5. The Middle Classes
This blog is 5th in a series that I will release weekly which will end with the release of the Utopian Manifesto covering Land and Property.
Earlier blogs in this series can be read here:
The middle class are an attempt to create a group of people happy enough with their lot that they protect The Overclass by not wanting to pick up their pitchforks and cause trouble, and it has been a wonderful creation.
In olden days, if you were not born into the landed aristocracy, then you were a common peasant. The most likely thing to happen to peasants were that they would die as a child.
In the mid-1800's a commoner living in the East End of London had an average life expectancy of 16 years old, even less than the estimated average age of an African slave who may have been unfortunate enough to live until 30.
However, should you survive to the ripe old age of 7, then your luck needed to come in the form of being able to learn a artisan trade and maybe, joining a guild, the equivalent today of winning the lottery and not something the majority of people could dream of. Girls also had to learn skills to survive, but given that they would have to face the risk of childbirth, which, if it didn’t kill you would render you unable to work at least in a moment, meant your luck relied upon coupling with a man who, hopefully wouldn’t beat you to death, be drunk, or commit infanticide or other child abuse.
If you did not learn a trade, you were a peasant, maybe you, man or woman, could find employment as a farm hand or doing other menial work to try and avoid the Poor House, an early form of slavery for poor people. Your final option was to survive on the streets, steal what you needed and in most cases death got you quicker than you could steal your next apple.
The 'luckier' working class people were those working as servants for the large wealthy land owners. However, even these would be at the mercy of their Lords benevolence. Of course we have heard the few stories of the generous Lord of the Manor who cared about his staff, and we see the Downton Abbey Lord who really cares (the stuff of TV fantasy). More commonly, the Lord paid for your service then cared for little else. If you did not work for him, he gave nothing to you.
But following French revolutions and the Industrial Revolution, working class people organised and leveraged their power. Their power, when united, was from their solidarity. They fought, sometimes violently, sometimes from just striking and protest. Wealth was shared in a small way, better than it had been before. People started to become better off.
The wealthy also gained from this. The wealthy industrialist needed people well off enough to buy their goods. They needed people with enough leisure time to want to buy a car and travel to the sea side. The middle classes were born.
The upside of the middle class is that without doubt, their life is better than the working class. Leisure time and excess cash. Life is good, although lets not forget, this improvement directly serves the interests of The Overclass.
As with any form of positive progress it also comes with a downside. The downside of the middle class is that it is a group of people who felt that there was no need to pick up a pitchfork and storm the gates of the mansion because, well, they were okay really. They had a car. They had a holiday. Their life expectancy was getting better and that of their children was expected to be even better, they're no longer surviving, they're enjoying life. Why revolt.
Once The Overclass had sacrificed nearly 80 million people, mainly commoners, in Europe during WW2 the Government felt bound to try and give something back to the majority who sacrificed the most. Given the very small nature of The Overclass, they can never make a sacrifice on the scale of the working classes and given their ability to be appointed to the officer classes, are more often than not to be found well behind the front line, making the often very poor decision to sacrifice the commoners as human meat.
The middle classes were expanded and a certain level of protection and support was given to ensure that were doing okay, the NHS was born, a social security system put in place for life events like retirement. Eventually rights for working women who got pregnant were introduced.
And whilst they didn’t have mansions and large landed estates. And they didn’t fly around on private jets, they were fine. They could worry about different things, like school grades, having a tidier front lawn than their neighbour or whether there was a problem with pot holes or dog shit at the local park.
In addition to tools like secrecy and economics, The Overclass had created another layer to protect their wealth, but this time it came from people who couldn’t be bothered to change things for the many.
Todays middle classes are told to eat turnips so that they can afford to pay The Overclass banks the extra interest on their mortgages. Their electricity bills go from £500 a month to £2,000 enriching oil extractors. If enclosure and removal of the commons seems like something from 1,000 years ago, think instead of your house and the money in your pocket as todays commons and ask whether the commons are still being taken from commoners by The Overclass.
But the Middle Classes can vote. So surely they can peacefully express their displeasure through the ballot box? Wrong, The Overclass know that universal suffrage is also the new commons. An event that is dangerous for The Overclass because if we were given a real choice, and if the Media and military didn't kick back against that choice, perhaps Commoners would vote to change things. So instead the political choices we are given are so pointless, there is no real choice. We have the Conservative Party Tories. Or The Labour Party Tories. Choose.
There is a type of middle class British voter who detests the Tories. Who would never vote for them. Yet quietly benefit from Tory policies of taking and exploitation. They have clean hands and can say they’ve never voted Tory and that they hate them. Yet this behaviour allies them with greed and takers and does nothing to change things or protect those under attack.
There is an even worse type of middle class British voter. The one who proudly proclaims that they are a socialist and votes Labour. Those who were over joyed to see Tony Blair win in 1997 and is keen for Kier Starmer to win in 2024/5. New Labour socialists. We have short memories. New Labour merely continues Tory policies, maybe in some small way taking the harder edge off some policies, but not in any meaningful or noticeable way does anything change.
People were so sick of a real lack of difference between Conservative and Labour that following Blairs terms in power the Labour party picked Corbyn for leader and the Lib Dems got their biggest election result ever, only for the Lib Dem's to be destroyed as a party when they were found to be Tory enablers rather than brakes on Tory excess. And Corbyn was eventually removed. We are now back to New Labour.
Graffiti artist Darren Cullen describes our choice as:
“…all three major parties offering nothing more than moderately different flavours of the exact the same thing: neoliberalism, crackdowns, more cops, fewer nurses, ongoing-austerity and constant boot-licked fealty to the worst and cruellest opinions bellowed out daily by the Mail and Sun.
But this is, at the heart of it, what neoliberalism and the post-WW2 'Washington Consensus' is about. Defanging democracy, making it palatable to capital and removing the big questions from the public altogether. No ideology except the dominant ideology. The plebs can't vote for the wrong thing if it's never allowed on the ballot…
...So thanks to politics getting back to normal you can have your Tory party with added lemon or with no added sugar, but whatever you choose, or don't choose, you're still getting 2 litres of carbonated full-fat Tory”
Whilst the creation of The Middle Class has been a highly successful move in protecting The Overclass, perhaps the biggest protection for them today was in how Thatcher was so successful in encouraging The Middle Class to pour scorn on the Union movement. By tearing apart social cohesion within community we have lost a sense of solidarity and the desire to fight for each other and for the common good. Instead we scoff if we are delayed by a striking train driver, delayed on route to our middle class work house job.
But there is one thing we are seeing now and that is this. Unlike our grandparents post WW2 the middle class deal is now under attack from The Overclass. The things in society that we valued, cherished and benefitted from are being eroded. Our children’s future is no longer the bright one of the 1950’s. Anger will take time to build, but make no mistake, it is building.
And it is building in a generation of children who do not have the common enemy of the USSR and communism to live in fear of, an alleged socialist state to be afraid of and avoided at all costs. Instead they have the authoritarian and communist state of China which actually looks aspirational in comparison to the US.
I don't want an authoritarian state but what's the difference between Chinese: "there is no choice" and British: "pretend there is a choice when there isn't". At least the Chinese are being honest with people. We're the ones being duped, and that will create anger. Anger is building and eventually anger will turn into action. Where we end up is unknown, but it won't be a pretty journey.
So whilst the creation of a 'broadly happy' middle class has put a cushion of people in place who cannot be bothered to protest, who feel they are okay so don't need to lift too much of a finger to help those less okay, and who certainly won't be going against the prevailing government, who buy into the media and social narrative are that things are just how they are and you can't really change the status quo, fortunately, there have been people in the past willing to fight back, willing to fight for a change that is not just about benefitting themselves, but benefitting the many and not just enriching The Overclass.
Next week, Revolting Commoners.
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