In particular, I found myself wondering about the class Marx and Engels decided not to discuss - "The Dangerous Class".
This would no doubt be labelled in modern British society as vagrants, criminals, and benefit users. I mean absolutely no offence by this banding - they fall into the same category simply because they are not considered an active 'resource' for exploitation by a bourgeois society, and instead they are provided for by that society.
This class has been termed 'The Under Class' by numerous Marxist philosophers, and I'm hoping to justify its use so that we can employ it on the forums, and in the MHOC. I'm sure we've all found ourself having that conversation with someone about 'Working Class leeches' and how the only solution is to move right wing, and I think without a term such as this we're limited in our ability to retort. At the very least, this draws a far more distinct line between
Working Class and an
Under Class.
The 'rule' of anthropological discourse is that a discussion of society should capture everything relevant in as few definitions as is convenient. It is perfectly reasonable for Marx and Engels, writing in the 1840s, to consider the 'dangerous class' irrelevant.
During their time of writing, the 'dangerous class' consisted primarily of criminals. These criminals would not hold a permanent position in their society - Penal transportation if not the death penalty (inadvertently or otherwise) ensured that the class could not grow into what we could call 'critical mass'.
However, in our current political sphere, this class has the mechanisations to achieve this critical mass. The introduction of state benefits, the human rights act, and extensive political restructuring has not only permitted this, but encouraged it. The justification for this, from a bourgeois perspective, is that by rehabilitating or inculcating education, it can be considered an investment into potential labour. Essentially, it's the transformation of a primary resource into a secondary.
So we do not have the luxury of being able to ignore this class as Marx and Engels chose to. It's incredibly relevant to us.
With that definition being fairly accepted in the anthropological community, despite some debate over defining the class (alot of american scholars have tainted this term by their reliance on racial stereotyping), I could not help but notice that the classical term 'Upper Class' did not quite cover the entirety of the upper spectrum.
The past half a century has seen the rise of global economy. This has introduced a new class that the use of terms such as aristocracy or upper class does not fully capture.
However, there are members of this class that are no longer limited to a single society. We could term them the 'international class', they are able to transgress their society and be influential on a global scale. They can protect their interests by exploitation of entire continents, and even go so far as to influence politics in in both their former society and in others.
I've decided however, to label this element as 'The Over Class'. This is so as not to invite conspiracy theorists, and limit the definition to a purely economic sense. Therefore, we could define this class as |
|
I believe this class, quite importantly, may not be the wealthiest of their upper class, but are certainly the most influential. Oil investors, bankers, and even European union politicians could be described as members of the Over Class, simply due to their abilities to engage so influentially with societies that are not their own.
This leaves the spectrum looking like this:
The arrow colours indicate how easily members of each class boundary can ascend, or how active their threat of descending is.
Red - Very difficult to ascend, very likely to descend.
Yellow - Moderately difficult to ascend, moderately likely to descend.
Green - Very easy to ascend, very easy to descend.