"Gordon Fitch" <gcf at panix.com>
> > This wouldn't be permitted to happen.
Lawrence:
> But isn't an independent middle class exactly what seperates the industrial
> countries from the Third World countries? Apparently it has been allowed to
> happen?
Independent of what? In the kind of social configuration where one observes a middle class of professionals and small businessmen, with the rich above and the poor and working class below, most middle-class individuals and families are highly dependent. Many of them, especially those involved in trade or the professions, depend on the welfare of the lower classes to provide them with profits and fees; when hard times come to these, then there is that much less that can be gotten out of them. At the same time, if middle-class people wish to maintain their social status, especially as families, they have to accomodate and adapt themselves to many institutions ordained by the ruling class, from IRS to the academic system, while taking care to outbid their many competitors for places in desirable neighborhoods and good job situations when necessary. It's a pretty constrained life.
But when you said "everybody", I thought you were talking about _everybody_. If the working class and poor somehow managed to save, along with the middle class, that money would be taken from consumption and therefore profits; as it accumulated in bank accounts and mattresses it would become a resource for resistance to bourgeois discipline; and it would increase the supply of capital and drive its price down. All of these are bad things to the bourgeoisie, so they would labor mightily to prevent them from happening. The most likely strategy for disciplining the lower orders would be depression, I think, although war is another possibility. This doesn't mean people couldn't do it anyway, but I think it would have to be done as part of a conscious revolutionary strategy to emerge from capitalism. Everyone can't be middle class, but class can be abolished.