Perhaps the illusion of the middle class was never an accident at all. Maybe it was a calculation, precise and cold, a grand maneuver in the service of a deeper order. That one might wake in a house they call their own – or the mortgage company’s, drive a car they believe they chose, send their child to a school that promises some vague upward mobility – are these signs of liberation, or of a new servitude, more complete than the old. It is not enough that men should toil; they must toil believing they are free, that their labor is a means to their own fulfillment rather than to the aggrandizement of forces they neither see nor comprehend.
A laboring aristocracy: such a notion is absurd on its face, and yet, in the hands of the industrial order, it became a reality. It was necessary to produce not only goods but also a class of men who would sustain the great machine of accumulation while remaining docile, convinced of their own self-determination. The American Dream – was it ever anything more than a mirage to lead men forward, not toward some true good, but toward greater usefulness to the mechanisms that governed them?
This aristocracy of labor, so called, was granted enough wealth to distinguish itself from the poor, enough comfort to fear its loss, enough distraction to never quite see the chains that bound it. Unlike the old proletariat, it would not rise against its masters, for it believed itself to be separate from servitude. The house with a mortgage, the pension tied to the fate of markets, the child trained to take their place in the same order – each link in this chain was mistaken for a gift.
What was manufactured in the great economic expansions of the twentieth century was not merely material goods but the very desires and illusions of those who would consume them. A man with a pension and a lawnmower, who thinks himself superior to the man without them, is a man who will never ask the deeper question: Who truly owns what? For every home in which a family sleeps, there is an institution that holds its debt. For every wage that rises, there is a mechanism ensuring that it rises only as much as is necessary to maintain obedience and consumption.
The true aristocracy, the one which has no need to labor at all, does not fear revolution from below. It fears only that the middle will awaken to its function. That the workers at the machines will see the men in the offices as their kin. That the managers will see in the executives not a promise of their own future but the barrier to it. The American Dream was the great sedative, the dream that kept the body moving while the mind slept. So long as men believed in their own impending prosperity, they would not ask why that prosperity never quite arrived.
It is not wealth alone that marks the ruling class. It is the absence of obligation. A man who must work to sustain his life, no matter how pleasant that work may be, is not free. A middle class whose comforts are predicated on endless toil is not an aristocracy but a refined form of servitude. The serfs of old saw the castle and knew their place. The modern worker sees his paycheck and imagines himself a king, never asking why the castle still stands while he labors on.
The labor aristocracy was necessary for capitalism’s expansion, but also for its defense. A vast underclass, too impoverished to participate, might revolt. A truly equal society would need no rulers. But a middle class, secure enough to disdain the poor, desperate enough to fear joining them – this was the ideal. They would police themselves, scorn those below them, envy those above, and never unite against the order that sustained their illusions.
The industries of the twentieth century were not merely producing cars and washing machines. They were producing a way of life, a structure of belief. The factory made automobiles, but it also made workers who saw themselves as something other than workers. The suburban home was not simply a dwelling; it was a bulwark against solidarity, an atomization of man into neat parcels, each believing himself independent while remaining wholly dependent on forces beyond his control.
The decline of this middle class, its slow erosion in the face of automation, globalization, and financialization, is not a crisis for the ruling order but its evolution. The illusion of stability is no longer necessary. Once, the factory needed workers who would return day after day, believing in their own eventual rise. Now, the machine can function with fewer human hands. What remains is the detritus of that grand illusion – men and women who were promised prosperity and find themselves grasping at memories of a world that was never truly theirs.
The American Dream, in its most cynical form, was never about freedom. It was about consent. It was about ensuring that men would dedicate their lives to producing and consuming, never questioning why the balance of power remained unchanged. The labor aristocracy was the mechanism by which the true aristocracy secured its reign. It gave just enough to pacify, just enough to inspire hope, and never enough to grant true autonomy.
If there is a lesson in the slow decay of this illusion, it is not that the dream should be restored but that it should be abandoned. The answer is not a return to some imagined golden age of middle-class prosperity, but the recognition that such prosperity was always conditional, always a means to an end that was not our own. To awaken is not merely to mourn what is lost, but to see, perhaps for the first time, what was never truly ours to begin with.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.