I am so hazy and thick lately... I always had a ready good, short way of exposing all that thing about classes, and yesterday I got entangled in developments and details: the core remains the same, which was a less vague of putting together what Al was hinting at, namely, a class is a connection of several factors, which are mainly position, connections and wealth, those latter being "resources" in general, and a certain education and "world view",which is but the reflect of the general social order from which they derive and which gives them sense. Once that is gone, there are no classes, and that is gone in our times, when merely wealth through individual (individual companies too understood as such) is the articulating element to society.
So in the old system, wealth had necessarily to be driven to certain positions already established, through given "right" connections, being used to maintain a "standard of living", which is more than that, a whole world view, a system of beliefs imprinted in the individual through a particular education to turn him into a full-fledged, a proper, member (a borg
) of that given, upper in the case at hand, class.
That is the main driving force, for all those remaining forces of the past that I mentioned and which may make you think we are still living under the same old class system. But you only need to see how that old system of lower, middle and upper class is compounded, in certain analysis made in relation to taxes, with the label "super rich": David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo, obviously, are not upper class, and that should be enough to realize that something is wrong with that analysis and classification.
Take also notice, as more examples of that, how Queen Elizabeth II, and old imperial aristocracy in Britain, or French upper classes in after decolonization, found themselves lost in a world strange to their beliefs, beliefs shaped by that class system in place until WWII.
Or take also the descendants of the famed Vanderbilts raising their kids like "common" people... until their 18th birthday. All that even reflect in the "luxury": that Michael Kors or Hackett are considered luxury gives you another proof of how real exclusiveness is something that even the rich won't or even can't afford, and luxury, traditionally a sure sign of status, today has become as "conceptual" as art, since it doesn't have a class of "irresponsible" uppities to maintain it: class system is based on distinctions made from above to others considered below, and today it is all so bourgeois, so business-oriented that the fantasy and exquisiteness that flows from indulging and sensuous classes can not but disappear. Only the parodies that in the past were an exceptions are left as the general new standard, mainly in China, Russia, the Middle East.
They may be classes of people, there can always be, but there is no class system setting apart people IN ALL RESPECTS of human existence, from personal development, education, to social position and interaction. Everything is "flowing", and if there is something that can definitely prove me wrong, and right at the same time, is that the classes are not of people, but of funds: private equities, family offices, bank accounts, stashes, nothings...
people around the world than to any redneck, chav or whatever they consider and mock at as being below them.
