Class decides everything
Income increasingly dictates every aspect of our lives, from our politics to our health to our happiness
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/24/class_decides_everything/
What is really interesting to me is the realization (duh!) that I am in an upper class. Though I have worked with my hands, held such jobs as factory worker and fast food burger flipper and whatnot, been homeless and destitute, it seems I was ‘destined’ to be in the middle class and all of that activity was ‘character building’ stuff that happens when people are young (sort of like the CEO’s son working in the mail room for a year). Of course, converting my middle class life into an upper class life, as I had intended since I was a teenager, seems increasingly unlikely (though not yet impossible; however, I might be lying to myself), so I might be just settling into my predetermined economic location. Here is what I think is a very interesting passage (some day I am going to need to read Marx):
As fallible as Marx might have been about some things, his focus on class (not to mention his analysis of the tendency of capitalism to sporadically lurch into crisis) was eerily prescient. Marx was the first to see that class was deeper than income or education, or where different groups of people lived or what they could buy. It stemmed from their relationship to the economy, or as he referred to it, “the social relations of production.” Capitalism had only recently overturned the old feudal order of the agricultural age and replaced it with a distinctive class structure of its own, defined by two principle classes. Marx identified the bourgeoisie or capitalist class as those who owned and controlled the means of production; the proletariat or working class was comprised of those who performed physical labor. The rub, of course, was that members of the working class were only paid for a portion of the economic value they created. The owners’ profits were derived from the workers’ “surplus value” — the value they created but were not compensated for.
It is interesting to me that after having studied business since I was 13 that I never consciously thought about business profits from the ‘surplus value’ of the worker’s efforts. I had often thought about how the price of labor impacted profitability, without a doubt, but not how it is written above. I don’t think that will make me on bit less interested in extracting the ‘surplus value’ of any workers I might hire, but it does reveal an interesting blind spot I have. If you are self-employed (but lack any employees), then you get to keep that ‘surplus value’ yourself. Yes, being self-employed comes with its share of headaches (it is generally accepted (by those not living in a fantasy) that the self-employed put in 80-100 hours per week and almost never take longer vacations than a 3 day weekend, two primary reasons why I have never been excited about self-employment) and the true hourly rate might be substantially lower than the billing rate, but if you can double (or more) your income when otherwise you might be at the top of your ‘class’, it might give your children the option to claw up to the next tier. At least it could if we still have any vertical mobility left in our country, something that the article implies is decreasing over time.
