Classifying classes
...ment the most one can hope for is an easier workload. Food service is much like this, there is nothing to look forward to, and you do nothing but serve others to lazy to prepare their own meals. You work so that others may prosper, and are paid little in return. In the endless quest to transform itself, capitalism has spawned a new working class. The proletariat was an essential part of the industrial revolution, the biological aspect of a machine driven world. But with the coming of the digital revolution, capitalism has refined itself further, and created the “Binary Proletariat” (coined by Nate Bolt). Although capitalist domination has not given way, there are other ways by which "everything solid melts into air." Fixed capital, domestic corporations, and government regulation have melted into air as a result of the digital telecommunications revolution. Class-consciousness, as Marx defined it, might have been threatened by the progression of industrial society, but it has been dissected and dispersed by the new digital global economy. And Marx defined class-consciousness, as Lenin quotes him in the Granat Dictionary written in 1914 and published in 1915, "Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we cannot judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production...” So, Marx argued that as long as one is not controlling the means of production, they are proletarian. And if one's labor is being exploited, they are proletarian. But with the casual and de-centralized world of digital employment, each binary proletarian worker often defines the means of production (juggling temporary contracts and multiple clients). One also might have direct contact with the market (stock options or direct distribution). While the Binary Proletariat may defy Marx and Engels' primary definition of class-consciousness, it fits right in to their strictly bifurcated models of class division. Upper class citizens are perhaps the most difficult to describe, as wealth can come from many sources. A person who has worked hard their entire life to become successful can’t really be compared to one who has always been f...