The Canadian Caste System

"Whereas in North America, there is perpetual movement - in both directions."

I'm not so sure that this is in fact so true.  I'm sure there are studies someone here knows about that would shed light.   But, it's my experience that people, by and large, either do what their parents did, for income, or inhabit much the same economic strata that their parents did.   

I suspect the idea of class mobility in the U.S. and Canada is largely mythological.

Terminology aside, I think Webgear's question is a very interesting one.  I'm not sure there's an answer in terms of some absolute reality-- there are so many different ways to differentiate and catagorize ourselves.

But, each answer will probably tell us more about the respondent than it sheds light on our society.

TP:

"I suspect the idea of class mobility in the U.S. and Canada is largely mythological."

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The idea didn't die, Tommy, only the reality...starting about three decades back. Oh, the brighter lights can count on "movin' on up", but the cost of education today is more and more making that a very class-specific act in our marvelous meriticracy. And, of course, we know that there is still the business method and the mob.

Well, this isn't ahrd statistics but just based on my own experiences: My mother's parents were both Holocaust survivors who came here with nothing. her dad worked in a steel mill in Hamilton. My dad's parents ran a little tailoring shop in Montreal. My parents, one generation removed from working-class, immigrant parents are, respectively, a physician and lawyer, lived in Forest Hill, all their kids went to university. My wife immigrated to New York from Iran as a baby, parents spoke no English. She's now a successful physician.

The silver bullet has been access to education which allows one to get those otehr categories - professional and monetary. I know things are getting ahrd with regards to access to education but I think if you were to look at the student body of Med school, law school, MBA programs, etc., you'd find a lot of people not too far removed from being in those "lower castes."

Well, in the case of my family, it was slave labour for the Nazis.

Star Spangled Canadian wrote:

Well, in the case of my family, it was slave labour for the Nazis.

What I meant was what were they doing before the Nazi's came along?

Webgear you should perhaps hold off on adding categories till you address the initial list. I'm still waiting for your rational on your initial c and d, as asked in post #4.

As for the latest 3 I can only see the rational for language. Urban/Rural for example, is a combination of things such as income and education, already listed in the OP. Religion is only significant when combined with language and cultural barriers, and should not be considered in itself, imo.

My two cents. 

As I understand the Indian caste system,  a poor person could become the wealthiest person in India, but they'd still not be brahmin. 

Similarly, if we look at France before the revolution, and England during the Industrial Revolution,  many aristocrates (particularly in France, which had different rights of inheritance) were in fact penniless, while the emerging middle class had a lot of money.

But for the middle class to ascend to the aristocracy, they had to marry into it.  And even then,  they did not escape the taint of not being born into it.

This, to me is a caste system.  Something determined by birth.  

 Is this happening in Canada?  I think there are elements of it, enforced systemically through things like access to education,  for example, and other monetary means.

However, on paper and in practice, I think there are too many excpetions and theoretical exceptions for it to be compared to rigid caste systems that have existed in Britain, India or Japan for examples.

There is a distinction though - someone like Mike Lazaridis (Research-in-Motion billionaire, if you aren't familiar) still isn't quite going to fit in socially with older-money types. It seems like less of an issue from afar, but I'd expect it would matter a lot more in those circles.

Doug wrote:

There is a distinction though - someone like Mike Lazaridis (Research-in-Motion billionaire, if you aren't familiar) still isn't quite going to fit in socially with older-money types. It seems like less of an issue from afar, but I'd expect it would matter a lot more in those circles.

I was having the same thought about not becoming part of the 'old money' group just because you have money.

However, does anyone really care?

EWell nowadays we  have "rock", hollywood", literary" and "fashion" royalty, which I find nasty and needing to be stopped, along with all the historical types of royalty.

Excellent breakdown ceti, but I would add within your breakdowns, there are  class subsets as well. I believe these subsets, on either side of the boundary markers, are the functional barriers that buttress, or enliven,  the persistence of stated socio-economic boundaries. These subsets are where the mobility between classes occur, and the absolute caste, within the class, remains mobility untouched. Except of course for the mushy middle, which is being thrown under the bus by both the over classes, so that they may sustain their caste levels.

As such, the mushy middle, in urban areas, will find themselves in lower caste regard, than the working poor in rural areas, though perhaps not as low as being part of an actual underclass, if they do not unite with both rural area working poor, and the underclass, and with those in the subset of the upper middle class who may recognize they are under threat as well, namely union workers.

A US perspective but I think it is useful here as well.

[url=http://www.monthlyreview.org/0706zweig.htm]Michael Zweig: Six Points on Class[/url]

Quote:

We need to change the understanding of class in the United States, going from the division of “rich and poor” to the division of “worker and capitalist.”

When we popularize this more accurate and useful terminology, we will convey a better grasp of class dynamics and make it easier to address the continuing operation of racism and sexism in American society. We will also contribute to the construction of political movements capable of reversing the decades-old trend towards ever-more-consolidated corporate power at the expense of working people, regardless of race and gender.

We should identify the class divisions as between the working class, 62 percent of the U.S. labor force—a substantial majority of the American people—and the corporate elite (or capitalist class), who make up only 2 percent. In between these classes is the middle class (36 percent of the U.S. labor force).1

The “Two Americas” John Edwards identified in 2004 and the “Two New Yorks” Fernando Ferrer identified in his 2005 mayoral bid refer to crucial realities that should be front and center in our political conversations and social policy. But these divisions are not best understood as simply the difference between “rich and poor.”

“Class” must be understood in terms of power rather than income, wealth, or life style, although these do vary by class. Using power as the starting point allows us to see class as a dynamic relationship rather than as a static set of characteristics. Investigating class as a question of power also makes it possible to find the organic links among class, race, and gender. Looking at class in terms of income, wealth, life style, or education separates it from race and gender, which are best understood as power relationships rather than inherent characteristics individuals possess.

The working class are those people with relatively little power at work—white-collar bank tellers, call-center workers, and cashiers; blue-collar machinists, construction workers, and assembly-line workers; pink-collar secretaries, nurses, and home-health-care workers—skilled and unskilled, men and women of all races, nationalities, and sexual preferences. The working class are those with little personal control over the pace or content of their work and without supervisory control over the work lives of others. There are nearly 90 million working-class people in the U.S. labor force today. The United States has a substantial working-class majority.

The capitalist class are the corporate elite, senior executives, and directors of large corporations, whose job it is to give strategic direction to the company, who interact with government agencies and other corporate executives while leaving the day-to-day operation of their company to intermediate levels of management and the workforce. In this they are different from small business owners, who tend to work beside their relatively few employees and manage them directly. These small business owners, while literally capitalists in that they employ wage labor, are better understood to be in the middle class, as will be discussed below.

The ruling class is considerably smaller than the full capitalist class and includes non-capitalists as well. If we think of the ruling class as those who give strategic direction to the country as a whole, extending beyond their own business or institution, we can identify those corporate directors who sit on multiple boards, thus having an opportunity to coordinate capitalist activity across enterprises, and add to them the political elites of the three branches of national government and cultural and educational leaders who contribute to the furtherance of corporate interests. The entire U.S. ruling class could fit into the seats at Yankee Stadium (capacity: 54,000).

The middle class are professionals, small-business owners, and managerial and supervisory employees. They are best understood not as the middle of an income distribution but as living in the middle of the two polar classes in capitalist society. Their experiences have some aspects shared with the working class and some associated with the corporate elite.

Small business owners, for example, share with capitalists an interest in private property in business assets, defeated unions, and weak labor regulations. But they share with workers the work itself, great vulnerability to the capitalist market and government power, and difficulty securing adequate health insurance and retirement security.

Professionals are also caught in the middle of the cross fire in the principal class conflict between labor and capital. If we look at the experience over the last thirty years of professionals whose lives are closely intertwined with the working class—community college teachers, lawyers in public defender offices or with small general practices, doctors practicing in working-class neighborhoods, and public school teachers—their economic and social standing have deteriorated, along with the class they serve. But if we look at those whose lives are more fully involved in serving the capitalist class—corporate lawyers, financial service professionals, Big-Four CPAs, and doctors who practice beyond the reach of HMOs and insurance company oversight—these professionals have risen in fortune with the class they serve, albeit to a lesser extent, absolutely and proportionately.

Professionals in most parts of the academic community (especially in colleges closely linked to working-class constituencies) are experiencing the pain of corporate pressure as working-class people do. In the process many academic jobs have been degraded. They are no longer relatively secure tenure-track middle-class positions, but adjunct and visitor positions staffed by a growing second tier of people working at will with virtually no professional standing, a new academic working class.2

“Working class” is best understood differently from the Department of Labor (DOL) category “production and non-supervisory” employee. This DOL category includes every employee who is not a supervisor, like most professors and other middle-class professionals working for a salary. However, lumping all employees who have no supervisory power over others into the working class masks the real differences in social position that professional people enjoy, beleaguered as they may be. Appreciating the contradictory location of professional and other middle-class employees helps to understand the political vicissitudes characteristic of this section of the population and suggests ways of approaching them as allies to working-class politics.

additionally, i know of many cases where privilege trumps knowledge- hence the hiring of those with little knowledge yet stuffy backgrounds.