As global poverty declines, we should beware the new class wars.

Pedro_P

We’re told the world is turning middle class, but those at the bottom have little to cheer.

Thousands of people at a saltwater pool in Suining, China, where 800 million people have risen out of poverty. Photograph: ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images
▼ Half the world is now middle class. So ran the headlines reporting a Brookings Institution analysis of global poverty, according to which 3.8 billion people can now be defined as “middle class” or “rich”. We have, Brookings suggested, reached a “global tipping point”.
Economic development, in China and Indiain particular, has helped pull millions out of poverty, a shift reflected in these figures. What is striking about the report, though, is as much what it obscures as what it reveals. The four categories in the Brookings analysis are: poor, vulnerable, middle class and rich. Notice what’s missing? The working class.
As a US thinktank, Brookings’ use of middle class as a synonym for “not poor” may simply reflect a distinctively American practice. “Middle class” is often used in US discussions as a way of talking about “ordinary folk”. British  newspapers, however, straightforwardly reportedthe study as the global triumph of the middle class, in keeping with a long tradition. In 2009, the Economist was already  celebratingthat “more than half the world is middle class”. (As with many such claims, when exactly a particular line is crossed depends upon the definitions one uses to carve out categories such as poor or middle class.) What all such “middle-class tipping point” claims speak to is an attempt to depoliticise the concept of class. “Class” becomes, in such arguments, an inert sociological category rather than a live political concern.
There has long been an important debate about how to define class. Marx analysed it through the relationship to the means of production. Capitalists owned factories, workers had nothing to sell but their labour power. In between stood the petit bourgeoisie, later to become the middle class.
Twentieth-century sociologists established more complex stratifications, based variously on differences in employment, wealth or education. Such classifications often grew out of marketing needs. The NRS social  grades,which placed people into categories from A to E, A being the “higher managerial and administrative” grade, C2 containing “skilled manual workers” and E describing the “lowest grade workers”, were, until 2001, commonly used for official purposes in Britain. They were created by the National Readership Survey, an audience research group set up by major publishers. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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