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Originally Posted by MellySingsDoom

I think we can all agree that a "classless" society is a crock of shit, and that the class boundaries of the past 100 years are still nicely in vogue, by and large. And so forth.

maybe in england. certainly not in the united states. the working class was DESTROYED during the reagan era. what is left is a small core of auto & industrial workers, but certainly not a majority of the population. there is a huge service economy where people get paid minimum wages, get no benefits or security of any kind, have no unions to represent them, and spend most of the time in front of computers, at the phone, etc. that i think does not qualify as "classic" working class--- though it's working. it's more of a working underclass because it has no cohesiveness or power of any kind. (and now even those jobs are being outsourced to india & so on).

on the other hand you have the rise of a creative class which, though mostly bourgeois in its economic role, has bohemian tastes and lifestyles-- those people starved 100 years ago, and now are the ones driving the information economy. this used to be a contradiction maybe in the XIX century but not any more.

the reason i say this is because social classes depend on the economy. during agrarian times, we had the serfs and the aristocracy and the city people. with the rise of trade and industry, the aristocracy wanes, the city people consolidate their power, the serf becomes the proletarian, and production and consumption become disloged-- you no longer produce what you consume, but you produce for a market.

today i am not sure where we are going but it's evident that the industrial model no longer applies. we don't have too many "company towns" built around factories anymore, at least not in developed countries.

however, in economic terms, there are still the fuckers and the fuckees, and you can call that whatever you want, but that's the part that doesn't change.