Hi Bruce--
Thanks a lot for very interesting article and discussion. I agree that
"middle class" is rather murky concept. I remember that in 1989 I was
helping Barbara Rogoff and her then postdoc Gilda Morelli to collect data in
Salt Lake City. I was a camera man while Gilda was interviewing families
with little kids. I remember that she was asking moms whether they had VCR
and microwave to define indirectly if a family belongs to "middle class." At
that time it might sense but clearly not now.
Let me share a personal account to make my point clear. My grandma who was
raised at the very end of 19th century in Tsarist Russia in a little Jewish
shtatle in Belarus. She used to tell me that we, i.e., young generation, are
not appreciative to the improvements in the quality of life made in the
century (in Russia and other places on the Earth). She said that when she
was young she could not even dream that she would live the way she did. All
of her children survived as well as children of her sisters. She told me
that for generation of her mother 20-30% of kids would die because of
diseases. Her mother lost two kids (out of seven).
Once she hided my glasses and told me, "100 years ago you would not have
glasses, try to live without them." Obviously, I couldn't. It would be
probably dangerous for me to get outside without glasses. What kind of work
I could have done then without my glasses? Many things we are taking for
granted.
Sure there are a lot of problems, some of which are created by the solutions
for previous problems. Sure, even if you have 32 healthy teeth and only one
tooth with a toothache, it makes you sick and upset. Nevertheless, I think
it is important to see positive changes as well not to celebrate them but to
appreciate the historical differences. I think it would be disrespectful to
lives of people who lived before us to say that life is getting worse. They
just would not understand what we are talking about.
Do not get me wrong, I do think that we lost many valuable features of the
past (e.g., way of learning through apprenticeship, rich oral culture,
certain aspects of communal life) -- I'm not a modernist. But I think that
not appreciation of some positive changes is a type of wastefulness.
What do you think?
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bruce Robinson [mailto:bruce.rob@btinternet.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2000 10:09 AM
> To: xmca list
> Cc: Martin Thomas
> Subject: Re: expanding middle/upper (in fact, working) class
>
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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