The extinction of the half class and the new neutral class

The crisis hasn't done more to speed up the process. The progressive disappearance of the middle class, or what until now understood as middle class, is a fact that begins to be evident even to the most sceptical. It is difficult to specify when the process began but it has not stopped nor the recent stages of greater economic euphoria nor in these years of crisis, on the contrary, it is sharpening it irreversibly. It is not a domestic phenomenon or geographically limited, but it affects, albeit with varying intensities, to all the developed West. And it will have far-reaching implications for every order, social, political, economic, cultural, and even will change, in fact is already changing our traditional scheme of values.

The middle class, dominant bastion of the Western democracies and liberal since the mid-20th century capitalism, covers today unarmed, just like the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous, how is threatened its ecosystem by the convergence of several factors that are proving lethal for their survival. Globalization, the triumph of financial economics (markets) on the productive and the desideologización and technification of the policy, tend to polarize society by creating a new breed of professionals and highly-paid staff, while the bulk of the middle class proletariza, opening up an increasingly wider gap between one and another segment. At the same time, the border between this 'middle class proletarizada' and (the excluded) poverty tends to be diluted. And a fact more, according to a report published in The New York Times, sixty years ago an Executive means gaining 60 times more than an employee, today charged 100 times more. And if he is a Senior Executive of a large company, his salary can be multiplied by 700 of its workers.

So far calificábamos as middle class (merchants and small and medium-sized entrepreneurs liberal professionals, staff, and workers with fixed and reasonably paid jobs) is still dominant in the generation of babyboomers (those born in the 1950s and 1960s). But the subsequent generation, already described as babyloosers (losers children), while having a much higher level of training, are not getting access to levels of income, welfare and security (yet) enjoyed by their elders. Except for a minority segment, linked largely to what has been called the 'new economy', which is situated in a very short time and with a relative effort on the cusp of the social pyramid. Others, the vast majority, are the mileuristas, perhaps sentenced for life to chaining temporary with periods of unemployment contracts and involved no choice but to use low cost and the white mark.

But the crisis is giving a new extent to the process. To the thirtysomethings mileuristas them are added, to forced marches, the new unemployed older and the hundreds of thousands of freelancers and small business owners who have had to close their businesses or which have been dramatically reduced their level of income. With the difference that they do not tend to enjoy as much of the younger, the help of their elders, that which has been called the family mattress.

Thus, while in the Asian continent, in the next twenty years, join the class average about 800 million people (according to a recent study by the Asian Development Bank) in the West the traditional middle class shrinks and weakens. And emerges a new class on the border between the welfare and exclusion. I would call her the neutral class, a growing mass of desideologizados young people who declare their independence more and later, that they enter the labour market at ages more advanced, who are parents from the thirty and go to live by entering just enough to have just enoughindebted to the end of his days. A new large, homogeneous, and social class of consumers subprime, that they will buy on eBay, will fly in Ryanair, frecuentarán the works and the Chinese stores and will fill their fridges with increasingly white markings. Without ideals that cling, politically disabled, addicted to social networks and trash television, and basically, resigned.

On the other side of the divide, the old caste of the new rich, overcome the setback of the crisis and cleared the horizon, broken and obsolete social elevator, will continue to be interlacing the mimbres of the new global feudalism.