends on you not losing your higher income. Yet with globalised free markets, there comes unavoidable pressure on employers to minimise wages and maximise savings in order to stay in business and increase profits. This results in job losses from mergers and takeovers and that can lead to automation or out-sourcing. Previously “safe” occupations have already seen such loss or transfer of jobs. The golden guarantee pension you expected to enjoy after you retire turns out to have not been as successfully invested as you thought, leaving you with the prospect of either making do with a lower standard of living in your old age, or carry on working for longer.

Worst of all there's your failure to see that you never did belong to a superior middle class, since your exploitation to produce profits for employers meant you were in fact a member of the working class, with problems and suffering just as bad as experienced by those stacking supermarket shelves, selling McFood or sewing clothes in sweat shops. And by failing to see that you were all collectively exploited by capitalism – instead believing yourself to have been above others – you helped maintain the divisive system that unnecessarily cheated, manipulated and punished you all. Many left-wingers rely on having a palpable ‘enemy’, against whom one could vent one’s spleen and exact one’s revenge. But the trouble with this is, whom do you blame for the way a social system works? Our leaders? Or ourselves for following them? The rich? Or the poor for accepting their poverty? History doesn’t hold individuals responsible. Capitalism is the real enemy, not its managers and functionaries. The reason given for excluding these people from the working class is that they exercise some degree of control over the use of the means of production and/or authority over other workers; in short, because they perform some managerial role. To adopt this view is to abandon the relationship-to-the-means-of-production theory of class for one based on occupation. Socialists have always maintained that, as far as the actual production of wealth is concerned, the capitalist class are redundant. They play no part in production, which is run from top to bottom by hired workers of one sort or another. This means that all job, including those concerned with managing production and/or disciplining other members of the working class, are performed by members of the working class. To exclude then from the working class is to give more importance to the type of occupation than to the economic necessity of having to sell labor power for a wage or salary which for Marxists is the defining feature of the working class.

So who are the middle class? They are the muddled working class!

that middle class again...

In this earlier post we quoted one American who has re-evaluated the meaning of "middle-class". In these times of recession , the ideological disguise and camoflage has unveiled the reality of class for many Americans. Media commentators often have lots to say about the "middle class", but they rarely define what they mean by the term. This is very wise on their part, because it quickly becomes obvious that the "middle class" includes just about everybody, which would make people think about just what it is they’re supposed to be in the middle of.

America's "middle class" has never been easy to define, measure or study. It's loosely seen as those falling between the impoverished and the rich, the vast group that makes enough money to aspire to the "American dream". The dream varies depending on the individual. But generally, "middle class" means enough to live on, with a little bit more. "Middle class" means in typical times, you can support a household, buy a home and pay a mortgage, afford medical care, help the kids with college costs and plot out a comfortable retirement. With the "little bit more," you can indulge - an upgraded smart phone, a relaxing vacation, a better car. Perhaps broadly, such as those earning a certain percentage below or above the median income. In Arizona, the median income last year (2010) was almost $33,000. But Philadelphia-based economist Joel Naroff said that defining "middle class" based solely on income can be misleading. Living costs vary widely, and what might be considered a "middle-class" income in one area wouldn't cut it in another area of the country. Family size and number of children also weigh heavily. The Economic Policy Institute calculated in 2008 that the threshold for a minimum "middle-class" living standard for a two-parent, two-child family varied from about $35,800 in rural Nebraska to almost $69,000 in Boston.

Jill Humpherys is a stay-at-home Gilbert, Ariz., mother with five kids ranging in age from 12 to 24 whose husband earns about $104,000. While that sounds like an upper-middle-class or upper-class salary to some, she said the family lives frugally, pays cash for used vehicles, and clips coupons. She said that is what it takes to support their four-bedroom, two-bath home, maintain a savings account, finance college education for the kids and save for retirement. The two oldest are married, another is at the University of Arizona and two others live at home. "My definition of middle class would be that you can live modestly, own a home, and send your children to college. Obviously, that dream has gotten very expensive," she said.

Javier Portillo and his wife, Alice, of Maricopa, Ariz., are probably more typical of middle-class families because they both work. She works in customer service at a Walmart and he drives a truck. Together they earn about $80,000 to support themselves and four children, aged 16 to 3. They have had to cope with a reduction in her hours over the holiday season. They also maintain a frugal lifestyle that includes coupon-clipping and shopping overnight on Black Friday to get the most Christmas presents for the least amount of money. The economic downturn has them on edge. "With this economy, for me and my wife personally, we learned to squeeze the quarter until it squeaks a little," he said. "I'm sure everyone loves their kids, but if you can't say, 'No, you can't have a new gadget now,' you are going to be in debt the rest of your life."

The U.S. Census Bureau doesn't have an official definition for middle class. It has focused instead on income inequality, the growing gap between the rich and the not-so-rich. Tom Rex, an Arizona State University economist, said it's pretty much the top 1 percent of the wealthy that has been getting wealthier. Whether you define the middle class by income, state of mind, dreams achieved or other measures, reaching that classification and remaining there appears harder to achieve.

A task force chaired by Vice President Joe Biden concluded a year ago that "middle-class families are defined by their aspirations more than their income." Those aspirations include homeownership, a car, college education for their children, health and retirement security and occasional family vacations. Biden's task force concluded it's more difficult for families to become middle class because prices for health care, college and housing have risen faster than income. People also need more education than once required to be middle class. And Rex pointed out that a family pretty much needs two incomes to become middle class whereas it once only took one salary.The standard of living is higher than the middle class had a couple of generations ago. With the explosion of consumer products, it raised the bar. Is a flat-panel TV or a Blu-ray player a necessity for the middle-class household? Is an iPod touch or a netbook vital to the middle-class teenager? No, but it sometimes feels like it.

The recession has shaken up some key "middle-class" hopes and dreams. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center the downturn has reduced Americans' expectations about retirement and their children's future. It inspired more frugal spending and borrowing. And it led to a concern that it could take years for home values and family finances to recover. 55 percent of adults in the labor force said that since the recession began , they have been out of work, had their pay or hours cut or become involuntary part-time workers. 62 percent said they have cut back on their spending. And 31 percent plan to maintain frugal habits when the economy improves. 48 percent said they are in worse financial shape than before the recession began, particularly those with annual household incomes below $50,000 and those who are 50 to 64 years old (Only 20% said they were better off.) About 25% of the adults believe that when their children are the same age, their children's standard of living will be lower. A decade ago, only a tenth of Americans believed that. So, far from us being “all middle class now”, there is no longer any middle class. It’s rather the case that “we are all working class now”

Taken from here

The World Socialist Movement asserts that class is defined by the position in which you stand with regard to the means of production. In capitalist society there are two basic classes: those who own and control the means of production and those who own no productive resources apart from their ability to work. The working class in capitalist society is made up of all those who are obliged through economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary. If this is your position then you are a member of the working class. The job you do and the status it might have, the pay you receive and how you chose to spent it, are irrelevant as long as you are dependent on working for a wage or salary in order to live. What this means is that essentially we are living in a two-class society of capitalists and workers. To ‘escape from your class’, do not dream of becoming a capitalist. Work instead for a society in which class divisions no longer exist. Where there is no social ladder but everyone has the chance to educate themselves in the best and broadest way possible and to do work which is rewarding and enjoyable, without ever defining themselves as a cleaner or a clerk, where everyone has the opportunity to relate to others as human beings rather than as cogs in an uncontrollable economic machine.

Who are the Chinese middle class?

The working class in capitalist society is made up of all those who are obliged through economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary. If this is your position then you are a member of the working class. The job you do and the status it might have, the pay you receive and how you chose to spent it, are irrelevant as long as you are dependent on working for a wage or salary in order to live. What makes a wage or salary-earner a member of the working class is not the mere receipt of a salary but being economically dependent on it for a living. What this means is that essentially we are living in a two-class society of capitalists and workers. Classes are defined by the relationship of their members to the means of production, not by how rich or poor they are. The existence of a middle class is one of the greatest myths .

It may be popular to talk (usually vaguely ) about various other 'classes' existing such as the 'middle class', but it doesn't add our understanding of capitalism. The figures for wealth ownership are only an indication of the class structure of society--they show that society is divided into classes but not how it is. So, classes should not be defined on the basis of them; classes are defined socially not statistically. And the working class is defined socially as those members of capitalist society who are excluded from the ownership and control of the means of production and are therefore forced to get a living by trying to find an employer to buy their labour power. Just like most workers they have to consume their incomes in order to survive at the prevailing standards of comfort of their peers. Most of those called the "middle class" fall into this category and the following article exposes the fallacy of defining what is "middle class" Whilst there are statistics, government statistics and politicians' proclamations, working class membership is easily defined.

The following article exposes the different definitions in regard to China.

A lot of international companies have long believed that they must have a presence in China because they consider its 1.3 billion people to be potential consumers, implying a seemingly endless stream of future revenue. The existence of a robust middle class, upon which this vision is based, is clearly growing at an accelerated pace in China, but an increasing body of research raises question about who the country's middle class really are and the true meaning of their disposable income.

Recent definitions of what constitutes the middle class in China range from approximately 10 percent to nearly half of the population. In 2007, Goldman Sachs said it believed 100 million Chinese consumers should be classified as middle class, and estimated that by 2015 that figure would jump to 650 million. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) suggested earlier this year that by 2020 more than 1 billion Chinese will be classified as middle class.
In a study released earlier this year, the ADB defined the middle class in China as individuals earning between $2 per day (the low end of lower middle class) and $19 per day (the high end of upper middle class) in income. The Bank notes that in 2005, 35% of the Chinese work force earned just $2-4 dollars per day, another 30% earned $4-10 per day, and less than 5% earned more than $10 per day. The Bank defines "affluent" consumers in China as those earning more than $20 per day (or $7,300 per year), consisting of 44.8 million in urban areas and 11.1 million in rural areas of the country -- approximately 4 percent of the total population.

According to a 2009 report in The Economist, the commonly accepted definition of income for the poverty line in the developing world is two dollars per day, implying that individuals above that income are by definition part of the emerging world's middle class. By contrast, the poverty line in America is $13 per day, but it would be difficult to imagine telling someone who makes $14 per day in the USA that he or she is not in poverty. By the same token, a person making more than $20 per day in China under the ADB's definition will hardly feel wealthy.

While defining the middle class is a relative proposition, but what seems clear is that the number of people belonging to the middle class in China, and more generally in Asia, is rising. A 2010 report by the Brookings Institution suggests that Asia's middle class is projected to increase from 28% in 2009 to 66% in 2030 -- an increase of 235% in just 20 years. The report says that China's middle class is poised to rise significantly not only because of the country's economic growth rate, but because more Chinese will continue to break out of the ranks of the poor. By 2030 the number of Chinese making more than $10 per day should increase to 74% from 11% today.

In 2006 the China National Research Association (CNRA) defined six criteria for what constitutes middle class status in China, based on education, salary, profession, societal influence, savings and holidays. At that time, the income benchmark for being a member of the 'new middle class' was just RMB2,000 (approximately US$300) per month (or $3,600 per year). McKinsey notes that as of 2006, 77% of urban Chinese households lived on less than RMB25,000 ($3,676) per year -- meaning, that by the CNRA's definition, 77% of Chinese do not belong to the new middle class.

A 2009 study by China's National Bureau of Statistics found that even with an 8.8% rise in disposable income that year, per capita disposable income for the average urban resident was just RMB17,175 ($2,525) and RMB5,153 ($758) for the average rural resident of the country, and that urban dwellers earn 333% more than farmers. This is important because as of 2006, 70.8% of the Chinese population engaged in some form of agricultural work according to Xinhua in 2008, and 54.3% of Chinese live in rural areas, meaning the majority of Chinese have very little disposable income.

So the idea that the majority of average Chinese consumers will be owning a home or a car in the near future, appears to be mistaken. This represents the paradox of the Chinese consumer market, where according to the ADB, in 2005 the percentage of "affluent" households owning a radio, television, air conditioner, refrigerator, or car was lower in China than in the Philippines -- a country considered to be much poorer.

Middle or working class?

Rick Santorum, the one time (and perhaps again a future) Republican presidential candidate shared this piece of advice with his party: “Don’t use the term the other side uses.” That includes the “middle class.” Santorum accused President Obama for constantly invoking the term “middle class” in his speeches about the economy. “Since when in America do we have classes?” Santorum asked. “Since when in America are people stuck in areas or defined places called a class? That’s Marxism talk.”

He is wrong about the supposed non-existence of class in America but he is right (for the wrong reasons) that we should not use the term “middle class”. Obama’s repeated reference to the “middle class” is indeed in error. Marx did employ the term “middle class” in his works . In the Victorian period this term was used to refer to the bourgeoisie or capitalist class. In modern Marxist terminology the words “middle class” would be replaced by “bourgeois” and ”capitalist” as appropriate. Having to work for an employer was how Marx defined the working class. In the 19th century when Marx wrote, the term was used by the up-and-coming industrial section of the capitalist class in Britain to describe themselves; they were the class between the landed aristocracy (who at that time dominated political power) and the working class. Eventually, however, the middle class of industrial capitalists replaced the landed aristocracy as the ruling class and the two classes merged into the capitalist class we know today. In other words, the middle class became part of the upper class and disappeared as a “middle class". The term, however, lives on and has grown to become a very vague term.

Most Americans like to think of themselves as middle class whether it’s accurate or not. The American working class has repeatedly been sold the myth of the “middle class”. In 2005 New York Times survey found only 1 percent of respondents considered themselves “upper class,” and only 7 percent considered themselves part of the “lower class.” There exists a tendency  for people to see the basic unfairness of the capitalist system and at the same time accept it and to believe that they can do well against the odds. This is a genuine and difficult reality for us Marxists, particularly when politicians like Santorum feed into this way of thinking.

All men and women who because of their lack of property are forced to seek work for a wage or a salary are members of the working class. Whether you work in a factory or an office whether you push a barrow or a pen if you have to seek a wage or a salary in order to live you are a member of the working class. “Better off” workers still have to  worry about making ends meet, face the indignity of redundancy or pay-cuts and in one degree or another, suffer the problems created by capitalist society. "Middle class" is not an appropriate term for people who are only a few pay-checks or a medical bill away from financial disaster or people who have jobs but with debts wildly disproportionate to their income and no assets to speak of. It should be admitted that they really are working class. This is what places them firmly in the ranks of the workers whether or not they like it or not or even  know it. It is not a question of social origins. An individual born in the working class may well enter the capitalist class (and vice versa). Nevertheless a class tends to perpetuate itself along the lines of its social origins. What this means is that essentially we are living in a two-class society of capitalists and workers. To “escape from your class” do not believe or trust in becoming a capitalist. Work instead for a society in which class divisions no longer exist. No matter how seductive the American Dream may be, we are still wage slaves and that fact is growing more and more apparent to more and more people. 

Once upon a time there was the American Dream...

Most Americans in the United States define themselves as being part of the middle class, but there are differing opinions of what that means. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the middle class as follows: "The socioeconomic class between the working class and the upper class, usually including professionals, highly skilled laborers, and lower and middle management." Most Americans, however, generally consider the United States to be a classless society and associate the group with factors ranging from income and occupation to hobbies and lifestyles. Doctors, teachers, lawyers and plumbers can all belong. Economists say there is no specific criteria for defining the middle class, though income level is the most common way of breaking it down.

INCOME
Economists generally align the group according to earnings, even if there is no standard established range. "Most people tend to think of themselves as middle class unless they're (billionaire investor) Warren Buffett or really poor," said J.D. Foster, an economist and senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Foster regards the upper 20 percent of earners as "upper income" and the lower 20 percent as "lower income." He regards the 60 percent in the middle as middle class, with household incomes roughly between $25,000 and $100,000. Median household income in the United States was $52,175 in 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

EDUCATION
Education can be another defining factor, as it is often correlated with income. Some academics divide the middle class into an upper bracket that includes professionals and middle managers who hold postgraduate degrees and often earn more than $100,000 and a less affluent lower middle class that typically has some college education with household incomes around the national median. These two groups account for roughly 45 percent of the population, depending on the model. Blue-collar and clerical workers in the working class typically have a high school education, and many may describe themselves as "middle class" even though their incomes may be a fraction of those earned by professionals. Profession and education level, however, does not always correlate with household income. A household with two blue-collar earners, for example, could take in more income than one headed by a single professional. The poorest 12 to 20 percent of Americans often have not finished high school.

Who, exactly, is middle class in America today?

Congress asked its research service to come up with a definition of middle class. The researchers started by looking at income levels. Based on 2005 Census Bureau reports, some 40 percent of the nearly 115 million households in the U.S. earned less than $36,000 a year. That represented just 12 percent of all income. The 40 percent on the next rung up the economic ladder took in between $36,000 and $91,705 — or about 37.6 percent of all income. The top 20 percent, who made $91,705 or more, collected half of all income. But those numbers don’t adequately reflect the state of mind of those who consider themselves middle class. Surveys have shown that, while people consider $40,000 a year to be the low end of what it takes to buy a middle-class life, some people who make as much as $200,000 a year still consider themselves middle class, the researchers said. In the end, they wrote, “There is no consensus definition of ‘middle class’; neither is there an official government definition. What constitutes the middle class is relative, subjective and not easily defined.”

You may feel comfortably middle class — with two cars in the driveway and a big screen TV — until the guy across the street pulls up in his third car to install a second widescreen TV. The researchers call this the "relative income hypothesis" ( although long identified by Karl Marx in Wage Labour and Capital when he wrote "A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut.." ) Being well above the bottom is a source of satisfaction. But when those at the upper end of the distribution fare better than you do, it is a source of consternation.

Another reason for middle class "consternation" is that income tells only part of the story: the cost of maintaining a "middle-class" lifestyle. The cost of housing has played an important role in the financial squeeze reported by many families in the middle.

Another key aspirations of "middle-class" families is to provide their children with the good yet expensive education they’ll need to maintain — or exceed — their standard of living when they enter the work force. The financial security of "middle-class" Americans has also been strained by the rising cost of higher education, which has risen faster than overall inflation for much of the past decade. Since 1990, the proportion of Americans who are paying off more than $20,000 in student loans a ­decade after they graduated has almost doubled. Lawrence Summers, Obama’s chief economic adviser points out that of the major economies, the US has the highest share of graduates in the workforce. But if you take the 25-34-year-old age group, America is not even in the top 10. More and more young Americans are put off by the thought of long-term debt. But “It’s not only fear of the debt – it is the four years of lost earnings.”

Health care costs also have outstripped inflation; the cost of a catastrophic illness can quickly knock a middle-class household into another, better-defined economic category - poverty. A 2009 study by researchers at Harvard and Ohio University showed that health-care problems were the root cause of 62 percent of all personal bankruptcies in America in 2007. Put another way: Every thirty seconds, someone in this country files for bankruptcy in the wake of a serious illness.

While many "middle-class" Americans a generation ago relied on their employers to fund their retirement, that burden has now shifted heavily to the wage-earners themselves.

The decline of unionized labor ( Fewer than a tenth of American private sector workers now belong to a union. ) in the past several decades has given employers more flexibility to increase productivity and adapt to rapid technological change and increased competition.But it has also devastated those workers who have been displaced from high-wage jobs and don’t have the skills they need to find a new one with comparable pay and benefits.Labor movements have been disabled by the capitalists’ increased ability to move capital and workers round the world.

Though "middle class" status may be largely a state of mind for many, they have clearly lost ground due to specific, harsh economic circumstances that have sent them falling abruptly down the ladder. For years, the problem was cushioned and partially hidden by the availability of cheap debt. Middle-class Americans were actively encouraged to withdraw equity from their homes, or leach from their retirement funds, in the confidence that ­property prices and stock markets would permanently defy gravity (a view, among others, promoted by half the world’s Nobel economics prize winners ). That cushion is now gone. Easy money has turned into heavy debt. Baby boomers have postponed retirements. College graduates are moving back in with their parents.We are afraid for their jobs. More and more, workers are working an extra half-hour or an hour or more, before they leave work for the day, or they take work home. They are producing extra profit for the capitalists, but no extra pay for themselves.

The anger is human and increasingly political. When people lose the sense of optimism, things tend to get more volatile.“To be pessimistic about the future is so new for Americans and so strikingly un-American,” says Michael Spence, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, whom the World Bank commissioned to lead a four-year study into the future of global growth. “But most people grasp their own situations way better than any economist.”

For so many for so long our wage slavery bought us a comfortable, prosperous lifestyle and personally rewarding work, now it means being discarded. There is no middle class. We’re all working class in the economic sense that we have to sell our labour in order to live. The exception being the small number of capitalists who can live entirely on the labour of others. The rest of us are all, economically speaking, working class by virtue of the fact that we have to let ourselves be used, to sell our labour power, to live. How readily we embraced the illusion of being middle class. Now in China and India, we reach out again and again in individual aspiration, setting aside the hope of banding together and ending our exploitation. We try to win in the rat race instead of trying to abolish it, thereby ensuring that the parasite class goes on leeching off us for their own profit. No matter how seductive the American Dream was, we were still wage slaves and still are , and that fact is growing more and more apparent to more and more people. However, rage and desperation rarely clarify the facts. To solve the problems we need to understand why society does not work for us. We need to understand the structure of society, and the real enemy. The ruling class, of capitalists and their executive, the governments of the world, have no monopoly on our skills and abilities. These belong to us. It is we who fish the oceans and tend the forests and till the land and plantations. It is we who build the cities and railroads, the bridges and roads, the docks and airports. It is we who staff the hospitals and schools, who empty the garbage cans and go down the sewers. It is we, the working class, who produce everything society needs from a needle to a sky-scraper, who provide all of its services. Moreover, it is we who are responsible for the inventions that have benefited humanity and the improvements in productive techniques. If we can do all of this, then surely we can continue to do so without a profit-greedy minority watching over us and, more importantly , we do it in our own interests. That much is assured. We certainly have the science, the technology and the know-how. All that is missing is the will and a belief in ourselves as masters of our own destiny – the desire for change that can make that next great historical advance possible

Sources:-
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/09/14/us-usa-taxes-middleclass-idUSTRE68D3QD20100914
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21272238/ns/us_news-gut_check/
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1a8a5cb2-9ab2-11df-87e6-00144feab49a.html

The non-rise of China

SOYMB has reservations on the article's loose use of the term "middle class". "Middle income" may be a more appropriate term, but notwithstanding that, it makes interesting reading for those with an interest in Chinese society.

A  headline in Forbes proclaimed the rise of China’s middle class to be “The Biggest Story of Our Time.” Such a statement is an hyperbolic oversimplification. Although the U.S. middle class has been squeezed and manufacturing has been outsourced to developing nations such as China, there has not been a corresponding rise in the Chinese middle class like that seen in the United States after World War II. Rather than a middle class of laborers in the manufacturing industry, China has seen disturbing levels of income inequality and the emergence of a new “elite” class at the same time that the United States is experiencing similar shifts.

Rumors of a rising Chinese middle class have been touted widely. However, the evidence supporting these claims remains conflicting at best. The “middle-class” jobs outsourced from the United States have not necessarily translated to “middle-class” jobs in developing nations, especially in China. Defining the middle class has always been a difficult venture, but on several fronts the Chinese middle class remains nascent.

Using wages as an indicator, the manufacturing jobs in China fall far short of providing a middle-class lifestyle .Even in Shanghai, these wages are below middle-class. And while wages maybe are rising, they won’t reach middle class wages any time soon. Workers lack the human capital, access to healthcare or education, and consumer behavior that are generally indicators of a middle class.

Perhaps a more important indicator of middle-class status is consumption behavior. A 2010 OECD report using consumption as an indicator found that the Chinese middle class constituted only 12 percent of the population. This is simply not large enough and China still has a long way to go before it can claim a legitimate middle class capable of driving healthy economic growth through its own consumption, rather than relying on exports to other countries.

If China has been experiencing near double-digit growth in GDP yearly where has all the growth gone? In fact, rather than creating a new middle class in China, outsourcing has contributed to the rise of a new elite class. The disproportionate benefits of China’s near 10-percent  annual GDP growth over the last 30 years have been appropriated  by a small minority (not too unlike the current situation in the United States).

Though growth has benefited all Chinese citizens to some degree, wage inequality has exploded. China’s Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) has increased to roughly 45.3, approaching levels of dangerous inequality (compared to the U.S. score of 46.8 in 2009). Thus, rather than replicating the middle-class growth of post-World War II America, China appears to have skipped that stage altogether and headed straight for a model of extraordinary productivity but disproportionately distributed wealth similar to the contemporary United States.

The arrival of a new elite class in China does not come from the throngs of factory workers, but on the backs of those workers.

Source

Middle Class? So What

Class is a concept that can be defined as anyone likes, however, the Asian Development Bank defines India’s middle class as those who spend anywhere between $2 and $20 (Rs 93 to Rs 930) a day on purchasing power. Broken down, the lower-middle class falls between US$2 and US$4 per day, the middle-middle class spends between US$4 and US$10 per day and is able to save and consume non-essential goods, and the upper-middle class consumes between US$10 and US$20 per day.
Yet, more than three-fourths of India’s 274 million-strong middle class face the risk of slipping back into poverty in the event of a major economic shock as they are in the lowest spending bracket of $2-4 (Rs 93-186) a day. Another financial crisis, wars or large natural disasters can reverse people’s move into higher income categories."Asia's rapidly-growing middle class remains vulnerable ... A major shock can easily send them back into poverty," said Jong-Wha Lee, chief economist at the ADB.

The African Development Bank also defines those who spend between $2 and $20 a day as members of the middle class . Mthuli Ncube, the bank's chief economist said Africa's middle class had risen to about 34% (313 million) of the continent's population. But once again an estimated 21% earn only enough to spend $2 to $4 a day so about 180 million people are vulnerable to economic shocks that could knock them out of the new middle class.

The Asian Development Bank also defined the middle class in China as individuals earning between $2 per day (the low end of lower middle class) and $19 per day (the high end of upper middle class) in income. in 2005, 35% of the Chinese work force earned just $2-4 dollars per day, another 30% earned $4-10 per day, and less than 5% earned more than $10 per day. In 2005, 35% of the Chinese work force earned just $2-4 dollars per day, another 30% earned $4-10 per day, and less than 5% earned more than $10 per day.

The China National Research Association defined six criteria for what constitutes middle class status in China, based on education, salary, profession, societal influence, savings and holidays. Ncube uses a consumption pattern to define class, claiming record numbers of people in Africa own houses and cars, use mobile phones and the internet and send their children to private schools and foreign universities. Sales of fridges, TVs and mobile phones have surged in virtually every African country in recent years, the report said. Possession of cars and motorcycles in Ghana, for example, has gone up by 81% in the past five years. The add lifestyle to the definition. The Africa middle classes are more likely to have salaried jobs or own small businesses. They tend not to rely entirely on public health services, seeking more expensive medical care. The middle classes tend to have fewer children and spend more on their nutrition and schooling. Those who proclaim that "we're all becoming middle class now" are not stating a fact. They are putting forward a political message. They want us to think that we are all just isolated classless individuals who can only improve our lot by our own individual efforts. It is an attempt to disarm the working class ideologically, to get us to give up the idea of collective struggle. Sociological definitions based upon cultural preferences, job types (professional, salaried or blue collar, waged), or number of TVs or cars owned in more likely to reflect a false consciousness of one's actual class position. It hides a great deal. By emphasising divisions among employees it suggests that they have different interests and statuses, rather than stressing what they all have in common. It suggests that removing inequality is about people climbing upwards within this scale and so doing better than their parents, rather than overturning the whole system. The traditional division between ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’ also implies that there is a conflict between these two groups, with the middle class being better paid, educated and housed, often at the expense of the working class. The real world is not merely made up of a population stratified into different income groups. It is true that the working class can be divided into different income groups. But between these groups there is no direct opposition, tension and conflict – they are just groups of people having different characteristics in terms of income, education and status. The real world is a world in which the population is divided into two main groups obtaining their incomes in distinct and completely different ways. One group obtains its income from the ownership of the productive wealth of the world and the other group obtains its income from the sale of its labour power to the owners of productive wealth.
In Africa there exists an elite of about 100,000 Africans who possess a collective net worth of 60% of the continent's gross domestic product in 2008. In China the richest 10 per cent of Chinese controlled some 45 per cent of the country’s wealth, the poorest, just 1.4 per cent. In India the wealthiest 100 Indians are collectively worth $276 billion.

The World Socialist Movement asserts that we’re all working class in the economic sense that we have to sell our labour in order to live. The exception being the small number of capitalists who can live entirely on the labour of others. The rest of us are all, economically speaking, working class by virtue of the fact that we have to let ourselves be used, to sell our labour power, to live. In capitalist society there are two basic classes: those who own and control the means of production and those who own no productive resources apart from their ability to work. The working class in capitalist society is made up of all those who are obliged through economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary. In other words, on exploitation. If you don’t own any means of production yourself you are working class because you are dependent for a living on going out onto the labour market and trying to find an employer to buy your working skills. If this is your position then you are a member of the working class. The job you do and the status it might have, the pay you receive and how you chose to spent it, are irrelevant as long as you are dependent on working for a wage or salary in order to live.

"Middle class" is not an appropriate term for people who are only one or two pay-cheques from financial disaster or people who have jobs but with debts wildly disproportionate to their income and no assets to speak of. It should be admitted that they really are working class.

The "middle class" again

More than two-thirds of Britons now claim to be middle class, a Daily Telegraph poll has found.

66 per cent of voters now consider themselves to be middle class, while less than a third say that they are working class. The poll found that most people considered that those earning between £40,000 and £60,000 were middle class, with an annual salary of £20,000 or less deemed to be that of the working classes. An income of £100,000 a year is seen by a majority of voters as wealthy, those who earn at that level still consider themselves to be middle class.60 per cent disagree with the proposition that Britain is a fair country where all children have a broadly equal chance of doing well whatever their background. And despite 13 years of a Labour government, a higher proportion 45 per cent think Britain is actually a less fair country than it was in the 1990s.Around half thought the financial gap between rich and poor is too wide.

SOYMB have blogged previously on the issue of class identification.We argue that what class you are in is defined by the position in which you stand with regard to the means of production.The job you do and the status it might have, the pay you receive and how you chose to spent it, are irrelevant as long as you are dependent on working for a wage or salary in order to live.Others such as the self-employed – small shopkeepers, independent workers, professional people – whose income is derived from selling some service or other directly to the consumer rather than from selling their labour power to an employer, many of these can be assimilated, in terms of income, to the ordinary worker. The working class is defined socially as those members of capitalist society who are excluded from the ownership and control of the means of production and are therefore forced to get a living by trying to find an employer to buy their labour power.The capitalist class are those people who enjoy a privileged non-work income derived from the surplus value produced by the working class.

What this means is that essentially we are living in a two-class society of capitalists and workers. But what about the “middle class” ?

In the last century, the term was used by the up-and-coming industrial section of the capitalist class in Britain to describe themselves; they were the class between the landed aristocracy (who at that time dominated political power) and the working class. Eventually, however, the middle class of industrial capitalists replaced the landed aristocracy as the ruling class and the two classes merged into the capitalist class we know today. In other words, the 19th century middle class became part of the upper class and disappeared as a “middle class". The term, however, lived on and came to be applied to civil servants, teachers and other such white-collar workers. But there was no justification for this, as such people were clearly workers just as much obliged by economic necessity to sell their ability to work as were factory workers, miners, engine drivers and dockers. The only difference was the type of job they were employed to do – and a certain amount of snobbery attached to it.

The so-called "middle class" are as dependent on what their employer pays them as the working class are. It may be called a salary and come in the form of a monthly cheque rather than a weekly wage packet, but its recipients still need it in order to live. The overwhelming majority of the population are in the same boat, employed, paid a wage, needing to work for a living, at risk of losing their job, pushed around at work, working longer hours and doing less interesting work than they would wish. They shop in the same malls and supermarkets, use the same schools, hospitals and transport systems, are subject to the same laws and government regulations. Above all, they are seen by their employers as a means of creating profit rather than as human beings with feelings and family responsibilities.As far as socialists are concerned, anyone in this situation is a member of the working class, irrespective of their educational background or the accent they speak with.

Living in a larger house and running a couple of cars does not in itself raise someone into another class. Neither does earning a bigger wage. The roller-coaster of capitalism's economy has recently brought thousands of people in this country sharply up against the fact that there is more to it than that. Thousands who thought that taking out a mortgage on a house made them "middle class" were deprived of that delusion by the reality of re-possession. Thousands who assumed they were middle class because they sat in a manager's chair and drove a company car were forced to re-arrange their concepts about society when they got their redundancy notice.

Those who proclaim that "we're all middle class" are not stating a fact. They are putting forward a political programme. They want us to think that we are all just isolated classless individuals who can only improve our lot by our own individual efforts. It is an attempt to disarm the working class ideologically, to get us to give up the idea of collective struggle, whether on the industrial front or to replace capitalism with socialism. While governments continue to fail to solve social problems, while profits continue to be put before needs, while exploitation continues, the class war is not yet over.

SWP and the Middle Class

SOYMB recently posted about the middle class and by coincidence the SWP paper Socialist Worker similarly have an article on the subject . And as always with the SWP , truths mixed with confusionism .
" Some commentators and politicians say that changes in society make class meaningless...They claim that the people who work in these “white collar” jobs are middle class...This view of society has become mainstream – but it is wrong. Class is not about whether you do manual work or work in an office. It is not even about how much you earn. It is about where you stand in relation to how things are produced in society...Workers still have to sell their ability to labour to capitalists to survive, just as they did 100 years ago.Some workers may think they are middle class – but it’s not about what you think. Class is based on the reality of whether you own a workplace or have to work for a wage..."

And here the SPGB can only agree . But as usual with th SWP they then disingeniously add:

"Marx did, however, recognise that there is a middle class. It is smaller than the working class but bigger than the ruling class. The middle class have more control and autonomy over their working lives. This class – made up of doctors, headteachers, lower-level managers and small businesspeople – faces contradictory pressures. Their wealth and social position mean that they can buy into the system."

Engels gives a clearer meaning for the usage of the term "middle class":
"Firstly, that I have used the word Mittelklasse all along in the sense of the English word middle-class (or middle-classes, as is said almost always). Like the French word bourgeoisie it means the possessing class, specifically that possessing class which is differentiated from the so-called aristocracy" (our emphasis) - exactly just as SOYMB pointed out the word's origin here

But this “middle class” the SWP claim the existence of is said to be composed of higher-grade white collar workers and to make up between 10 and 20 percent of the workforce (The Changing Working Class by SWP leaders Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman, p. 37). The reason given for excluding these people from the working class is that they exercise some degree of control over the use of the means of production and/or authority over other workers; in short, because they perform some managerial role ( similar to the Parecon co-ordinator class perhaps) . But to adopt this view is to abandon the relationship-to-the-means-of-production theory of class for one based on occupation. The SPGB have always maintained that, as far as the actual production of wealth is concerned, the capitalist class are redundant. They play no part in production, which is run from top to bottom by hired workers of one sort or another. This means that all jobs , including those concerned with managing production and/or disciplining other members of the working class, are performed by members of the working class. To exclude from the working class workers with no productive resources of their own who are paid, among other things, to exercise authority of behalf of the employing class over other workers is to give more importance to the job done i.e. their occupation than to the economic necessity of having to sell labour power for a wage or salary which for Marxists is the defining feature of the working class. Having to work for an employer was how Marx defined the working class. Of management he says :

"With the industrial capitalist, this labour of superintendence, which is “his”, is performed by workers delegated by him. These are the NCO’s of the workshop. It is in fact the overlookers and not the capitalists who perform the real labour of superintendence. The mechanical workshop is altogether characterised by these relations of subordination, regimentation, just as under the system of slavery the ruling mode of cooperation is slave-driving Negro slaves and working Negro slaves. It is labour for the exploitation of labour." (our emphasis)

It had been the experience of the 70s that forced the change in the SWP class theory. They found that the largest and longest-lasting of the rank-and-file groups they sponsored were not those for industrial workers but those for white collar groups such as teachers, council staff and lower level civil servants and indeed, they found that (apart from maybe university lecturers ! ) this was where most of their members came from.
This was a bit disturbing in terms of Tony Cliff’s 1966 perspective about a “new socialist movement” arising and that “its roots will be in the class struggle at the point of production”. What to do ? Revise the theory and extend the definition of the working class to include these groups. Harman and Callinicos were commissioned to write The Changing Working Class.

Of course they had no problem in doing so since such groups are indeed part of the working class, though their classification of which white-collar workers should fall into the working class and which should not (based on the degree of authority they are or aren’t able to exert over other workers) ended up being a bit tortuous .

The SWP was forced to make this shift towards recognising that most, if not all, white collar workers were fully-fledged workers and not middle class because they had to accommodate their average member . Any Marxist objectivity in class definition was secondary to their motives .

The Riddle of the Middle

Almost everyone thinks they belong to it, but few can define what it is. Politicians claim to champion it, but it's increasingly difficult to determine what it actually wants. And, often, when we talk about it, we're really only referring to part of it -- the part that doesn't really belong to it at all, but likes to think it does.
What is it?
It's the "middle class"

The CCPA Growing Gap Project did extensive public opinion research to look at issues around income inequality and poverty-how it's experienced and how it's perceived. But something else was revealed: it doesn't matter if you make $25,000 or $150,000; everyone self-identifies as "middle class."

While disposable income is flatlining and decent jobs are vanishing, the "middle class" label isn't. On the contrary, it's being stretched like an elastic band to accommodate an enormous range of people with very different lives and financial realities. The distribution of wealth has shifted, but the self-identification as middle class has not; if anything, identification of and with the middle class has expanded to include more people than ever. And rather than political leaders addressing the vast disparities across the economic spectrum, we hear how their policies will benefit the "middle class" when even a cursory analysis reveals the real beneficiaries of many of these policies are those with much higher incomes. In spite of the "middle class" framing, tax policies are being used to help enrich the already most affluent. Meanwhile, everyone else labouring under the false impression that they are part of the "middle class" that politicians are talking about is left wondering why at the end of the day the so-called "middle class-friendly" numbers don't seem to add up for the people who need the most help.

Is "middle class" simply a label that speaks to how people want to think of themselves and be perceived? People who make less can aspire to the notional lifestyle middle class evokes, and people who make more can take comfort in a label that allows them to have more, yet still be considered ordinary, down-to-earth folks. Consumer culture has played an enormous role in servicing this disconnect. It guides how we define ourselves, how we judge others, and how we want to be judged. We are encouraged to perceive qualitative concepts that help constitute our quality of life as little more than consumer transactions. We are encouraged to think about acquiring a university or college education the same way we acquire iPods or flat screen TVs. Accumulation of these items is what ensures us our place in the "middle class" -- some of us just go more deeply into debt to acquire them for ourselves or for our children.

Erika Shaker, Director of the CCPA's Education Project here

SOYMB has come across many such articles as the above extract in the Canadian and American media. The recession has created a re-appraisal of how society is in reality. We can only recommend the World Socialist Movement's interpretation of the class division.

Under capitalism, the means for producing and distributing goods (the land, factories, technology, transport system etc) are owned by a small minority of people - the capitalist class. The rest of us, the majority of people, must sell their ability to work in return for a wage or salary - the working class. We say there are just two classes in society. It may be popular to talk (usually vaguely as the above article's author indicated) about the "middle class", but it is the two classes defined here that are the key to understanding capitalism.

It may not be exactly clear which class some relatively wealthy people are in. But there is no ambiguity about the status of the vast majority. Members of the capitalist class certainly know who they are. And most members of the working class know that they need to work for a wage or salary in order to earn a living. There is no “middle class” as the working class includes land workers, doctors, lawyers and teachers – anyone, indeed, who must sell their mental and physical energies to survive.

The fact that many people live in better houses, do different work or earn more money than some others does not elevate them out of the working class. They still have to work for a living, worry about making ends meet, face the indignity of the sack and in one degree or another, suffer the prob­lems created by capitalist society. This is what places them firmly in the ranks of the workers whether or not they like it. This recession makes it more and more evident.

Now we are seven – or are we?

A new study by academics from the LSE and Manchester have come up with the idea that there are seven classes in British society. You can classify people according to whatever criteria you want and the academics have chosen to combine income, security of income, occupation and leisure pursuits. The seven classes they come up with are: elite (6 percent), established middle class (25 percent), technical middle class (6 percent), new affluent workers (15 percent), traditional working class (14 percent), emergent service workers (19 percent), and precariat (15 percent). In fact, this is just a refinement of the popular division into upper class (toffs and nouveaux riches), middle class and working class.


The sevenfold division might have some use for business to target their sales but it is useless for explain social dynamics. Socialists define class in terms of relationship to the means of production – who owns and who does not own the farms, factories, mines, railways, utilities and other workplaces where goods and services are produced. This gives, essentially, only two classes in an advanced capitalist country such as Britain: the rich owners of the means of production and the rest of society who depend on them for a living. Since, on this criterion, most of the ‘middle class’ are in the same position as the ‘working class’, the split could well be the 6/94 that the academics figures suggest.

In Marx’s day – and this is the assumption in Capital – there were three distinguishable classes depending on their relationship to the means of production: an upper class of big landowners who derived an income as ground-rent from their ownership of land; a middle class of capitalist employers who derived theirs as profits from their investments in agriculture or industry; and a working class of non-owners who lived by selling their ability to work for a wage.

This in fact is the historical origin of the term ‘middle class’ as the class between the landed aristocracy and the working class. Since then they have merged with the landowners to become a single capitalist class (both through marriage and through landowners investing in industry), so it no longer makes sense to talk of a ‘middle class’. There is no class in between the capitalist class and the class of those who depend for a living on the sale of their working abilities for a wage or salary. Those referred to in popular parlance as the ‘middle class’ are in reality a part of the class of wage and salary workers; as, indeed, are those seen as the ‘traditional working class’. Both are sub-sections of a wider working class properly so-called.

There is another difference between the socialist concept of class and that of the academics. Their classes are non-antagonistic. It is true that there is in fact an antagonism between their ‘elite’ and their other six classes but this is not recognised. It is also true that, at present, politicians are trying to set everybody against the ‘precariat’ as ‘non-strivers’ and ‘shirkers’, while others see an antagonism between the four bottom classes (which they see as the ‘working class’) and the two middle classes. But these don’t represent real antagonisms but attempts to divide the classes other than the elite against each other that only service the interest of the elite.

Socialists see a built-in antagonism between the two classes defined by their relationship to the means of production. As wealth can only be produced by people working and as profit is a non-work income, it follows that the profits of the capitalist class are derived from the work of the working class. There is an exploitative relation between to the two classes. There is therefore not only a division of society into two classes but a class struggle between them.

At present this class struggle is over the division of newly produced wealth into wages and profits, a basic feature of present-day society of much more significance than the cultural differences between the academics’ seven classes. It manifests itself in bargaining between employers and unions over wages and in strikes, in employers trying to increase work-loads and impose speed-ups, and, today, in the government cutting the living standards of workers.

Ultimately, however, the struggle is over the ownership and control of the means of production and can come to an end only with the victory of the working class and the conversion of the means of production into the common property of all. Then a classless society will have been achieved. The working class will disappear along with the capitalist class and there will simply be free and equal men and women, members of a community with a common interest in working to satisfy the needs of all its members, both as individuals and as a community.

ADAM BUICK

What class are you in?

Chris Harman, one of the leaders of the SWP died last week. He had a mistaken idea of who the “working class” were.

What class you are in is defined by the position in which you stand with regard to the means of production. In capitalist society there are two basic classes: those who own and control the means of production and those who own no productive resources apart from their ability to work.

The working class in capitalist society is made up of all those who are obliged through economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary. If this is your position then you are a member of the working class. The job you do and the status it might have, the pay you receive and how you chose to spent it, are irrelevant as long as you are dependent on working for a wage or salary in order to live.

In Britain over 90 percent of the population are members of the working class. Of the rest only about 2-3 per cent are members of the exploiting, capitalist class who enjoy a privileged non-work income derived from the surplus value produced by the working class over and above what they are paid as wages and salaries. The others are the self-employed – small shopkeepers, independent workers, professional people – whose income is derived from selling some service or other directly to the consumer rather than from selling their labour power to an employer. And many of these can be assimilated, in terms of income, to the ordinary worker.

What this means is that essentially we are living in a two-class society of capitalists and workers. But what about the “middle class”? The existence of such a middle class is one of the greatest myths of the twentieth century. In the last century, the term was used by the up-and-coming industrial section of the capitalist class in Britain to describe themselves; they were the class between the landed aristocracy (who at that time dominated political power) and the working class. Eventually, however, the middle class of industrial capitalists replaced the landed aristocracy as the ruling class and the two classes merged into the capitalist class we know today. In other words, the 19th century middle class became part of the upper class and disappeared as a “middle” class.

The term, however, lived on and came to be applied to civil servants, teachers and other such white-collar workers. But there was no justification for this, as such people were clearly workers just as much obliged by economic necessity to sell their ability to work as were factory workers, miners, engine drivers and dockers. The only difference was the type of job they were employed to do – and a certain amount of snobbery attached to it. .

It is not just the Daily Mail persists in believing that there is a middle class. So does the SWP which has come forward with a theory of the “new middle class”. This “class” is said to be composed of higher-grade white collar workers and to make up between 10 and 20 percent of the workforce (The Changing Working Class by SWP leaders Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman, p. 37). The reason given for excluding these people from the working class is that they exercise some degree of control over the use of the means of production and/or authority over other workers; in short, because they perform some managerial role.

To adopt this view is to abandon the relationship-to-the-means-of-production theory of class for one based on occupation. Socialists have always maintained that, as far as the actual production of wealth is concerned, the capitalist class are redundant. They play no part in production, which is run from top to bottom by hired workers of one sort or another. This means that all job, including those concerned with managing production and/or disciplining other members of the working class, are performed by members of the working class. To exclude from the working class workers with no productive resources of their own who are paid, among other things, to exercise authority of behalf of the employing class over other workers is to give more importance to the job done (occupation) than to the economic necessity of having to sell labour power for a wage or salary which for Marxists is the defining feature of the working class.

Of course not everybody who receives an income in the form of a salary is necessarily a member of the working class. Some capitalists chose to manage their own businesses and pay themselves a “salary” for doing this. Although a part of this might correspond to the price of labour power (the part corresponding to what the capitalist would have to pay to hire a professional manager to do the same job), usually most of it is only a disguised way of distributing some of the surplus value at the expense of the other shareholders. What makes a salary-earner a member of the working class is not the mere receipt of a salary but being economically dependent on it for a living.

Having to work for an employer was not only how Marx defined the working class. It is also, and more importantly, the view of many workers who have never heard of Marx. When asked, as in a number of recent radio broadcasts, a surprising – and pleasing – number have replied that anyone who has to work for a living is a worker. Which makes them more sensible than both the Daily Mail and the SWP.

ALB

There's No Such Thing As A Middle Class

Dear Middle Class:
Fuck you.
Perhaps I should back up a bit and try that again.

One of the most frustrating things for me on those occasions when I get suckered into listening to the mainstream media is the lamentation and hand wringing over the shrinking middle class.
While I don’t have any money in the bank and the only assets I have are a computer a video camera and a rusty old mountain bike, most people would look at where I live and where my children go to school and label me squarely in the middle class.
I usually accept that label.
It is easier than telling the whole world that am in my mid forties with no savings, no retirement plan, no 401K- and I live the life of a new media freelancer; check to every increasingly small check. These facts would make my middle class friends uncomfortable.

But I digress. The reason I say “fuck you” to the middle class is that holding onto the status of middle class requires a poor class.
There would be no middle, without the poor. That 1 in 5 kids in the United States live below the poverty line is both immoral and a requirement of our system. This system holds as its very center, heartbeat and myth of the American Dream the cherished “middle class.”

George Carlin frames it this way:
“The upper class keeps all of the money and pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes (and) does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class… keep ‘em showing up at those jobs.”
So what is to be done? We hoist ourselves on our own petard when we allow the Koch brother fueled narrative that Wal-Mart and Fast Food workers who are struggling to attain a living wage should be grateful to have a job, any job, in this climate.

We know our elected officials are not responsive to the people, but to the ruling elite and yet we still argue over Obama or Romney or Pelosi or Boehner as if these politicians are even listening to us.
We cling, no worse, we teach our children to invest in the false American Dream that if we only work a little harder, or go into more educational debt that we would be able to grasp the brass ring and wear proudly the label of American Middle class.
That label would be made in Bangladesh, mind you, by a child working six days a week 16 hours a day and making 30 bucks a month but you would be proud to wear that middle class label just the same, and in doing so do you- we, I- not only endorse the conditions of poverty that, because of its very existence, defines the middle class, we insure that poverty will continue.

We need new language, a new system based on equity and fairness and not on exploitation and oppression and until then I say fuck the middle class.
I quit it.

From here

"We need new language, a new system based on equity and fairness and not on exploitation and oppression" - Sad to say this individual and many others like him haven't yet stumbled upon the World Socialist Movement, the SPGB or this blog, SOYMB. Comments are open at the link for anyone having a few words of enlightenment to pass on. And remember - www.worldsocialism.org/spgb
JS

If There's A Middle Class What Is It?

An interesting article by Paul Krugman can be found here. Basically it's about the US and general perception of what and who the 'middle class' are. Now I must state right away that as a socialist I don't accept the concept of 'middle class'. For me there can be only two possible classes within the worldwide capitalist system: the capitalist class and the working class. Whatever your wage, salary or remuneration, if you must have a job, be in employment or follow a profession in order to have a roof over your head, food to eat and all the necessities of life, then you are clearly of the working class. When we talk of the 1% we are really referring to a much smaller percentage of the population, to those whose income is derived without the need to actually 'work' but who receive it from business profits, shares, the fruit of the labour of others and they are the capitalist class.

Now, back to Krugman who begins, ' One of the odd things about the United States has long been the immense range of people who consider themselves to be middle class - and are deluding themselves. Low-paid workers who would be considered poor by international standards, say with incomes below half the median, nonetheless consider themselves lower-middle-class; people with incomes four or five times the median consider themselves, at most, upper-middle-class.'

So what is it that makes people feel that they want to be or are 'middle class'?
According to Krugman, '- - - when we talk about being middle-class, we have two crucial attributes of that status in mind: security and opportunity.
By security, I mean that you have enough resources and backup that the ordinary emergencies of life won't plunge you into the abyss. This means having decent health insurance, reasonably stable employment and enough financial assets that having to replace your car or your boiler isn't a crisis.
By opportunity I mainly mean being able to get your children a good education and access to job prospects, not feeling that doors are shut because you just can't afford to do the right thing.'

Well, fair enough but that seems to preclude an awful lot of people from a halfway decent life. What about all those others who work and struggle in low paid jobs. Aren't they entitled to security and opportunity too? When the work that's available is not enough to secure security and opportunity and there are too many would-be workers chasing the same available jobs what shall we say to them? What shall we label them?

The article focusses on a recent Pew Survey (find it here) from which Krugman reveals 'in early 2008 only 6 percent of Americans considered themselves lower-class - far below the official poverty rate! - only 2 percent upper-class and 1 percent didn't know. So 91 percent of Americans - roughly speaking, people with incomes between $15,000 and $250,000 - considered themselves middle-class.'

And he goes on to explain why many of them were mistaken. Lack of health insurance and decent public education for instance. Although the survey relates to US perceptions and realities (and I recommend it for its clarity) both it and Krugman's analysis are necessarily firmly entrenched within the capitalist system's way of observing and explaining economic realities and how they affect us all.    
Socialism, much maligned and misunderstood, (especially, I believe in the US) is about egalitarianism, among other things. No classes, no 'us and them', security and opportunity for all and a place for everyone at the table.

Who Are The 'Middle' Class

We read all about it. The growth of the Third World 'middle' class. But what does 'middle' class mean in the developing world?

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) economists shows the rapid growth of what they term "the developing middle class" – a group on between $4 and $13 a day. This group has grown from 600 million to 1.4 billion; if you include around 300 million on above $13 a day, that's now 41% of the workforce, and on target to be over 50% by 2017. But in world terms they're not really middle class at all. That $13 a day upper limit corresponds roughly to the poverty line in the US in 2005. The key markers were: families had access to savings and insurance, were likely to have a TV in the home and to live in smaller households (four people). They would typically spend 2% of their income on entertainment – plus they would have better access to water, sanitation and electricity. These, then, are the "winners" from globalisation.

 One of the most startling results of the ILO survey is that more than half the "developing middle class" works in the service sector. Factory workers form between 15% and 20% of each income group: they are spread from the destitute to the above-$13 group. This, say the researchers, reflects the fact that the industrial sector of the global south now offers as much skilled, high-value work as it does sweated labour.

The reality of being "new middle class" in Brazil, Morocco or Indonesia and the word "comfortable" does not spring to mind. It means often living in a chaotic mega-city, cheek-by-jowl with abject poverty and crime, crowding on to makeshift public transport systems and seeing your income leach away into the pockets of all kinds of corrupt officials, middlemen and grey market people.

Perhaps the lines between low and middle income people are blurred. But other articles from the Guardian certainly show who is not middle class.

Those applicants to food banks who cannot afford to switch on their cookers and are supplied with  products that can be prepared by adding boiling water, such as instant soup, Pot Noodles, instant mash and just-add-water porridge, as well as staples such as crackers, cereal and tinned food are not in this 'middle' class.

But most of all, it does not include the richest 85 people in the world who are wealthier than than all the poorest half of the world put together (3.5 billion). Those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £1 trillion. Nor are the top 1% with wealth that amounts to $110 trillion (£60.88tn), or 65 times as much as the poorest half of the world in the middle class. 70% of the world's population live in countries where inequality has increased since the 1980s and 1% of families own 46% of global wealth - almost £70trillion.

Winnie Byanyima, the Oxfam executive director said: "It is staggering that in the 21st Century, half of the world's population – that's three and a half billion people – own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all fit comfortably on a double-decker bus. Widening inequality is creating a vicious circle where wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, leaving the rest of us to fight over crumbs from the top table."

Oxfam argues that this is no accident either, saying growing inequality has been driven by a "power grab" by wealthy elites, who have co-opted the political process to rig the rules of the economic system in their favour. Socialists however point out that this is not a 'power-grab'. But the way it always has been under capitalism - a two class system of the rich and the not-rich and those who argue that there is now a rising new global 'middle' class are wrong by definition.

Class War No More?

As mentioned, the Socialist Party will be holding a forum with Ian Bone in September. The following article from the Socialist Standard looked at Class War - Gray


The magazine Class War has decided to cease publication after 15 years

One of the more delicious frissons I derived from the recent death of Princess Diana was the wicked thought of what Class War magazine would have made out of it.They would have had a field day with the idiotic business, and shocked a great number of the grieving public with an extra-special dose of their puerile sick-bag humour.

But the demise of this less-than-august periodical means we will now have to make up our own sick Diana jokes, and we are the poorer for it. Of all the groups on the "Left", Class War was the most consistently outrageous and self-parodying. Any revolutionary after our own heart could find much to like about Class War, even if some of their statements could bleach the roots of your hair. Tearaways, hooligans perhaps, juvenile and even infantile at times, the Class War Federation had an energy and a freshness about it which you don't often see in print, a willingness to say the unsayable to alienate just about everyone, to flout almost every principle of taste and good manners in their unrelenting efforts to shock people into political awareness.

But now they've hauled down their pirates' flag. Class War is Dead, they proclaim. Long Live The Class War! They have decided to pack it in after 15 years, and do something else. And they are asking revolutionaries everywhere to discuss with them what that something else ought to be. In an Open Letter to the Revolutionary Movement contained in their final issue, Class War, in a fit of honesty certainly alien to the Left, offer to exchange dirty washing with all-comers in an attempt to find the way forward. There follows a sad tale of internal division and internecine squabbling which will sound familiar to many groups. And they frankly admit the "macho" female-excluding nature of their political ethos. That they are sincere cannot be doubted. Nor are they one whit diminished by these admissions but in fact appear more dignified upon their retirement than ever during their career.

Class War, it has to be said, succeeded brilliantly in appealing to a small section of the radical "market" — those who wanted action, but not the stale formulaic sloganeering of the Left. They had an effect and an influence out of all proportion to their size, making headlines and TV appearances again and again. But for every one person (young white male, as they admitted) who was attracted, fifty were put off. Mainly it was the violence. Pin-up pictures of dead coppers might make good satire, but confirmed most people's worse prejudices about the real nature of anarchists and of revolution. And it narrowed the already small band of their potential sympathisers to the point where Class War became more thuggery than thinking. And when the thinking stopped, the Federation fell apart.

Two not three

One gets no satisfaction from saying this, but in most respects Class War got it wrong from the start. They wanted a democratic moneyless society, without leaders or classes, and without state control. Furthermore they detested the elitist and authoritarian demagogues of the Left every bit as much as we do. But they made, without doubt, one crucial error in their class analysis. Instead of a two-class society — owners and workers, they had three. The middle-class to them was the "controller" section of society (around 20 percent) which actively collaborated with the top five percent, and also acted as a buffer zone between the owners and the bossed about "working class" (the bottom 75 percent). This view therefore involved a class struggle not against a tiny minority, but against a very large minority which, though some might be expected to embrace revolution, had its role as collaborator and class traitor already marked out for it.

"We were inspired by the principles of anarchism to raise the flag of direct class conflict because we know that it's the only way our class can win its freedom. To do this we have to push the middle class out of the way."

Hence the perceived necessity, indeed inevitability, of violence. Hence the dropping of paving stones off motorway bridges onto "posh cars". Hence the whole tone and thrust of the magazine. Revolution to Class War was essentially a bloody affair, with at least one quarter of the population condemned to the wrong side of a civil war: "We are in favour of mass working class violence, out in the open."

And this inverted snob dismissal of the "middle class" in turn condemned Class War, for in purposefully insulting the educated, the Guardian readers, the trendy-lefties, the road-protesters, the vegetarians and the tree-climbers, they managed to alienate the "joiners" and the "do-ers". Despite a circulation of up to 15,000, they could never persuade many of their "real working-class" readers to get involved. They were not interested in getting involved, and they bought Class War because it amused them, like Viz or Private Eye, or because it flirted with some secret desire to destroy and vandalise — few if any took it seriously. And revolutionaries need to be taken seriously if revolution is ever going to be possible.

Most jokes have a butt, a target to hit in order to get the laugh. It might be women, or men, or the Irish, or blacks, or politicians, but the victim must be there for the joke to work. Interestingly, most left-wing politics also has to have a butt, a human target, a victim, without which the argument doesn't work. Class War relied very heavily on having a palpable "enemy", against whom one could vent one's spleen and exact one's revenge, but the trouble with this is, who do you blame for the way a social system works? Our leaders? Or ourselves for following them? The rich? Or the poor for accepting their poverty? History doesn't hold individuals responsible. Capitalism as a system is the real enemy, not its come-and-go managers, nor its police, nor its teachers. If scapegoats there must be, we are all deserving. The creation of the human "enemy" in revolutionary politics is the point of departure from the Socialist Party's case for change, and the foundation and wellspring of all appeals to violence. In short, any solution which necessitates violence against individuals is probably wrong, not because of some pacifist moral imperative, but because it doesn't get rid of the problem.

Violent nonsense

In order for Class War's politics to maintain its appeal, the enemy had to be found, not in the abstract workings of a social system, but in concrete everyday realities. The owning class was too remote to be tangible, and certainly too remote to be vulnerable. So Class War dragooned the "middle class" into the role:
"Those who really run society never put a foot outside their heavily protected worlds. For most of us, our immediate enemy is the middle class: management, social workers, magistrates, teachers and all the other functionaries of capital."
Making a putative middle class into an enemy is as divisive as anything dreamed up by the owning class, and has more to do with testosterone than tactics. Violence is the steamy sex of left-wing politics, including Class War's. It is adventure, illicit excitement, danger, risk, Marx meets Millwall FC, hooligans on a mission. It is attractive, but only to some, in the same way as cave diving or bungee jumping.To most people Class War was one of three things: an affront to common decency, or an MIS plot, or a gang of kids having a lark. In no case was it a thing to get involved with.

What many groups can't stand about the Socialist Party is that we do not advocate violence and therefore cannot offer a practical programme of activity based on it. We are just not exciting enough for them, and thus we are labelled as sterile or "theoretical" (this being a term of abuse, naturally). But we are not Quakers and would countenance using violence if it was absolutely necessary to defend the democratic will of a socialist majority. We simply argue that it is quite possible, and highly desirable,for a large majority to establish socialism without bloodshed. The more violence is involved, the more likely the revolution is to fail outright, or be blown sideways into a new minority dictatorship.

The Socialist Party has consistently struggled to be heard for almost a century, and continues to struggle. Our venerable age however is no cause to be smug, and we hope that we also can learn something from Class War's commendable openness. We also have not always got it right. We also have had divisions. And we also have known stagnation. Class War tried a tack — that of attack — which didn't work. We could have told them it wouldn't. But we are not sitting too pretty either, and are not pointing any fingers. So long as there are revolutionaries out there with the energy to act and the will to think, we want to talk to them.

PADDY SHANNON. Socialist Standard October 1997