The Deliberate Confusion of Class

What classes are there? In capitalist societies, the idea of ‘class’ is described to us as something that differentiates people. Some people are lower class, some are middle class, some are high class. Even in schools, which level of class can be seen as a way to differentiate students —when I was in high school, the most ‘intelligent’ took Advanced Proficiency classes, below that College Prep classes, and way down at the bottom there were Remedial classes. However, because we all have ‘freedom’, we are all told that anyone can achieve whatever class they want to become. Students can study real hard and pass higher ‘class’ classes. Workers can work real hard to earn more money and move from lower class to middle class, and from middle class to higher class.

It’s presented as simply a sliding scale. The only presented difference between AP students and Remedial students is their ability to study and learn. The only presented difference between lower, middle, and higher classes of wealth is how much money they earn each year. Just as they (purposefully) fail to examine the underlying circumstances that lead to some students excelling at studying while others can’t seem to focus on school, similarly they (purposefully) fail to examine the circumstances through which one person may earn $20k a year working full time, while another may earn $200 million a year while not lifting a finger. Students may be living in unstable households, where thoughts of ‘when will I be able to eat again’ pushes out the lessons learned in school. Perhaps if given the same living conditions as many of the ‘smarter’ students, many ‘struggling’ students might suddenly find that they are more able to learn in school. Perhaps if a minimum wage burger flipper was given millions of stocks in profitable companies, thousands of rental properties, farmlands and factories in South America, perhaps that same burger flipper could also not lift a finger and earn $200 million a year.

Forget everything you’ve ever heard in school or on television about ‘class’ divisions among people. The difference between how much money people make is not important. What is important is how that money gets made. Does a person do the work themselves, or do they hire people to do the work for them? Do they earn money by working or by owning? That’s what separates people in a meaningful way. Otherwise, you could simply look at billionaires and somehow think that, wow, they must work so much harder than a burger flipper, when nothing could be further from the truth. The burger flipper works no harder than the middle class office worker, however both are still actually doing work, unlike the owners that employ them to do the work while also personally deciding who gets the profits of the work done by those they employ.