Tired of the "middle class"...

[CAleftist]

What has historically been the most effective way to destroy class consciousness? The creation of a "middle class" that has a good deal of material comforts, that is neither rich nor poor.

Even better, convince the majority of people, through suburbanization, home ownership, and consumerism, that THEY are part of the "middle" class.

The thing that is so insidious about the "middle class" is that it prevents people from seeing the tremendous gap between the rich few and the many poor. It prevents people from seeing, at least in America's case, that race and class are inseparable. Why else would the liberals want so much to create a "black middle class?"

The low point of the Communist Party in America, was also the high point of the "middle class" and liberal politics in America.

So yeah...fuck the middle class.

[Octavian]

You might just get your wish because I don't think it's going to be around for very long.

[Sensible Socialist]

The greatest trick is convincing people not only that they are part of the middle class, but convincing people they actually should strive to be part of the middle class. It's like they are trying to hide the elephant in the room, the rich, from the rest of society. As most average people and they'll tell you all they want is a nice middle-class life, with a home and a lawn, two cars, and two kids. It's not a bad life, but we have tens of millions of people who completely ignore those above them because they've been brainwashed into thinking the middle class is a magical land where only the chosen few survive. People are so frightened of becoming "poor," they'll do anything for the label of middle class. That includes turning their eyes away from the tiny group of people who control most of the country's wealth.

[Pretty Flaco]

The greatest trick is convincing people not only that they are part of the middle class, but convincing people they actually should strive to be part of the middle class. It's like they are trying to hide the elephant in the room, the rich, from the rest of society. As most average people and they'll tell you all they want is a nice middle-class life, with a home and a lawn, two cars, and two kids. It's not a bad life, but we have tens of millions of people who completely ignore those above them because they've been brainwashed into thinking the middle class is a magical land where only the chosen few survive. People are so frightened of becoming "poor," they'll do anything for the label of middle class. That includes turning their eyes away from the tiny group of people who control most of the country's wealth.

I think a lot of middle class people develop a lowly look for people poorer than themselves too. One of my cousins parents rose up there and now they barely talk to us anymore. They never visit. This sort of behavior is bad because the middle class is still mostly working class.

[CommunityBeliever]

The principal contradiction is between the exploiter and the exploited, not the rich, the poor, or the "middle class."

[Tommy4ever]

As people have said, it has become increasingly clear that you don't have to give people a middle class lifestyle to give them a middle class outlook - you just need to convince them they are middle class.

Society's long history of creating a structure in which everyone wants to be considered to be a part of a higher tier in the social hierarchy has made it an obvious dream of so many millions to be a part of this 'middle class', even making them repusled at the very idea of being working class or proletarian. The thing about the concept of middle class is that it is so vague and is encouraged to such an extent that anyone with a certain degree of comfort can realistically consider themselves a part of the middle class.

I'm sure we all know what consequence this has for class consciousness ... :(

[Ingraham Effingham]

The worst part of the middle class are those that are willfully ignorant. They have a vague understanding that there is a fundemental flaw in the system, but they are too comfortable to do anything about it.

This sea of apathy is vastly untouched by true left ideology, thanks to this comfortability and to propoganda.

Historically, it's only when this comfort is removed that this majority becomes a tide of change.

How do we get people to "wake up" without waiting for a famine or strife to shake them?

On sites like these, we are just preaching to the choir. We can have all the best ideas in the world, but until the majority is willing to listen, understand, AND do something, we will have the same problem all progressives nowadays have: no one will be there. The only mass protests that have the numbers nowadays are from Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart.

Our role, i think, needs to be the ones to get a fire under those people, who aren't academics, don't care so much about politics and political agenda, who aren't informed enough to make the stand they need to. Like Beck and Stewart, but Beck is the wrong direction and a total tool, stewart isn't serious enough and a little too moderate.

The sea of apathy is the last, biggest group, and the most important. They are the reason for the status quo. Yeah, they suck, but they are the tide.

[RadioRaheem84]

My gf's sister making 14 bucks an hour as a secretary, raising two kids and living in an OK apartment complex thinks she is middle class. What does that say?

She cracks jokes about the poor all the time. She really thinks she is not poor because her parents help her out on top of her job. Bill up the wazoo, but still "middle class".

She has no medical insurance, to boot. And she thinks she is middle class.

[mastershake16]

Define "middle class".

[ColinAYB]

The "middle class" are no less harmful to society than the wealthy class, as they're simply serfs who have willfully taken the bribes and propaganda of the wealthy and become content with it, also more than willing to spread the good news about their station in life to those lower on the societal totem pole than they are. I think there needs to be some catastrophic event, or some occurrence that would cause the divide between rich and poor to break into the public eye, where there would be no chance of avoiding or turning a blind eye to it. At that point, the "middle class" would be forced to take sides and decide what they really think is best, conserving the wealth and greed of a few, or aiding in the well-being of all.

[Pilkington]

What has historically been the most effective way to destroy class consciousness? The creation of a "middle class" that has a good deal of material comforts, that is neither rich nor poor.

Even better, convince the majority of people, through suburbanization, home ownership, and consumerism, that THEY are part of the "middle" class.

The thing that is so insidious about the "middle class" is that it prevents people from seeing the tremendous gap between the rich few and the many poor. It prevents people from seeing, at least in America's case, that race and class are inseparable. Why else would the liberals want so much to create a "black middle class?"

The low point of the Communist Party in America, was also the high point of the "middle class" and liberal politics in America.

So yeah...fuck the middle class.

Why? A lot of people don't really even think of themselves as being in one class or another. It's just a label that some people put onto others and it's a very simplistic way to view people. There's so much more to an individual than their so called income bracket, how they earn their money, whether or not one might perceive them as having deserved their income, where they live, and so on. People just generally tend to live their lives in the best way they see fit and sometimes it doesn't please everybody. That's life, it's the way it goes no matter what system you have. I think that's fair.

[Red Future]

Good posts ..I despise the middle class..they regard themselves as so "enlightened" yet many are less intelligent, politically and socially aware and far more racist than any "lower class" community could ever be.

[AnonymousOne]

So yeah...fuck the middle class.

Fuck you too, bro. Income/Material Conditions have nothing to do with politics. Most poor people in America support capitalism, more welfare yes, but still a capitalist society. We have attitudes and stigmas we need to try to change and insulting a whole group of people just because they make enough money so as not to be in poverty is the height of arrogance.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Historical materialism.

Just as between 1700 and 1900ish the newly enriched middle class waged war on the aristocracy and became (as Capitalists) the dominant economic and political power, so in time will the working class conquer power for themselves.

Hopefully, they'll follow a fairer, more equitable route to prosperity for all of society.

[Kiev Communard]

The so-called "middle class" is just a statistical convenience. In fact, the majority of its members belong either to managerial class or to an old-fashioned petty bourgeoisie (in the U.S. terms, "Joe-the-Plumber" types), with the minority being skilled, mostly white-collar workers. Therefore it is better to speak about "middling strata" (srednie sloi, as they were called in the late Soviet Union) than of some homogeneous "middle-class".

[La Comédie Noire]

America's motto should be "we're all middle class here" Seriously everyone, from the poorest restaurant employee to the most well paid executive , claims to be from the middle class.

Another weird thing, I don't know if it's only specific to the us, is when talking about their jobs, people will often "brag" about how bad it is or how under appreciated they are like "noo I'm treated like shit way more than you". Like it's a badge of honor to be abused by capital.

[CommunityBeliever]

The "middle class" is disappearing at an alarming rate, social programs and all other benefits workers are being withdrawn, and the globalisation process is moving all of the jobs of the "middle class" to India and other poorer countries in order to maximise profit.

Do not be fooled by any benefits, privileges, or promises given to you by the capitalists, ultimately if you aren't a capitalist you are fucked, so lets overthrow this system.


She really thinks she is not poor because her parents help her out on top of her job. Bill up the wazoo, but still "middle class".

The capitalists won't to keep people uniformed to prevent them from getting class consciousness. We are all being exploited.

[Fopeos]

The middle class has always reminded me of Malcolm X's analogy about the difference between house slaves and field hands. While those of us from the fields conspire to burn down the master's house, the house-slaves form bucket brigades to put the fires out. We're all slaves, some just don't yet recognize it.

[jake williams]

The concept of the "middle class" is ideological warfare along all sorts of axes:

- It's a message to any workers who aren't obviously the most oppressed the society: you're middle class, and so things could be a lot worse, so be happy with what you have. Huge swaths of the "left" are more than complicit in this.

- Its use as a meaningless, unscientific term to refer to an abitrary collection of traits - income, cultural values, fashion sense, occupation, work hours - is a weapon against a scientific understanding of class and society. Again, the academic "left" is absolutely complicit in this.

- Its use to semi-secretly refer to the bourgeoisie promotes the suggestion that the bourgeoisie is a progressive force in class struggle. The job-creatin' smallbusinessperson is the prototype of the "middle class". Their (virtually always unstated and implicit) struggle against the "upper class" - Jewish financiers, aristocrats, and assorted unproductive old money - are cast as progressive class struggle. This has all sorts of damaging effects.

- As a corollary to the former, it allows bourgeois politicians to speak of policies that benefit themselves as the "middle class" (ie. not monarchs), and yet convince workers that workers (those workers who are not the most miserable of the poor, and thus "middle class") that it is they who benefit.


There isn't a "middle class". There are relatively privileged workers, and relatively weak bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements, including some owners of very small businesses. But none of them constitute a "middle class". Privileged workers are not the enemy, and small businesspeople are not our friends.

[CAleftist]

Fuck you too, bro. Income/Material Conditions have nothing to do with politics. Most poor people in America support capitalism, more welfare yes, but still a capitalist society. We have attitudes and stigmas we need to try to change and insulting a whole group of people just because they make enough money so as not to be in poverty is the height of arrogance.

To clarify, I'm not insulting the people who call themselves "middle class." I'm criticizing the very idea of a middle class, as something that should be preserved at all costs, as a buffer between the working class and the ruling class.

I've heard people say, "You can't have a strong society without a strong middle class." Yeah, well you can't have a middle class without an upper class and a lower class.

[Thirsty Crow]

Good posts ..I despise the middle class..they regard themselves as so "enlightened" yet many are less intelligent, politically and socially aware and far more racist than any "lower class" community could ever be.
Nice to see that you despise a section of the working class for their prejudice and misplaced identifications. You must be one hell of a socialist organizer.

To reiterate: the so called middle class is a section of the working class, unless the term is taken out of the income stratification context (bourgeois theories of inequality) and taken to mean the "petite bourgeoisie", or rather the "new petite bourgeoisie" which differs from the traditional petite-bourgeoisie in that they occupy supervision/middle or high end management positions and administrative positions within state apparatuses. Then we might talk about their class interests, but if we are talking about working people who earn wages around the median wage (yes, I've seen people so foolish as to take the "middle" literally), then I'm afraid that all the vitriol is misplaced.

[Comrade Trotsky]

I pretty much agree with whats already been said here. The middle class is an illusionary concept made up by both the bourgeiosie and the proles.

Society tries to create this concept of a middle-class to give the illusion of easy social mobility, and the working class folk who are lucky enough to be doing alightly better off than the others gladly accept this title to make themselves feel better. After all, most people don't like thinking of themselves or being thought of as "poor".

I don't think that those workers who own small businesses, or happen to make more money and thus have more material possesions than the average bear should be looked at as our enemy, though.

They too are subjected to the whims of the real bourgeiosie, and are after all, still part of the working class.

[eric922]

I pretty much agree with whats already been said here. The middle class is an illusionary concept made up by both the bourgeiosie and the proles.

Society tries to create this concept of a middle-class to give the illusion of easy social mobility, and the working class folk who are lucky enough to be doing alightly better off than the others gladly accept this title to make themselves feel better. After all, most people don't like thinking of themselves or being thought of as "poor".

I don't think that those workers who own small businesses, or happen to make more money and thus have more material possesions than the average bear should be looked at as our enemy, though.

They too are subjected to the whims of the real bourgeiosie, and are after all, still part of the working class.
That highlights a question I've been wondering. Should small business owners really be considered an enemy of the working class in the same way as the actual capitalist class such as CEOs,senior shareholders,etc.? It seems to me that the small business owner and management type are being exploited too, perhaps not as bad, but it's still exploitation.

[Thirsty Crow]

That highlights a question I've been wondering. Should small business owners really be considered an enemy of the working class in the same way as the actual capitalist class such as CEOs,senior shareholders,etc.? It seems to me that the small business owner and management type are being exploited too, perhaps not as bad, but it's still exploitation.
Considering the fact that the base of support for Fascist and national-socialist parties have been the very same small time capitalists, I'd say that it's necessary to keep that in mind and treat them as potential class enemies. Of course, the concrete development is conditioned by specific, historical conjunctures, and depends on the actions of the ruling class, especially in the actions of the capitalist state, so there is also a possibility that small capitalists will have to face, at some point in time, proletarianization on a mass scale, rendering them more accessible to working class politics.

The important thing is to completely reject a rigid, black-and-white outlook in class analysis and the resulting political tactics and strategy. The concrete situation is always more complex than that.

[jake williams]

That highlights a question I've been wondering. Should small business owners really be considered an enemy of the working class in the same way as the actual capitalist class such as CEOs,senior shareholders,etc.? It seems to me that the small business owner and management type are being exploited too, perhaps not as bad, but it's still exploitation.
Small business owners ARE actual capitalists. And they're not typically being exploited in a Marxist sense. ("Managers" are something a bit different and it's a complicated story.)

They are oppressed by a state controlled by higher echelons of their own class, but this is a separate problem. Moreover, their natural solutions to this problem are typically different from our own. They're regularly the quickest to come out against statutory minimum wages and child labour laws. Depending on the industry, the same goes for environmental or food safety laws. The simple fact is that bigger businesses, including evil corporations, are better able to bear the costs of regulations, and in supporting them, when they do, they can often push out of business their smaller competitors. When these regulations are in the interests of the working class, there's no reason to be against them, even though they certainly cause real problems for small business owners.

[eric922]

I appreciate the responses. I'm assuming if a revolution did break out and they were willing to side with the working class and give up their means of production they would be considered working class and would be considered equal with the rest of the working class, though not above them of course.

I'm just curious because I've noticed that in a few of the bourgeois revolutions some nobles sided with the bourgeois and I'm curious what would happen if a similar situation were to occur.

[KevlarPants]

The true middle class and the lower middle class are also part of the spectrum of the workers, they are just more highly compensated than other workers. Making an hateful blanket statement that puts aside one of the largest sectors of the working class (and the people, really) in most developed countries is foolish.

[Hoi Polloi]

In my mind, the middle-class identity has become so broad in the United States that it essentially is the working class identity; with two caveats.

1.
People who live off of the exploitation of others can still call themselves middle-class and still believe themselves such, even when they are quite wealthy and not "petite" anything (Joe the Plumber I'm looking at you).

2.
The middle-class identity has specifically evolved to exclude African-Americans, Latinos, etc. and working class or even genuinely middle class intelligentsia - starving artists and poor students who are considered in the right-wing populist mentality as being spoiled sycophants living off of the work of rural people, living in the effete coastal metropoli.

By making it so that the people affected worst by exploitation and poverty while working often the hardest (African Americans, Latinos, single-mothers, etc.) cannot - even while employed - consider themselves part of this middle/working class; and by making it so the intellectual center of the middle/working class are rural or suburban small businessmen rather than the urban "creative class"; capitalist society has successfully bifurcated working class identity.

So instead of a unified socialist movement you have rural and suburban workers being drawn into right-wing movements and urban workers taking their cue from the intellectuals - who are well meaning but, without a strong unified proletariat around them, naturally will when offered a leadership role rather than role as equals lead to liberalism rather than socialism.

And the horrible truth there is that the areas where liberalism is gerry-mandered into and allowed to flourish, are ones that depend on production to survive - currently on capitalist production. New York doesn't grow its own food or export as many goods as it does serve as a financial services center and center of trade. So no matter how extreme the right wing "heartland" areas get and in turn provoke a reaction from the liberal urban hotbeds, the liberal intelligentsia will never allow the industrial proletariat so strongly concentrated in those regions to abolish exploitative trade - as the coasts would be heavily damaged in an attempted transition to more agricultural and industrial production.

Similarly in the rural areas, the political clout of the small businessmen - from whence things like Jim Crow laws came while the rural upper-class looked on and laughed - will keep the rural proletariat, the farmers and soldiers who would otherwise be naturally socialist and already benefit from many socialist-like programs, a force of reaction rather than a force of revolution.

So rather than a matter of consciousness, in my mind I see the middle class identity as being "the working class identity + racism/sexism/other attitudes + regionalism/capitalist-partisanship" rather than a separate thing onto itself. Take the working class, separate into communities based on race, and tell them they have to pick between reactionary capitalists or reformist capitalists. That's the middle class.

When the middle class and those excluded from it, which is to say when the unified working class, is able to develop consciousness in concert with each other it is a sight to behold - which is exactly why it was stopped. The Socialist Party and the Knights of Labor and the American left in general were far too successful at making the urban German and Catholic workers allies with the rural and small town Protestant workers. So both just the institutional inertia of capitalism and probably some level of deliberate scheming (though perhaps just inertia) set about to divide the urban and rural from each other the way they already were regrettably in many other countries.

This was such a feat and such a robbery, when you consider America had a kind of unity between the farmer and the industrial worker that nations like France struggled so hard to attempt to create.

[RadioRaheem84]

There is a whole new class of middle managers in China that are making up the bulk of the middle class in that nation. They are firmly supportive of the Dengist regime in China because they owe their growth to the reforms. Do they care that their rise has also led to the downfall of many more workers below them? No, I think not. Most of them seem content with the situation being lackeys to the new billionaire, millionaire class of owners in China.

I understand the frustrations that the OP has with the middle classes because they tend to be the most reactionary and defiant againt any working class opposition movement. I cannot tell you just how reactionary a young professional middle management lackey who votes Democrat can turn reactionary when you steer the conversation toward leftism. The same goes for the middle classes in any nation.

But the disdain should not translate into personal hatred for a class. Remember that they're just following their material interests.