Eugene wrote:
<<
"I wonder if it is true that the percentage of people on the Earth who
belong to middle and upper classes has been increased in this century ...."
(then there was this whole part about counting the millenium) "...This is
definitely true for some countries (like USA, Western Europe, Canada,
Australia, Japan, Southern Korea, Taiwan). But maybe it is even true for
China, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Middle East, and Eastern Europe including
Russia at a lesser scope. What about Africa?
Anyway, if it is true would you consider this as evidence for optimism?"
>>
This might be the impression that appears if you believe in the American
Dream or have a very broad definition of the middle class, but in fact the
reality is different. Not merely are the extremes of wealth and poverty as
polarised as ever (if not more) as Genevieve and Pete pointed out, but also
the
working class is growing quickly on a world scale, primarily as a result of
the growing industrialisation of a range of Third World countries. Here is
an excerpt from an article by Chris Reynolds in Workers' Liberty (accessible
via http://www.workersliberty.org/wlmags/wl59/contents.htm) which gives some
figures.
The working class in the 21st century
By Chris Reynolds
The world has over 2.8 billion wage-workers today (2,806 million in 1997,
according to the World Bank). Of those, about 550 million work in
industry,and 850 million in services.
Of the 1.4 billion in agriculture, an increasing number work under
more-or-less modern capitalist social relations, rather than in archaic or
semi-feudal relations, but exact figures are unavailable. Forty per cent of
the population of the "low and middle income" countries live in cities now,
and 77% of the population of the "high income" countries.
In the cities of the Third World, large and growing proportions of workers
are "informal" (in petty trade, repairs, transport, construction, and
contracted-out manufacturing). This work, as the International Labour
Organisation notes, "rarely involves a clear-cut employer-employee
relationship... In Asia, the sector absorbs an average of 40 to 50% of the
urban labour forces, a proportion which rises to 65% in the poorer
countries... In Africa, it is estimated the urban informal sector currently
employs 61% of the urban labour force".
Thus the wage-working class proper is surrounded by, and shades off at the
edges into, a class, maybe equally large, of "semi-proletarians" - people
who scrape a living by varying combinations of petty trade,
self-employment, theft, begging, domestic work, and straightforward
wage-work. But probably today, for the first time in history, the
wage-workers and their periphery are a majority, or near a majority, of the
population."
Renee wrote:
<< Maybe middle class just means comfortable, not needing to
struggle for survival...and can be seen in a purer light than that which I
initially cast it.>>
You cannot define middle class in these terms (a) because increasingly large
sections of what are traditionally 'middle class' occupations are insecure
(e.g. middle managers, bank and insurance employees) and often subject to
rapid immiseration as a result of capitalist rationalisation; (b) anyone not
starving or living
on low wages becomes middle class. In socio-economic (rather than cultural
or status terms), I don't find middle class a useful term without further
definition of how particular groups earn a living i.e. whether they live
from wage (or salaried) labour or from capital.
Bruce Robinson
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 01 2000 - 01:02:25 PST