Slashdot Mirror
American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace
Jamie found this paper earlier about American Class Divisions and Facebook and MySpace. The paper talks about the history of the two sites, what groups tend to use what site. They also talk about what proponents of each site think of the other. It's actually an interesting read and worth your time.
To be fair, I saw this earlier this morning when danah (the author) first linked it off her blog (which I read); the announcement there was along the lines of "here's this thing I've been looking into, I don't have anything formal or rigorous yet but I wanted to throw out some thoughts on it real quick", not "this is a serious, finalized paper on the topic".
Her actual (formally) published work is, as one would expect, of much higher quality.
Marx never said there were only two classes. He said that society was moving toward there being only two basic classes, but he identified multiple classes.
For example, among the bourgeois (from the same root as "burg" - meaning townsperson, person engaged in commerce there are at least the "haute bourgeois" and the "petty bourgois." The difference lies in their relationship to the act of working. The haute bourgeois own things (factories, corporations, etc.) and employ others; the petty bourgeois includes small business owners, shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, engineers and other professionals. They either own a business that they work at, often alongside the employees, or they are employed by others and, while they may make more money and have nicer things, they are dependent for their living on employers. This makes the petty bourgeois potential allies of working class people because while they are better off, they actually work hard for a living and are at the mercy of the more powerful class.
Even the proletariat (labor class) is divided into skilled (better paid, more secure) and unskilled labor.
Then there's the lumpen-proletariat - drifters, criminals, homeless people, etc. that have no class power at all and exist "invisible" to the eyes of most people.
One of Marx's points was that industrial capitalism has a tendency of driving people, inevitably but gradually, towards unification into haute bourgeoius and proletariat. That doesn't happen overnight, and substantial steps were taken (e.g., New Deal, unions-corporate truce that defined the WW2-1970s era) to avoid class conflict. But overseas outsourcing even of professional jobs, Walmart-style big boxes, etc. are examples of how, even recently, petty bourgeois (professionals and shopkeepers, respectively) are being driven into proletariat status.