Reply #76: It Is A Symptom Of A Larger Confusion, Sir

[The Magistrate]

People do not look at the matter of class squarely in this country, and, by and large, also lack any comprehension of what real wealth is. The tale is that this is a society without class boundaries, and that hard work is the respected route to prosperity and wealth: the facts are that this is a stratified society, in fact one in which the stratifications are growing increasingly more rigid; and that work, and the people who do it, are held in contempt, while the sharpster and the grifter are honored; and that damned near the surest way to a life of straitened circumstances, and often outright poverty, is to dedicate oneself to working hard at hard work.

People generally knowing, in their bones if not in so many words, what the actual facts of a society around them are, most are quite reluctant to identify themselves with their actual status as workers, members of the working class, and so the idea that 'middle class' is a measure of income arises, and has a collision, fortunate or unfortunate depending on ones point of view, with a very inaccurate perception of what the actual patterns of income, and its sources, are.

But 'middle class' is actually just a bastardization of bourgeoisie, or persons who make their living from the proceeds of a stock of capital, usually in trade or manufacturing or lending, or a body of knowledge, such as medicine or law or accounting, or even pedagogy. A person who sells labor, however skilled or at however dear a price, is not and cannot be classed as a member of the bourgeoisie.

What the United States had, for a period of several decades after President Roosevelt's New Deal was a prosperous working class, and large elements of this prosperous working class sold its birthright for a mess of racial and culture war cant sold by propagandists for the plutocrats perched on the pinnacles of wealth in this society. We no longer have a prosperous working class,and on present lines of development, are unlikely to ever see such a thing again.