I think that the classic Marxian distinctions are good ones. My main issue is with the slippage from qualitative to quantitative and back.
This is especially problematic in the USA where the myth was that the great majority of the population was "middle class" and lived reasonably comfortably. There was an "upper middle class"--doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers and successful small business owners, then small millionaires and big ones. The lower class was anyone chronically un- or underployed. Much of the former ""middle class" has slipped into the Lower class. "Middle class" I think in Britain carries quite a different sense to it and in Euro English yet another sense, the nuances of which probably vary with the first language assumptions of the speaker. Just trying to filter the fuzziness. Keith On Nov 3, 2011, at 10:14 AM, Dmytri Kleiner <[email protected]> wrote: > > Let's not get too caught up in the x% rhetoric, the numbers are just > illustrative, 99% meaning "almost everybody", Alex's 66% I take to mean "2 of > the 3 social classes" he discusses, without needing quantifying the exact > size of those social groups to make the point. <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
