Working Class! Capitalist Class! Middle Class! A plague on all your classes. I do not like to think of men and women in society as belonging to different classes.
I like to think of these people as individuals all doing their best to meet life's joys and anxieties with enthusiasm and determination.
A one-time Prime Minister of Great Britain, whose benevolent face and rotund figure are often the background for a pipe, became a little disturbed at such descriptive class titles and consoled himself and his hearers with sentiments similar to the above. How he abhors such marking off into sections of certain members of the human family! Nevertheless, I am sure that he knows to which class he belongs. Probably some evidence will be found on his railway ticket; on his particular suite in a luxury cruise; on his standing under his own pergola or chandelier; on the power of his effective demand upon the mass of commodities within society.
Now there are many who, like our one-time Prime Minister, give more evidence of sentimentality than sense when discussing society, when faced with the logical terminology which is forced upon them by the economic system which we know as Capitalism.
However, the march of events takes but little notice of a person's particular dislikes, and we are compelled to take notice of facts, not fancies. In society, as at present constituted. there are two distinct classes with interests diametrically opposed — Capitalist Class; Working Class.
(From an article Working Class, Socialist Standard April 1939.)
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