The reproduction of social classes

Abduljaleel, 25 years old

I was sitting at the back of my car and my driver was taking me to college when I told him to go pick up my new spectacles from villagio. And so I gave him the receipt and tried to simplify my language with half Arabic and half English to make him understand what I’m trying to say. But I was surprised when he replied with a fine English with a good accent! I was even more surprised when he told me that he completed two years of his college life and couldn’t afford the rest so he dropped off.

Social classes reproduce itself
Abduljaleel’s Father was a Driver and worked so hard for his son not to be a driver and to educate him. But social classes tend to reproduce itself, and social mobility is almost impossible for working class people. It’s as they call it the American dream that social mobility can be achieved by hard work and personal effort. However, social mobility can’t be easily reached, and the idea of that all men are created equal with equal chances is just a dream! Since his father was a driver his future can be expected the day he was born. We can’t predict that he will be a driver as his dad but sociologist will agree that his social status remains as his dad’s, because social classes reproduce itself.

And so he dropped off his American dream!
After two years of college he wasn’t able to afford the rest so he dropped off and became a driver as his father. Social class is not about how hard someone works but rather it is inherited. And because Abduljaleel was born in a lowbrow culture and almost everyone around him was poor and from the same social class mobilization remained just a dream!



Why Social classes reproduce itself?
It is the way that the bourgeoisies (high-class) have set up the society to benefit themselves is preventing the low class people to mobilize upward. The most obvious example is the low wages of the working class people. With low wages none of the working class people is able to afford education or better life. Because if all proletariat (low-class) were able to educate their children and mobilize upward there will be no one left to do the hard work. So bourgeoisies set up the society in a way that they will remain the high-class people.

Updated

When I was in 6th grade, our final class project was to map out our life and where we would be in 20 years. Appropriately titled, “This is your life,” the project was supposed to be a fun way to map out our future. Each student basically designed his/her own ‘American Dream,’ complete with the notion of the white picket fence.

Naïve is an understatement. I think I may have been delusional at the time, with my desires of becoming a forensic scientist (remember the days of CSI?). Alas, I can't be too harsh on my 6th grade self, mainly because, at the time, Qatar was not in my vocabulary, much less on my radar of places I wanted to go.

My visions have definitely changed, but the conceptual ‘American Dream’ still lives on. As a through-line in American historiography, everyone, at some point, has had his/her own interpretation of the American dream. Hollywood may have been the first one to exploit the dream for financial gains, but its trajectory through American history is older than the nation itself.

As early as the 1700’s, Benjamin Franklin’s aphorisms in Poor Richard’s Almanac depicted sage advice for Americans. Pithy phrases like “He that has a trade has an estate” and “Industry, perseverance, and frugality make fortune yield.” This brings us back to Weber’s protestant work ethic in defining capitalist nations and their work/spending habits.
Franklin’s key to life is summed up in hard work and education. Can Franklin safely promise these outcomes? Not really, but he isn’t the only one who has tried. American writer Horatio Alger wrote wildly popular ‘rags-to-riches’ stories in the 19th century. In modern times, Hollywood isn’t the only one to portray the gleaming American dream. Nas’ 2003 song, “I can” has the same message. “I know I can…Be what I wanna be…If I work hard at it…I'll be where I wanna be,” sung by a chorus of children.



Part of me wants to believe that the American dream is a possibility for everyone. But at the same time, how high is the deck stacked against those who try to achieve upward social mobility? Talk to any Occupy Wall Street protester and they will give you one set of answers. Talk to a Wharton Business school graduate and you will get a completely different answer.

Everyone wants to be The Joneses

In this blog post I will be talking about conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure in the movie, “The Joneses”. In this movie a self-marketing unit working on increasing the revenue of other companies hires a fake family to promote for their products. The Joneses, who are living the American Dream, come to this neighborhood with the company’s products, fancy cars, clothe. They have to live in a fancy house and get the job of making others want the products they have done. Throughout the movie, we see conspicuous consumption appear when The Joneses wear and use purchases such as phones, jewelry, food, ect, making people around them impressed.



From the readings and especially the movie we watched previously, “Six Degrees Of Separation”, we always see how highbrow culture consumers tend to sell their life style to people of lowbrow culture. Yet, in this movie, we see fake, high social class family trying to sell their lifestyle to their upper class neighbors. “If people want you, they want what you’ve got”, and according to that The Joneses manage to be the most popular and wanted people in the town by making connections with store owners, throwing parties and making friends, impressing them with the things they own and make them want to own those things as well.



The increases in revenues of these companies are measured by numbers, calculations and graphs. Each member of the fake family is asked to get the highest numbers possible. The fake family did not display class and status through the things they have, yet, they also practiced high-culture pastimes as we see the man of the fake family playing golf, and play classical music.



In short, the movie, “The Joneses” shows us how people of highbrow cultures live, and the effect they can have on each others’ decisions. As known such movies are pointed to people of lowbrow culture, but in real life such life style affect people of highbrow culture too.