3) Class

by Dr. Badgemagus Swineherd, PhD.

Class is leaving the furniture in the double wide. Har, har. They showed some class. All righty then. That's a good 'un, Red.

Ahem.

Actually, I don't know much about this subtopic. I know more about botany and er other stuff. Remind me why I'm doin' this.

By default, Badgemagus. Everyone else is stove up with this, but Ray spelled it and that's why we have to do it. Accountability. You're our only hope.

All righty then, but that Ray is due for a plant press strappin,' fer sure, Ye've let him run amok, Red.

We're lookin into measures fer Ray, Badgemagus. Lookin' in, to 'em.

Okie Dokie then.

Ahem.

Class is a very serious problem in most of the Americas if you are in the wrong class, or you are not in any class (de class). If you are in the wrong class your posessions are mainly personal and you lack access to much capital and you may, if you lose your job, become de class. If you are de class you have only personal posessions, not many of those, and you probably don't know what capital, the a and a kind, is, especially if you have been generationally de class and are, therefore, not a newcomer to de classedness. On the other hand, if you are in the right class, you have so much stuff, you get to boss the wrong classes around.
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Hold up here a minute. I didn't spell this. This is just rabble rousin'! Where's my notes. We need to show some scholarship, in these parts!
_____

Ahem.

One often hears about the basic goodness of us Americans. And by and
large, I think we are, a lot of us, basically just that, good. We want to
be, lots of us, just safe and happy, we have "relatively" modest
ambitions to achieve safety and happiness, and we perceive that everyone else
we both know and like is pretty much taking the same approach, so it's
easy to wax altruistic on occasion with respect to those we both know
and like. All this makes us good, and as good as we are going to get, maybe.

But then we goody two shoes, in order to achieve our modest ambitions,
must interact with the marketplace. The marketplace, as it ever has
been, is where we proffer our goods and services to others, in exchange
for their goods and services. For most of us, in the northern parts of
the Americas, undergoing the capitalistic spasm spelled, globalization,
this means we sell our services, since most of us don't have handy
access to surplus good and don't produce any manufactured goods either. Because marketplaces for services are not evenly distributed in the Americas, we shift around a lot to find the right marketplace to sell our services in. We service workers, it might be said, are a shifty lot.

Why are so many of us selling our services? Easy that. We have no access to the means of production.

Now I, Badgemagus Swineherd, PhD, feel a pivot, coming on.

Pivot - The myth of the honest worker had a huge influence on many of
the old left, anarchists especially. We saw the honest worker as a hero
sungod or goddess, wresting control of the means of production away
from the greedy capitalist and establishing an egalitarian system of
worker controlled farms and factories, globally. And, mythology aside there
were, and remain, lots of honest workers who fight hard all their
lives, and with their lives, to bring egalitarianism to the workplace, or,
at the least, to derive a better living from the workplace. But there
were/are never sufficient numbers of honest workers to bring any of
this about on a global scale. - End of pivot.

But now we, in these parts, the northern part of the Americas have been
essentially removed from the honest worker myth-making process; we no
longer, for the most part, have access to the means of production. Why
don't we have access (note I am spelling access, not ownership or
control) to the means of production? Easy that. The means of production has
gone elsewhere in search of the very cheapest labor and in search of the very fewest
constraints on, the means of production. And the very cheapest labor
has come to these parts to interact with the means of production. So
honest workers left behind with our myth of the honest worker, and with
somebody else doing our jobs for lower wages, and with plenty of time on
all our collective hands, tend to do something else, so we "perform"
services.

Now! I see Ray out there fidgetin', and the Crumby Ovate is near to a
panic attack because, so far, I Dr. Swineherd, have only spelled class,
once, and that once, in the title. But the table is now set. So let's
dig on in, to class.

The notion of class in the north part of the Americas has been
problematic. Early on, the means of production were largely bucolic and
everyone that wanted access to the bucolic means of production could have all
they wanted. Even slaves got plenty of access, though they didn't get
to keep much of what they accessed. Then population growth and the
consequent requirements of a more orderly civilization kicked in, and we
remembered our roots in Europe and how just a few people owned everything
in Europe, and we waxed melancholic for those good times and decided we
(that is some of us) needed to have classes too, only omitting the
royal class. So some rich white boys set up some general guidelines
regarding class and we follow those guidelines, as amended, to this day.

The most important general guideline is that only the richest white boys
get to be in the ruling class. This was slightly amended to admit new
slightly different types of the richest white boys every now and again,
maybe. But basically, from that day to this, the ruling class is
comprised of the richest white boys.

The only other important general guideline promulgated by the original
ruling class was that all the white boys, not just the richest ones,
should, theoretically, be free to pursue life, liberty and property. For
some odd reason they later amended property to happiness. Are property
and happiness synonyms?

But the ruling class is just one class. To get the rest of the classes
lined up everyone had to be sorted and that sorting process is ever
changing and is subject to perturbations, like for example, the War
Between the States, which pretty much eliminated the slave class, in these
parts.

Now, absent royalty and slaves, we have about five classes; the ruling class,
the service class, the little boss class, the working class and the de class. The ruling class, as always, owns just about everything, the service class, performs
services for everyone, the little boss class has limited access to the means of production sometimes, but is encumbered by an excessive tax burden, brutal competition and economy of scale; the working class, mostly foreigners (and I don't just mean aliens staying in these Yorenited States), accesses the
means of production; and the de class receives government checks in the
mail, or not, in a timely fashion.

The service class is large and diverse growing by leaps and bounds
(from crossovers from the working class and little boss classes mostly) and includes many of the rich, but not the richest, most of the working poor, and tons of the in
between - the rich and poor. The unifying theme of service people is that they have no access to the means of production, although the richer do odd things like "retire to a working cattle ranch".

The most lucrative jobs in the service class are those that provide
services to the ruling class, directly. In fact, these jobs are sometimes
so lucrative (perks), that members of the service class sometimes encounter
ruling class competitors for these positions. I believe the ruling class
competitors at this level refer to their role in this competition as,
slumming. Some of the "jobs" in this category include cabinet
secretary, federal judge, ambassador, CEO of a small corporation, prezidink of
these Yore Nited States, etc.

Then there are a whole bunch of unbelievably aggravating jobs in the service
class too, so aggravating that they are probably not worth doing, like leaf-blowing, and the practitioners of these jobs are very unlikely to have legal intimate relationships with a ruler. Most of the service class jobs, though, fall in the middle range, in both salary and aggravation, and the lucky service class guy or gal might get to service someone, sometime, a step or two down from a ruler if they're on the ball and a go-getter. The Crumby Ovate yonder falls in the lower range of this latter category for he told me he once saw a copy of the Texas Governor Bushnoid's signature on an Environmental Impact Statement.

So that about sums up my opinions on class. They exist, the lower four are slightly fluid, and the ruling class, with its gluttonous proclivities and ideological poisons and the general acceptance of this ideology among the ignorant and vulagr is pushing the Goddess to Her limits. But I am old and feeble, and would like a Dolmen now, so I quit, fer the nonce. This has been a great strain, on me.

All righty then Badgemgus. Let's go have us a Dolmen er two.