> And remember in your glee to destroy the middle-class: when the working class have a job, it's the middle-class that buys the goods. When they don't have a job, it's the middle-classes' taxes that pay for the welfare. The middle class needs the working class, too. We're all in this shit together, and we all need each other - this kind of divisive class bollocks just hurts everyone. Unless the working class is going to go all hippy and start forming volunteer communes to help each other, talk of mobs with clubs is just scoring an own-goal in the long term.
We don't have the same model of the world so we reach different conclusions. The Brexit is just one jigsaw piece in a bigger shift. Let's be clear, I don't hate the middle class. They have many good ideas and values. I'm quasi-middle-class myself in some ways. However they also are less unaware of their 'sins' because the mainstream press and television is not about to bite the hand that culturally and literally feeds it. What is happening in the present is a kind of historical correction.
If you'll allow for it, I'll offer you an alternative view of what is going on based on money and power relations. Do you recall Orwell's idea about the proles, the outer and inner parties? How two side against one periodically? Something like this but more complex is going on.
We are not all in this together at all and this is why:
There isn't three classes of people, there are at least six.
In the lower classes there exists the poor and the working class. These are not the same people. Working class people have skills and capital in the form of tools. The poor live in council estates, the working class typically don't. There is of course some overlap, but they are very aware of the difference.
In the middle class there is the upper and lower with which I'm sure you're familiar. Most of their assets are in property or their service sector jobs.
In the upper class there is two classes, the financial capitalists and the mercantile capitalists. Always at war. In America these are personified in part by Wall St and Silicon Valley. They even have different stock exchanges.
What is going on in the present is that the mercantile capitalist and working classes are at war with the financial capitalists and most of the middle classes whose primary assets are in property or finance. This is why the alliance is arson friendly, it's not their assets that will burn up in the conflagration.
The stock market and currency markets will swing around, but the factories remain standing. The fields remain extant and commodities still stay or slosh beneath our feet. The merchant capitalists will be fine, as will those with the ability and means to work for them. Exports will be up, imports may decline.
This will be a minor heresy to you perhaps, but the middle classes actually consume the majority of welfare through indirect subsidization e.g. below cost university education and the majority of David Graeber's bullshit jobs. A portion of the middle class does work for the production capitalists doing something useful but it is a distinctive minority of what I consider the real upper middle class.
The majority of tax paid comes from rich and goes to the middle class. The finance capitalists and production capitalists have always been at war with each other and the reign of the financiers was supreme in a globalizing world. That trend is now in reverse and the cycle is swinging back to the production capitalists. This means the virtual side of capital, in the form of artificially high share prices and property prices is about to crash it won't recover for generations.
Thanks to an artificial oversupply of educated labour plus artificial government regulations restricting property development, the middle classes are about to suffer an absolute and relative real decline in wages over the next decade. That or it will shrink rapidly to a much more manageable size (in my country I see it already occurring with the civil service, where the young {police/doctors} receive much lower rates of pay than in the past). At the same time as this they will also suffer a loss of their primary asset's value i.e. their houses. Best case scenario: Stagnation.
This all makes sense to the working classes because they intuitively think of the middle as being closer to the core and themselves towards the peripheral. When the middle class economy see-saws they are likely to have their situation improved. Not just because of rival goods such as housing but also the types of wages and types of jobs the economy will be wanting in the future. Technology is deskilling the middle class, not the working class. Robotics won't be able to replace working class jobs for many decades but all the people who deal with information i.e. the financiers and the middle class kind of jobs, those are on the receiving end.
Basically I am saying that the world's class system is reverting from a diamond shape back to the traditional hierarchy. Does fewer middle class jobs and more low wage work sound familiar? Growth at bottom and top away from the middle.
This could all be wrong and you're free to nitpick but those are the broad strokes as many people see it.
> The poor have always been in fiscal trouble.
The poor by definition, but not the working class. Up until the 70s in the States they received huge wage increases and then stagnation in real terms since then.
> The poor have frequently not been able to afford their abodes - that's why there's council housing.
Throughout most of history working class people have owed their homes. The concept of council houses and even mortgages for them are relatively recent. Most people's grandparents built their own houses. My parents owed two houses in their twenties and they were the humblest of working class workers. Of course the standard wasn't as high as it is today, certainly they were smaller, but they owed them outright and that's more than I can say about the 'average' person with a 30 year loan today.
> But clothing and food is less expensive, not to mention that ye olde poor never had a luxury like a low-end smartphone.
Clothing and food and almost nothing else. Education. More expensive. Energy. More expensive. Housing. More expensive. This is all since the early 70s when we reached some kind of inflection point and wages stagnated since then.
It is true that technology has made technology objects cheaper like electronics and computers but here is the rub. Outside of computers technology has not improved the average person's life for decades. You've probably heard all this before so I won't sidetrack.
>And for people on less than an average wage, living expenses have always taken everything. Housing is more expensive now, sure. But clothing and food is less expensive, not to mention that ye olde poor never had a luxury like a low-end smartphone. But however it works out, if you're of less than average wage, you basically spend everything on survival and always have. Maybe the odd luxury now and then, but it's not like the poor of yesteryear were buying investment properties.
Regrettably you're wrong. It was normal for below average income people to own their house, have a boring but reasonable job, along with owning some stocks. Yes, that's right, a great many people owned stock or bonds. Also land. Standards of living have been stagnating for a long time and many people are suffering from present-ism. Most households also contained a cook in the form of a mother which cut down on living expenses considerably and most households had one job with the ability for mom to find part time work if times got tough. Now most households both people work and they are living paycheck to paycheck. Did I mention people had savings in the past?
The media has fed everybody wife's tales about the recent past. The New York Times might as well be Pravda. I don't buy it. The statistics don't back any of it up. It reminds me of the way in the Soviet Union everybody thought everything was getting better and better, but it wasn't.
Anyway now you probably want to hit me so I'll stop here.