A Simple American Class System
“This is roughly the class structure of America in the middle of the twentieth century. It seems most functional to speak of three classes, the Poor, the Organization, and the Independents; and of three statuses within the dominant class, the Organization. Viz.:
Organized System:
Workers
Organization Men
Managers
Poor
Independents
It will be seen that these three statuses in the organized system (which include bigger business, organized labor, entertainment, government, bigger education, etc.) are engaged primarily in engaged in keeping the system itself running and slowly expanding. The most self-aware of its members are the middle-class intellectuals, among the advertising men, salesmen, and junior executives; and they describe the system as the Rat Race. So W.H. Whyte, J. K. Galbraith Jr., however, describes it differently: “Among the many models of the good society, no one has urged the squirrel wheel.” It is interesting to contrast the different species of imagined rodents between those who are running the race and the scholar who is contemplating it with wonder.
But there is another large class: those who do not properly belong to the system and are not yet submerged into the poor “outside” of society: this is the vast herd of the old-fashioned, the eccentric, the criminal, the gifted, the serious, the men and women, the rentiers, the free-lances, the infants, and so forth.
This motley collection has, of course, no style or culture, unlike the organization that has our familiar American style and popular culture. Its fragmented members hover about the organization in multifarious ways—running specialty shops, trying to teach or give other professional services, robbing banks, landscape gardening, and so forth—but they find it hard to get along, for they do not know the approved techniques of promoting, getting foundation grants, protecting themselves by official unions, legally embezzling, and not blurting out the truth or weeping or laughing out of turn. They have no style at all, and it is understandable that neither they nor their usually rather irrelevant enterprises make much headway in the market, the universities, entertainment, politics, or labor. Besides, they often speak a minority language, English.”
This is excerpted from the book “Growing up Absurd” by Paul Goodman (who was Jewish). His class schema, however, makes a lot of sense despite being somewhat dated (he wrote this in the early 1960’s).
The Managers are the Jewish 1% and their allies. The Organization Men are represented today by the “upper middle class”, constituting roughly five percent of the population. The Workers are the great middle mass of the people; the former middle class, the former working class, all of whom constantly toil while being slowly driven into penury. The poor would be those who rely on the state dole and don’t not have steady employment (perhaps 20-30% of the population).
The Independents are the most interesting. This group may prove to be the nucleus of the ‘out elite’ (why not flatter ourselves eh?). We exist in the cracks of ZOG. Little green shoots rising from the not-so-solid pavement of Organized System.