When the subject of “class” comes up in America, almost always it is about what’s happening with the middle class. But this ever-present middle class is never defined, except to include all those who fall in a certain range of incomes.
In practice, “middle class” is used to refer to just about everybody who isn’t very rich or very poor, an indiscriminately all-inclusiveness that makes the term virtually meaningless.
Middle-class is a “safe” class term because it says nothing about the economic function its members play in society, nor does it suggest anything about a power relationship between classes.
In short, “middle class” obscures rather than reveals the basic interaction between classes that characterizes capitalism: the economic exploitation of one class by another class.
But it is the fact of class exploitation that explains how some become and stay fabulously rich, privileged and powerful, and why the rest, who are the majority, struggle all their lives just to make a living.
Classes before capitalism
Capitalism isn’t the first system to have class division and exploitation. Under feudalism the landlords exploited the labor of their serfs and peasants. As production slowly expanded, a surplus of goods developed that the lords could trade for other goods, and eventually sell for money.
The people who did the trading for the lords were the first peddlers who traveled from place to place with their wares. As they accumulated more and more money from their trading, they developed into professional merchants who bought and sold over wider and wider areas of Europe and Asia.
The merchants became a new economic class, neither lords on the top nor peasants on the bottom of the social scale, but a class in between — the middle class.
This was the original meaning of the term middle class. It described a definite grouping with its own distinct economic role in society. Its wealth was based on money earned through trade, not on the ownership of land.
As trade and the wealth of the merchants grew, the middle class branched out into manufacturing and banking. The middle class represented the new system aborning — capitalism.
The middle class grew more economically powerful, but it lacked the political power it needed for the complete development of capitalism. The noble lords and kings still controlled government through their inherited right to rule, and they refused to step aside voluntarily. So the middle class had to lead revolutions of the “common people” in many countries to establish democratic- capitalist states.
America’s radical middle class
The most radical of these middle class revolutions was the American Revolution of 1776. All economic and political traces of feudalism were swept away. Equality of opportunity, to enable the “common man” to rise in society through his own efforts, replaced feudalism’s inherited monopoly of privilege as society’s ruling ideal.
Though for many years after the Revolution America denied her own professed ideals by enslaving blacks, annihilating native peoples and denying equal rights to women, immigrants and others, the middle class ideal was a reality for many. Most whites had a real opportunity to own their own land to farm, or their own business as self-employed craftsmen or merchants.
Americans cherished the idea of private property as the way ordinary citizens could achieve economic security and personal independence. The middle class ideals became ingrained in American consciousness.
But the development of capitalism, rather than continuing to extend the opportunity of property ownership to more people, threw the process into reverse. Because the system is competitive, larger concentrations of capital drive out smaller capital.
Where as recently as 100 years ago a majority of Americans were farmers, today the “family farm” is little more than a hallowed memory as agriculture has become big agribusiness.
The same concentration of ownership occurred in every industry. Many small manufacturing, retailing and other businesses were replaced, and are being replaced, by fewer and fewer giant corporations. Think of Wal-Mart and you get the picture.
From middle class to working class
What happened to all those farmers and other small businessmen? They and their descendants, now without the land and capital required for economic self-sufficiency, were forced to hire themselves out as wage workers.
Unlike middle class small business owners who own the product of their labor, workers own neither the tools and workplaces of the jobs nor the product of their labor. They are thus a class different from the middle class. They are the working class.
Under feudalism the peasants were forced to turn over maybe one-half of their product to the lords and the state. Under capitalism workers too must “share” their product with their “lords,” their employers. Another chunk goes to the state to finance its many variedfunctions.
But in our case, being blessed with freedom, we don’t worry about the boss riding up to our house on his steed to crack us over the head if we fail to deliver the goods. We share the product of our labor voluntarily. If we don’t like the terms of the employment deal, we don’t have to take or stay in the job.
Of course, no job means no paycheck means no food on the table. So lurking underneath the appearance of freedom is brutal coercion. Work for a wage and make someone else rich — or starve.
From dependence to freedom
This stark reality of the relationship of capital to labor is never admitted to in the media. In fact, the opposite message, that we have all the freedom imaginable, is constantly repeated in all the “official” organs of information and opinion. So most workers are unaware of the cause of the distress and tension they feel trying to keep up in capitalism’s rat race.
But despite all the propaganda, real life inevitably steps in to give away the game. The competitive market ensures that employers can never rest satisfied with their existing level of labor exploitation. They must constantly lower their costs of production to remain competitive, and that means cutting labor costs.
So regardless how loyal and hardworking the workers may be, they can never be safe from layoffs, wage cuts, benefit losses. As a conflict of economic interest between workers and employers is built into the system, social conflict between the classes is inevitable.
How the conflict turns out for workers will be largely dependent on the degree of understanding they obtain concerning class and class exploitation.
With this understanding they can see through the con game and no longer be conned. With this understanding they can gain a vision of a different system, one without exploitation. A system where people truly get what they work to produce, and thereby attain material well-being and security — and the genuine freedom to control their own destiny.