THE MIDDLE CLASS AMERICAN DREAM
Marx identified the middle class as often times a critical enemy to the goals of working class socialist revolution. He believed that the middle class, which includes small business owners, professionals, managers, even self-employed tradespeople, anyone with a position above the working class, retains a significant influence over them. He argued that this class often flips their allegiance between the interests of the working class and those of capitalists, making them more of a reactionary or counter-revolutionary force, and unreliable allies in revolutionary struggle.
This didn’t mean he rejected every middle class person, as depending on one’s definition, Marx himself would have been considered middle class. His closest friend and comrade, Friedrich Engels, inherited a manufacturing corporation from his parents, so he was a capitalist! We just need to be mindful of each other and settler goals we might have, as well as how different social classes interact within the broader revolutionary movement in general.
The American Dream is most simply expressed in the idea that anyone can achieve a comfortable and secure life through hard work, determination, and self-sacrifice. It’s summarized in a board game called “The Game of Life” that simulates a person’s travels from early adulthood to retirement, with college if necessary, jobs, marriage, and possible children along the way. This is deeply tied to beliefs known as Social Darwinism, which is the idea that only the strongest individuals survive in society, often summarized as the “survival of the fittest.” Many believe that this survival of the fittest was ordained by God.
People who were able to achieve middle class status were thus inherently more fit or superior compared to those in lower social classes. Poverty and hardship become signs of weakness, suggesting that those struggling in life were merely reflecting their inferior status in this “natural” order of society. Instead of recognizing that capitalism and interconnected systems of impression keep people in poverty, the focus is often placed on individual responsibility.
The notion of a “middle” class is just another way of saying an “ideal” class. In our case, this refers to the mode of living brought to these lands by genocidal settler colonists. Achieving success means you are among those “ideal,” as in more deserving, civilized, capable, and superior to those among the poor and working class, who’re struggling to get by. This creates an environment where people compete against one another for jobs and resources, undermining collective solidarity. Without collective solidarity, middle class people are vulnerable to falling down the settler class ladder.
After the Second World War, the USA exported this American Dream around the world, often as a way of dividing populations to overthrow democratically elected governments. Globally, this is referred not as the American Dream but the “Imperial Mode of Living.” This colonizer way of life is similarly characterized by high levels of consumption, unsustainable natural resource extraction, as well as significant social and ecological costs pushed onto poor and working classes, particularly in less developed regions of the world.
This survival of the fittest was globalized, including its core belief that those who’ve achieved the Imperial Mode of Living are inherently superior, i.e. the civilized middle class over poor and working class “savages.” This belief extends to other nations, who similarly regard their ability to create a “land of opportunity” for the superior humans as evidence of their nation’s superior, including racially. This represents the complex relationship between ancient and modern ideas of race and whiteness, where it used to mean more directly civilized over savage to then become associated with skin color, etc.
