Middle-Class Privilege

Let’s talk about middle class privilege. I don’t think that we should dismantle middle class privilege as many middle class people don’t individually own their own land or houses. Instead we should be for basic economic rights: individual land rights and rights to housing as inalienable human rights. We should think about having a strong middle class lifestyle – complex living, as the baseline level of wealth for a strong and prosperous society.

Also, as a transitionary method we should protect and nurture small business (with humble profit-sharing for workers/employees) as business owners wear the risk and asset burden in the market, and often pay themselves a wage. I think socialist revolutions and revolutionaries oft make the mistake of seeing the proletariat as the sole or only revolutionary force available and/or that we should be quick to dismantle middle class and small business people’s privilege. Generally, I think that middle class level of wealth and education is rightful even if it is ‘achieved’ through exploiting others; people in the first world buy goods made overseas that are made by/through underpaid labour and sweatshop labour at times or as the norm, so most of us in First World countries are caught up in exploitation and benefit from it materially in some way. This is no good or ethical justification for dismantling First World working class level of privilege. Rather, we should seek to emancipate overseas workers caught in chronically underpaid jobs, often for multi-nationals, and bring people up to a First World middle class level of privilege and complex living.

We need to protect the middle class as they oft have genuine virtue and instead bring up the working class to the wealth privilege of the middle class and abolish more passive forms of wealth leverage and income which the rich classes benefit from through excessive amounts of surplus value extraction from workers and through investment without labouring menial or rote, cognitively ‘disempowering’ tasks and job-roles.

In summary, an inclusive baseline level of legitimate social privilege would be the right to individual freehold ownership of land and housing, UBI (in the face of capacity to automate much of production), a reduction in the working week towards ancestral loads of 20 hours (paid) labour a week, and free access to tertiary education.