Eugene,
Thanks for your note. My point wasn't that things have got materially
worse - obviously anyone with two eyes can see that isn't the case, at least
for most people (even including the poor) in the richest countries in the
world. (Though the US still has to develop a basic health care system
accessible to all...) I think also that it's necessary to realise that that
hasn't happened through natural philanthropy and a lot of struggles e.g. of
trade unionists have had to take place for it to become true.
My point that this doesn't mean that we are living in a society where
everyone except a few at each end are becoming middle class. I think Paul
made the point well when he said that this idea is based on the belief that
consumption standards determine class rather than structural economic
relationships. On the basis of consumption perhaps the gap has narrowed as
there is an absolute limit to how much even the very rich can consume
(though it's way beyond what most of us would consider possible or
necessary) and thus the Bill Gates, Carnegies and Rockefellers of the world
usually get round to giving some of their money away.
On the other hand, the recession of the early 90s proved how fragile the
entry to the consumption-defined middle class was for those who either
thought they had a job for life, made too much use of consumer credit or who
had bought houses on mortgages. For some, it's a very short step from the
'middle class' to homelessness. (A recent programme on the Japanese economy
here showed the ex-managers and executives literally standing in the queue
for the soup kitchen, having lost everything when their firms 'down-sized'
or went bust.)
Bruce
>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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