Mark Steel rubbishes the new '7 class system'.

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This man is like a fresh breath of sanity.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/com ... 60195.html

Any model of the class system is flawed. The only thing you can say is that you have elites who control the means of production and everyone else. If you're not one of the elite, then capitalism doesn't directly operate in your interests (though it may be much better to live under capitalism than under a badly-run version of a different system).

I think the difference in how people perceive the survey depends on how they look at class - the Marxist way (people who have the money and the means of production are upper class) or the old fashioned/reactionary way (you need to be born to upper class people, have their accent and their norms and manners).

In the Marxist way someone from an upper class background who loses his money is no longer upper class, and someone from a poor background who becomes nouveau riche will be considered upper class.

I can understand why they asked people for other things beside their own income. Just measuring the wealth of the person surveyed causes much greater variance than also asking him for his friends as it is unlikely they all became poor as well; some upper class person who becomes poor probably still knows many wealthy people and retains his accent and habits. He then is no longer upper class in the Marxist view, but most people will still view him that way.

I guess on thing you can say is that there are psychological effects of the class system on an individual depending on how they grew up and how they see themselves. Even if I won the lottery tomorrow, the psychological effects of growing up poor would still be there for me. Money and assets are the only objective way of measuring this stuff, though.

I would say there are two classes these days - those who run the world and those who just live in it

A utopia has 2 classes. Choosers and chosen.

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

The means of production model depends on what the country you're applying it to is like. If it's dominated by agriculture, then those who own the agricultural land are the upper class (even if they farm it themselves?). In an industrial society, it will be the factory owners. What about somewhere like Britain, which is dominated by finance? Not that I would say most city bankers are the upper class - they may have lots of money, but their political influence isn't high enough. The ones who control the media? If you're in an information economy, it will be the ones who control the information...

...which means that everyone's upper class, or will be when Anonymous and Wikileaks formally fuse together, resulting in everyone having all the information they want. We're already at the point where everyone can control their own means of production of information, and have been since we made the first scratch on the wall of some cave.

A traditional Marxist interpretation is certainly laughable in a post industrial society full of independent farmers, where there is no definite class that owns the "means of production". The only realistic way we can divide the classes now, if we were inclined to do so, is what their job entails - do they work for themselves or an employer, is their work physical labour (i.e. builder) or intellectual (i.e. teacher) etc. Or do they have to work at all, in which case they're either upper class (have enough wealth they don't need to work), temporarily out of the class system (unemployed but looking for work), or underclass (unemployed with no intention of changing that, what the Daily Mail call benefit scroungers)...