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The middle class is muddled

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan
THE middle class, mind it, our middle class, is comparable to occupied Iraq, which is still inhabited by its people but ruled
by others. Once if a social class had any class, it was the middle class. They had their pride and panache, values and virtues, ideals and ideas, a class of people who, as George Bernard Shaw defined, lived not for themselves but for others. That middle class today is muddled. They merely occupy that space. Nobody lives there.
TYue, true. Look at the vast concourse of doctors, lawyers, teachers, scholars, performers, writers, editors and host of other professionals. They belong to the middle rung of the income ladder, sort of mid-island on a two-lane thoroughfare. The poor comes in one, the rich goes in another. But the middle class stays in the middle, above poverty and below affluence.
The rule of the road, however, doesn't apply. Aristotle, who supported slavery and opposed equal rights for women, believed that if the midisland grew wider, narrower roads should make the traffic smoother. “The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes,” he said.
That is not how it works for our middle class. It's a meager 10 percent of our population compared to
Pakistan’s 18 and India's 30. The Economist reported in 2009 (Burgeoning bourgeoisie) that more than half the population in the world was middle-class for the first time in history, putting it neck-to-neck with the lower class: three billion each.
What are the signs of a growing middle class? The Economist mentions that people are buying televisions and refrigerators in slums of Sao Paolo, Brazil. Three million Chinese could now afford to ski in a country that didn't offer the sport 15 years go.
In 1964, Herbert Mercuse had already predicted it in One-Dimensional Man. The curse of capitalism was to create a consumption culture, he cautioned, which was going to incessantiy turn luxuries into necessities.
Thus consumption mobility is the sign of social mobility, both of which take time. In the long history of poverty in Bangladesh, both apparently sped up in two decades between 1980s and 2000s. The percentage of poor people dropped from 60 to 47. Where did that 13 percent go if the middle class stood at 10 percent?
Some of them must have joined the
ranks of the affluent class, while others must have got stuck on the mezzanine floor known as the lower middle class. Ideally, this class also should be included in the range of middle class people. May be they aren't full-fledged middle class for the same reason pipeline is not utilization.
What if more people make it out of the poverty trap and swell the ranks of middle class? Does an expansion in the number of middle class people compensate for contraction in their nature? In other words, what is the
use of a having bigger house if nobody wants to live there?
Last July, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh announced that the Indian middle class was more middle class than before. Whatever he meant by it, his critics interpreted it for him. They said that the middle class was more in the middle because the rich had become richer and poor had become poorer. The middle point in the economic spectrum was more prominent now than before, hence it was more middle class.
In that sense our middle class has become less middle class, not in count
but in content. It is less visible in the economic spectrum where poverty dominates intellectual discussions and opulence dominates material repercussions. If the middle class is in the middle of anything today, it is in their conviction. They sit on the fence of everything, their back to misery and face to money. They are middle class in their bodies, but upper class in their souls.
Russian born American writer Ayn Rand said, “Upper classes are a nation's past; the middleclass is its future.” The middle class does to a society what gravitation does to the universe. Gravitation keeps planets in their orbits. It's responsible for formation of tides, natural convection and various other phenomenons observed on Earth.
Likewise, the middle class spearheads revolutions, organizes protests, drives political movements, and holds together a society through its many upheavals. Between deprivations of the poor and desperations of the rich, this one class is supposed to be decent. It is supposed to hold the center for us when things fall apart.
Wonder why nothing works now? The middle class has lost its place, and the center has shifted to the side. It looks down on the poor and looks up to the rich, further from conviction, closer to convenience. When the fence starts eating the crop, we know what happens next.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is the Editor of weekly First News and an opinion writer of The Daily Star. Email: badrull51@yahoo.com