This is an important piece because of what is missing from her view. I entirely agree with her views and feelings with regard to others as one enters in a class oriented occupational world. However, she dramatically ignores some stark realities of living in a class-structured society. I think she illustrates someone who as a result of her socialization now overlooks the deeply classist nature of our capitalist societies and the consequence for people who enter this social system with the hope of earning a decent income. Here in the US, we are taught that we are almost all middle class. Just yesterday I encountered such an obscuring of the class nature of our Western societies.
I am referring to the Guardian's piece entitled "If the 1% wants class warfare, maybe it's time to start fighting back". As is almost fashionable among liberal circles, she espressos concern about the growing fact of inequality in terms of income that is occurring all over the capitalist world. As a part of this concern she asks who the "jerks" are who defend this growing disparity and finds some easy clownish capitalist targets.
Well, it turns out there are two kinds. Call them the emotional alarmist and the pseudo-scientific apologist. Both variations were on display in the past week, in the form of zillionaire Tom Perkins and economist-to-the-zillionaires, former Romney adviser Greg Mankiw. Both Perkins and Mankiw are correct to be worried about how the widening income gap might inspire more class consciousness. They’re just wrong about which side is the underdog.But then she obscures the impact that classism has on people by arbitrarily defining class as merely a mathematical concept: middle class is defined as people receiving the middle 60% of income. This definition hides so much of the way class discrimination is experienced in our capitalist societies: we too often must suppress our feelings for each other in order to serve the interests of power and wealth of the ruling One Percent. To reinforce serving those interests, high value is placed on the acquisition of material things that money can buy--cars, clothes, owning homes in certain high status locations, etc. But more important than this is your occupation and formal education.
One of the first things that people always ask of a stranger is there occupation, and people will often go to great lengths to glamorize what they actually do by embellishing the name of the occupation. Basically, occupations are valued by the degree of independence that one has while carrying out the work. Small business owners, professionals, managers, and highly skilled technicians constitute what sociologists refer to as middle class. Such people enjoy a variety of perks (independence, flexible time, salaries, etc.) as an additional reward besides higher income that enables them to engage in conspicuous consumption, but they also generally receive more indoctrination in their education than do other workers to insure that they serve the ruling class. Capitalists who live mostly off their investments are regarded more on the basis of their wealthy lifestyles.
Now to get back to this author and her article, I believe she completely ignores the way higher education inculcates these class values; and most of all, the way employers evaluate employees according to their adoption of class-based values. An employee who wants to "get ahead" in the capitalist world will do much better if he/she adopts the views and values of the ruling class and dispenses with the humanistic views he/she might have held as a student or ordinary worker. This is so because much of what people do who have high income is to serve the interests of the capitalist class which often means harming the interests of ordinary people. You will not be able to do such work if you continue to affirm humanistic values. Such an employee will be weeded out early or stuck in low paying dead-end jobs.
