Under Class, Lower Class, Working Class,Middle Class

[BrainGlutton]

@wmfellows

Class identity? My you are a marxist aren’t you?

Not at all; I believe Marx’ theories are fundamentally flawed and pseudoscientific. But, you don’t have to be a Marxist to be a socialist; nor to be a non-socialist progressive (as I define “progessive” in this thread, as something well to the right of “socialist” and well to the left of “liberal”); nor simply to acknowledge the plain and obvious facts that different social classes exist (as something socioculturally distinct from mere income levels or occupational categories), and that different classes’ interests are in some respects convergent but in other respects in conflict.

From The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind (no leftist radical, BTW, he was once a National Review editor):

Understanding the white overclass requires revising the most common misconceptions about class. The discussion of social class has been confused for generations by Marxist thinkers, who made the mistake of completely identifying class with economic function. Like the Marxists, old-fashioned American liberal pluralists tend to misunderstand class. What they refer to as class is typically not a social class at all, but a mere occupational or income category, such as service-sector workers or millionaires. Meanwhile, the New Left which came to prominence in the sixties has tended to drop the idea of class altogether, in favor of race and gender. . . . In recent years, conservative ideologues have added further confusion by defining political factions and lifestyle subcultures as classes. . . .

In order to think about class in twenty-first century America, we must first clear our minds of these Marxist, liberal, New Left, and conservative definitions of class, and return to the older notion of class found in classical and European political thought from Aristotle to Montesquieu.

A class is a group of families, united by intermarriage and a common subculture, whose members tend to predominate in certain professions and political offices, generation after generation. Note that the class – the group of similar families – has an existence independent of the offices which its members tend to hold. Indeed, we cannot talk intelligently about class unless we make a distinction between a social class and a mere institutional elite. Those who talk about “the political class” or, with C. Wright Mills, about “the power elite,” are confusing two very different things. Every modern society, even the most perfectly egalitarian, will have an institutional elite – top civilian politicians, military officers, judges, diplomats, financial and industrial executives, publishers, editors and leading intellectuals, clerical leaders, and so on. The subject of class is raised only when you examine the social origins of the particular individuals who hold office in the institutional elite or elites. Learning the organization of judicial offices in a country tells you nothing about class. However, if you find out that most of the judges tend to come from old-money families in a particular region of that country, and that most attended one of half a dozen schools, then you have learned something important about that country’s class system.

The United States at the end of the twentieth century has both an institutional elite and a dominant social class. The institutional elite is composed of upper-level officials in the federal and state governments, plus executives and professionals in the concentrated private sector and foundation and university executives (low-level government officials and small business owners are not part of the institutional elite). Almost all of the members of the American institutional elite also happen to be members of a single social class: the white overclass. To put it another way, the labor pool from which most elite positions are filled is the white overclass. The overlap is not complete. Though most members of the institutional elite belong to the white overclass, most members of the white overclass are not part of the institutional elite (since the overclass greatly outnumbers the elite); and – though this is uncommon – a person can become a high-ranking politician, military officer, judge, CEO, foundation president, or university president in the United States without having been born into the white overclass. It is possible to imagine a United States in which most members of the institutional elite did not have similar class origins. But that is not the country in which we live.

[Lemur866]

There’s a lot of confusion about social class, namely that your economic status determines your social class.

But that of course doesn’t make any sense. It didn’t matter how much money a tradesman or industrialist made, he would never be an aristocrat. And while some aristocrats were rich, others were so poor they could barely afford servants. But a poor aristocrat is still an aristocrat.

In the aristocratic view, wealth was land. You controlled the land, and the people attached to that land provided a stream of income for you. Making things, or building things, or trading things, were for peasants. An aristocrat didn’t WORK. His proper occupation was warfare, or forms of entertainment that were training for warfare–hunting, riding, and so on. Many highwaymen were impoverished aristocrats. It was honorable for an aristocrat to steal for a living, but ignoble to work. A true aristocrat lives off the labor of others, only a peasant trades.

Even in America this was true until the civil war destroyed the plantation system. A plantation owner imagined himself an aristocrat, and an impoverished planter was still a better man than a tradesman, no matter how rich. And so Nathan Bedford Forrest the wealthy slave-trader was looked down on by the planters. And of course, one of the purposes of the slave system was that every white person was a lord or lady, no matter their economic status, and entitled to social deference from every black person.

Then we get into the industrial era, when there was a social difference between “working class”–people who worked with their hands such as farmers and miners and artisans and soldiers and sailors, “middle class”–people who worked with their minds such as teachers and shopkeepers and doctors and lawyers and bookkeepers and managers and officers, and “upper class”, people who didn’t work but rather owned. And you’d be able to tell what social class someone was by the way they spoke, the foods they ate, the clothes they wore, the job they did, the schools they sent their children to, and the church they belonged to. Middle class meant you hired servants and knew what fork to use and were taught to dance a certain way.

But when we look at 2009 America, I don’t know what we can say about “social class”. What social class is Barack Obama or Bill Gates or Warren Buffet? Heck, take a look at, say, the Kennedys. Here was a fabulously wealthy family, who were heavily involved in the levers of power, and yet they certainly weren’t aristocrats of the old sort. Where do Jews fit into all this? I suppose we don’t think about such things nowadays in America, but a Jew could never be a member of the upper class, no matter how wealthy.

I suppose living where I do I don’t get the same social class markers as other people. Here the person cleaning your house could be the wife of your lawyer. It’s not that there aren’t social groupings–hippies and techies and so on–just that no one is going to suddenly discover that you aren’t the right sort after all when you find out what school they went to, or what church they attend.

[BrainGlutton]

@Malthus

I submit that my classification is more useful, as it does not, as far as I know, internalize any preconceived theories on the ideal nature of our society …

If you want to classify people by occupational function, a finer scheme might be that used by Robert Reich in The Work of Nations (review here):

1. “Symbolic analysts.” – most professionals.

2. Routine production workers.

3. “In-person service” providers. Including waiters and retail clerks, but also doctors and nurses. These jobs are so classed because, unlike routine production work, they cannot be outsourced to another country.

@Malthus

I certainly enjoyed the Fussell extracts, but I think his analysis is somewhat arbitrary, subjective and dated: going on about what makes a whole class of people 'ashamed" or what they tend to name their cats strikes me at least as gossipy and anecdotal.

Well, of course, Fussell is simply an essayist/humorist/academic, and makes no pretense of being a social scientist in any rigorous sense.

[Ruminator]

@BrainGlutton

And how, exactly, does “the aggregation of consumer preferences” lead to stratification?

A human (such as you) prefer people with attribute X over attribute Y. Multiply this preference (aggregate it) a hundred million times over and people with attributes X inevitably move higher up in stratification.

For example, let’s consider that society likes to pay lip service to the fact that teachers are “more valuable” and should be “paid more” than football players. Let’s put that inequality to the “human preferences” test: Let’s imagine that we have 2 public events for consumers to choose to attend. One event is a football game. The other event is a teacher teaching calculus or world history. The tickets to both events cost $10. Which event would people voluntarily prefer to pay to attend? Which event would collect the most money (the aggregate of consumer preferences)? It should be no mystery why football players make more than teachers.

If we want teachers to make more than football players, then there has to be a genuine desire deeply embedded in the human brain to PREFER the calculus class over the football game.

People want income equality but they don’t realize that it starts with human preference equality. Since human preferences are skewed, society ends up skewed.

And how would you represent that graphically?

My first attempt at visualizing it would something something dynamic (a picture that changes with respect to time) such as cellular automata simulations.

It would be more clever to summarize that into a static poster. I don’t have any ideas for that.

[Lemur866]

The problem with Lind’s “White Overclass” is that it is so general it doesn’t explain anything. All it does is define the guys that run the country as a social class. But where are the correlations he imagines? Do these guys all attend the same schools, go to the same vacation spots, eat the same sorts of foods, know how to use the right silverware, and so on?

If his point is simply that if your parents are wealthy and educated and influential you’ve got a big leg up, and if you grow up on welfare in the projects there will be more than a few rungs missing on the ladder, well, duh.

The very fact that we can’t agree on who is a member of what social class seems to indicate that in 2009 America these social classes are in flux. As recently as the 1960s the Ivy League schools weren’t academically elite schools, they were socially elite schools, and a custardhead like George W. Bush could attend Yale simply because he belonged to the correct social class. But that is no longer the case, and the change is so dramatic that it is hard for us to remember that “attended Yale” meant something completely different just a few years ago.

[wmfellows]

@BrainGlutton

Not at all; I believe Marx’ theories are fundamentally flawed and pseudoscientific. But, you don’t have to be a Marxist to be a socialist; … nor simply to acknowledge the plain and obvious facts that different social classes exist (as something socioculturally distinct from mere income levels or occupational categories), and that different classes’ interests are in some respects convergent but in other respects in conflict.

Same difference as the expression goes. So you disavow marxism, but I have a hard time seeing sunlight between you and general marxist (if not capital M Marxist) thinking.

Notably, confusing or mixing the concept of “class identity” (which implies something well beyond common socio-economic or socio-cultural & economic shared interests), or the idea there is a “class interest” within the context of your “something more than mere income levels or occupational categories.” That’s marxist enough for me, again if not Marxist…

[wmfellows]

@Lemur866

The very fact that we can’t agree on who is a member of what social class seems to indicate that in 2009 America these social classes are in flux. … But that is no longer the case, and the change is so dramatic that it is hard for us to remember that “attended Yale” meant something completely different just a few years ago.

Fair observations (I have no idea with respect to the elite schools, but similar things have happened in other Anglo countries, so I give it credence), however I don’t know how much one can conclude about the conversation so far re social class. It seems to me that so far everything’s been quite muddle headed and confusing personal preference with some agreed on objective standard.

Of course maybe there is not precise objective standard, but I wager a more precise - even if subjective - conversation can be had.

[BrainGlutton]

@Lemur866

The problem with Lind’s “White Overclass” is that it is so general it doesn’t explain anything. All it does is define the guys that run the country as a social class. But where are the correlations he imagines? Do these guys all attend the same schools, go to the same vacation spots, eat the same sorts of foods, know how to use the right silverware, and so on?

From the same chapter of the same book:

. . . The white overclass is the child of the former Northeastern Protestant establishment, produced by marriage (not only figurative but literal) with the upwardly mobile descendants of turn-of-the-century European immigrants and white Southerners and Westerners. Unlike the Northeastern establishment . . . this relatively new and still evolving political and social oligarchy is not identified with any particular region of the country (though it is concentrated in East and West Coast metropolitan regions). Nor does the white overclass dominate other sections through local, surrogate establishments, as the Northeastern establishment once did. Rather, overclass Americans are found in the higher suburbs of every major metropolitan area, North and South, coastal and inland. Unlike the sectional elites of the past, members of the white overclass are not even identified with the regions in which they happen (temporarily) to live. The white overclass, homogeneous and nomadic, is the first truly national upper class in American history.

The white overclass is the product, not merely of the amalgamation of Anglo- and Euro-Americans, but of the fusion of the rentier and managerial-professional classes. This blurring of the upper and upper-middle strata is a relatively new development in the United States. In earlier generations, there were distinct landowning and rentier classes, with their own lifestyles and institutions – cotillions, seasons spent in the country, and the like. The elaborate rituals that governed upper-class life, such as dressing for dinner, were designed to conspicuously display wealth, including a wealth of leisure time. That was a long time ago. There is a class, or rather a category, of the celebrity rich, and there are still pockets of old-fashioned rentiers in the U.S. – in Virginia, there are still planters who do not work and who hunt foxes with hounds – but these subcultures are detached from the summits of power. Members of the upper class who want to make a mark in the world tend to adopt the style of life and dress and speech of the managerial-professional elite. Even though they do not have to, most members of the small hereditary upper class go to college and get executive or professional jobs, and work, or at least pretend to. Instead of serving as a model for well-to-do executives and lawyers and investment bankers, the hereditary segment of the American overclass conforms to the segment immediately below it, the credentialed upper middle class.

. . . The composition of student bodies at Ivy League schools is a good surrogate for the composition of the white overclass. If you factor out black and Hispanic students admitted under affirmative action programs, you are left with a student body that is disproportionately of British or German-Scandinavian Protestant and European Jewish descent. There are relatively few evangelical Protestants and Catholics in the overclass, despite their significant numbers in the general population. If you are Episcopalian or Jewish, have a graduate or professional degree from an expensive university, work in a large downtown office building in an East or West Coast metropolis, watch MacNeil/Lehrer on PBS, and are saving for a vacation in London or Paris, you are a card-carrying member of the white overclass, even if your salary is not very impressive. If you are Methodist, Baptist or Catholic, have a B.A. from a state university, work in or for a small business or for a career government service, watch the Nashville Network on cable, and are saving for a vacation in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Branson, Missouri, or Orlando, Florida (Disneyworld), you are probably not a member of the white overclass – no matter how much money you make.

Although there are residual religious and ethnic differences among members of the white overclass, these are minor compared to what they have in common. There is, for example, a common white overclass accent, which is more or less identical in corporate boardrooms from one end of the continent to another – the “NBC standard,” which is the equivalent of BBC English or Britain’s Received Pronunciation (RP). As formerly distinct local elites have fused into a single national ruling class equally at home in New York and Texas and California, this accent has become the badge of elite status. In order to advance in overclass circles in America, a white American has to suppress any regional or ethnic dialect, whether it be a Southern drawl or a Boston honk or Brooklynese, and learn to speak this flat, clipped, rather nasal version of English. . . .

. . . The overclass eats pate and imported cheeses; the middle class eats peanut butter and Velveeta. The overclass sips wine; the middle class drinks beer. The overclass plays squash and tennis; the middle class plays pool and bowls (both golf, but the middle class does so at second-tier country clubs and public courses). The overclass jogs; the middle class does not. . . . These are cliches, but they are a better guide to the real class structure in the United States than income categories in the census or pseudoscientific sociological measures like the SES (socioeconomic survey).

Also from the same book and also relevant:

The chief danger confronting the twenty-first century United States is not Balkanization but what might be called Brazilianization. By Brazilianization I mean not the separation of cultures by race, but the separation of races by class. As in Brazil, a common American culture could be indefinitely compatible with a blurry, informal caste system in which most of those at the top of the social hierarchy are white, and most brown and black Americans are on the bottom – forever. Behind all the boosterish talk about the wonders of the new American rainbow is the reality of enduring racial division by class, something that multicultural education initiatives and racial preference policies do not begin to address.

In the absence of sustained popular pressure from below or concern about America’s international status, the white overclass has no incentive to combat Brazilianization in the United States. For one thing, any serious effort to reduce racial separation by class would inevitably mean higher taxes on the affluent – not just the rich, but the politically powerful upper-middle class. What is more, the dominance of the white oligarchy in American politics is strengthened by the emergent dynamics of a polarized society. In a more homogeneous society, the increasing concentration of wealth and power at the top might produce a populist reaction by the majority. But in a society like that of present-day America where a small, homogeneous oligarchy confronts a diverse population that shares a common national culture but remains divided along racial lines, the position of the outnumbered elite can be very secure. This is because the resentments caused by economic decline are likely to be expressed as hostility between the groups at the bottom, rather than as a rebellion against the top. In the Los Angeles riot, black, Hispanic, and white rioters turned on Korean middlemen, rather than march on Beverly Hills.

[BrainGlutton]

@wmfellows

Same difference as the expression goes. So you disavow marxism, but I have a hard time seeing sunlight between you and general marxist (if not capital M Marxist) thinking.

Notably, confusing or mixing the concept of “class identity” (which implies something well beyond common socio-economic or socio-cultural & economic shared interests), or the idea there is a “class interest” within the context of your “something more than mere income levels or occupational categories.” That’s marxist enough for me, again if not Marxist…

But it is not Marxist, it is a concept from Western political theory far older than Marx and very different from Marx’; re-read the above excerpt from Lind in post #21.

[BrainGlutton]

@Lemur866

It didn’t matter how much money a tradesman or industrialist made, he would never be an aristocrat.

But, he could – or, at least, his children could. As George Orwell noted in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941), “Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to speak of a ruling class. Like the knife which has had two new blades and three new handles, the upper fringe of English society is still almost what it was in the mid nineteenth century. After 1832 the old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy shipowner or cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just that purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus.”

[Malthus]

@wmfellows

Fair observations (I have no idea with respect to the elite schools, but similar things have happened in other Anglo countries, so I give it credence), however I don’t know how much one can conclude about the conversation so far re social class. It seems to me that so far everything’s been quite muddle headed and confusing personal preference with some agreed on objective standard.

Of course maybe there is not precise objective standard, but I wager a more precise - even if subjective - conversation can be had.

To my mind, the single most important criterion of class is whether a person, objectively speaking, ought reasonably to be in favour of some sort of collective job security for themself. Those who would do better with such security are of lower social class than those who would not.

Pretty well everyone can agree on the underclass and on the truly rich; what causes confusion is those in the great mass who exist inbetween. I think this can logically be divided into two, as outlined.

[Lemur866]

Nice that if you exclude the blacks and hispanics and asians, then the attendees of Ivy League Schools are all members of the white overclass. :rolleyes:

The one thing I agree with is the fusion of “upper middle class” and “upper class” in social mores, with the upper class aping the manners of the upper middle professional class.

It just seems silly to insist that race plays a large part in the definition of the overclass. Yeah, most of the members of the merged upper/professional class turn out to be white, but whiteness isn’t important to these people. Barack Obama and Condi Rice and Colin Powell and Bill Richardson and Bobby Jindal and Gary Locke and so on don’t count? Come on.

And it’s kind of weird that Lind thinks that listening to NPR and drinking wine are some sort of uber-elite status markers. You think people who attended state universities don’t listen to NPR or jog or play tennis? Really? He’s confusing blue collar with middle class. But the blue collar guys who don’t jog or drink wine or listen to NPR also didn’t go to college. There still exists a working class/blue collar identity, but that’s distinct from “middle class” in my mind.

[msmith537]

Certainly there are elements of truth in BrainGlutton’s links, just as there are with any form of stereotyping. But personally I think a more important distinction of class is the real social and economic barriers that keep people from advancing to the next higher class. Access to education and social networks are a more significant indicator than whether someone has lots of rare leatherbound books or listens to NPR.

[CalMeacham]

In the last chapter, Fussell identifies a tenth class, a “Class X” of declassed intellectuals and bohemians.

…to which Fussell himself, conveniently, belongs.
Various things in Fussell’s book (especially the illustrations) make it very hard for me to take him seriously (Upper-Middles slangily call sex “hiding the salam’”, he claims, suggesting not only that it’s something lower classes wouldn’t come up with, but that dropping that final “i” is significant. Makes me wonder who he’s having sex with.)

[Brainiac]

@The_Falling_Reverend

So what say you?

Why you talk funny? In church you?

[Tamerlane]

@Brainiac

Why you talk funny? In church you?

Urban Dictionary: What say you?

You ignorance of this noble construction doth display your lower class standing, sirrah.

[BrainGlutton]

@Malthus

To my mind, the single most important criterion of class is whether a person, objectively speaking, ought reasonably to be in favour of some sort of collective job security for themself.

That reduces “class” to a pure question of economic status/function/interests (as Marx assumed). It is that, certainly, but it’s a lot more than that. For instance, are working-poor African-Americans and working-poor white Americans really in the same “class,” if they speak different dialects, and mostly marry within their own racial groups, and go to different churches, and live in different neighborhoods, and move in different social circles, and never associate outside of work?

[Malthus]

@BrainGlutton

That reduces “class” to a pure question of economic status/function/interests (as Marx assumed). It is that, certainly, but it’s a lot more than that.

The word has more than one meaning. Certainly saying something is "classy’ or someone or something "has class’ means one thing; the connection between that meaning (with its connotations of education, taste and elegance) and one’s actual social position, it seems to me, has been steadily eroding over the last half-century or so. This has lead I believe to a relative fall in status for those in certain occupations, and the relative rise for others.

Take for example academics. My father was a professor. In my father’s day, a “professor” had an automatic high status, irrespective of how much he (and it was mostly “he”) was paid or what field of study he was in. Moreover, most people who were not academics themselves did not distinguish between the various ranks and degrees of academic (i.e., lecturer, associate professor, tenured full professor, etc.).

Nowadays, becomming an academic is no garantee of relative high status. Certain academics clearly have high status - namely, those who, because of their specialized knowledge and/or prominence (or public fame), can “write their own ticket” and get tenured positions. Others, those who have to worry about job security - your associate professor in some soft humanities subject like sociology - are not of particularly high social status.

[Malthus]

@BrainGlutton

For instance, are working-poor African-Americans and working-poor white Americans really in the same “class,” if they speak different dialects, and mostly marry within their own racial groups, and go to different churches, and live in different neighborhoods, and move in different social circles, and never associate outside of work?

I missed your edit.

It’s a good question, and I will answer it as follows: “class’ is in my opinion a measure of relative social status - one class being “higher” than another. There may in some cases be a difference of opinion as to who is 'higher”, but in general, that’s what I think it measures.

Now, what you are describing is I think something different - namely, a division of society by ethnic community. It may well be the case that two ethnic communities, largely of the same “class”, choose for historic reasons of emnity or otherwise not to mingle in any meaningful way. It may also be the case (but not necessarily) that one ethnic community, in spite of being functionally identical to another, will be considered en mass as “higher class” than another because of racism or other forms of ethno-centrism.

In my opinion, this latter difference, while it still exists in some places, is rapidly disappearing. I offer as an example my own city of Toronto. Here, there are many ethnic groups who live lives in what amounts to ethnic enclaves; but in terms of class, there is little stratification between them. Thus, an Italian shopkeeper may live a life almost entirely distinct from a Chinese shopkeeper, but both are considered of the same “class”.

[adhay]

@BrainGlutton

:rolleyes: An educational use with respect the actual form and shape of American society, of course. We assume, and I hope you will agree, that teenagers should take social studies and American history in school; therefore, anything that will help them take away an accurate picture rather than a confused one of how-things-are is worth doing. What, if anything, they do with that knowledge is for them to decide. But how can plain facts be ideological propaganda?! (Telling the kids, plainly or subliminally (TV does a lot of the “subliminally”), that they are higher-placed in the socioeconomic hierarchy than they really are would be propaganda.)

[color added]

It says so right here in the Neo-Conservative Thesaurus. In the same work, truth is equated with government lies and corporation is a synonym for person.