The "middle class" is one of the most insidious political concepts ever devised. I don't understand how people can complain about the "vanishing middle class" without realizing that, in order to have a middle, you have to have the obscenely wealthy and the abjectly poor. It's like, both things are considered moral failings, but instead of concluding that a class based society is just a gross and disgusting as a racist society, say, they fret over the existence of a middle ground. It's bananas
fuhreal dude, I've met some small businesses that absolute scum of the earth yet people use the phrase as if it implies some kind of worthiness. There's a special sweet spot for power hungry capitalists where they're big enough to have employees they can play god with, but not yet big enough to have an HR person/dept to tell them its probably not a good idea to hold to keep the waitresses tips to himself unless she agrees to fuck him. Most of those victims are precarious workers already without the means to hire a lawyer or even know they have other free courses of available. So they're able to do it again and again until he realizes how close he could be to spending big time in prison and stops, or he ends up spending big time in prison. These stories I feel like happen once a week and its always like "Owner of beloved quaint itallian restauarnt" and shit like that
I just want one of these motherfuckers to tell me what qualifies as middle class. Is it income? Is it homeownership? Is it net worth? Is it category of professions? Is it a lifestyle? Fucking tell me. Tell me if I'm in it or out of it. Y'all claim you stand for the middle class, well? What is it then? What exactly do you stand for?
They'll never fucking tell you what they mean when they say middle class, because if they did then people would be like "oh fuck these people they're going to let us all die."
If the term were to have any meaning at all, I'd peg it at homeownership myself - but with that as the benchmark it would lose all of its rhetorical power. I only have one friend who has managed to buy a house (i.e. take out a loan of hundreds of thousands of dollars). No one else I know is even close. We'll all be renters until we die, unless we end up in prison first.
It also has rhetorical power: a "middle" implies a top and a bottom, and given that nobody likes to think of themselves as poor (shame) and given that if you openly admit to being rich, you're expected to share more, almost everyone claims to be middle class. A nice result of that classification is that it erases the concept of the working class, which at best becomes synonymous with the upper part of the lower class.
The "middle class" is one of the most insidious political concepts ever devised. I don't understand how people can complain about the "vanishing middle class" without realizing that, in order to have a middle, you have to have the obscenely wealthy and the abjectly poor. It's like, both things are considered moral failings, but instead of concluding that a class based society is just a gross and disgusting as a racist society, say, they fret over the existence of a middle ground. It's bananas
deleted by creator
fuhreal dude, I've met some small businesses that absolute scum of the earth yet people use the phrase as if it implies some kind of worthiness. There's a special sweet spot for power hungry capitalists where they're big enough to have employees they can play god with, but not yet big enough to have an HR person/dept to tell them its probably not a good idea to hold to keep the waitresses tips to himself unless she agrees to fuck him. Most of those victims are precarious workers already without the means to hire a lawyer or even know they have other free courses of available. So they're able to do it again and again until he realizes how close he could be to spending big time in prison and stops, or he ends up spending big time in prison. These stories I feel like happen once a week and its always like "Owner of beloved quaint itallian restauarnt" and shit like that
I just want one of these motherfuckers to tell me what qualifies as middle class. Is it income? Is it homeownership? Is it net worth? Is it category of professions? Is it a lifestyle? Fucking tell me. Tell me if I'm in it or out of it. Y'all claim you stand for the middle class, well? What is it then? What exactly do you stand for?
They'll never fucking tell you what they mean when they say middle class, because if they did then people would be like "oh fuck these people they're going to let us all die."
If the term were to have any meaning at all, I'd peg it at homeownership myself - but with that as the benchmark it would lose all of its rhetorical power. I only have one friend who has managed to buy a house (i.e. take out a loan of hundreds of thousands of dollars). No one else I know is even close. We'll all be renters until we die, unless we end up in prison first.
It's only ever used as a euphemism, and it could mean basically anything depending on the context.
It also has rhetorical power: a "middle" implies a top and a bottom, and given that nobody likes to think of themselves as poor (shame) and given that if you openly admit to being rich, you're expected to share more, almost everyone claims to be middle class. A nice result of that classification is that it erases the concept of the working class, which at best becomes synonymous with the upper part of the lower class.
well if anything, we definitely know the middle class means white people