16/07/202215/07/2022
Everybody talks about the middle classes and nobody knows who they are. Because what is it to be middle class? A flat with a mortgage, a family car, summers in Torrevieja… The dream of One two Three. But who already remembers the pumpkin Ruperta: you who have gone to university, have a master’s degree, chain part-time internship contracts and continue to share a flat, of course not. Maybe that’s why we swim in the dark sea of uncertainty, from where the coast is no longer visible: have I stopped being middle class and haven’t I realized it? When I refer to the middle classes, should I use the first person plural or am I evoking an ancient and remote race? We invoke them more than ever because we sense that they are an endangered species.
Science, capable of translating miracles into the language of mathematics, has a simple answer as for almost everything: the middle class would be nothing more than a statistical median. Thus, the OECD includes in this category all those people who receive between 75% and 200% of the average income of a country, and last year’s World Inequality Report placed the population with average income in those who are below above the poorest 50% and below the richest 10%. Too wide ranges, in any case, a vague hope that there will always be a middle class by definition, but we already know the great trap of statistics: the master eats two chickens, the servant none, and they touch chicken per head. Because, according to the INE, the average income per inhabitant stood at 12,269 euros net per year in 2021, and with that, you can enjoy few apartments on the beach.
Then there is the subjective perception: I ask my family what income they consider to be middle class, and although they offer me a figure that points to the average income per household in Madrid (around 35,000 euros, although a household can be made up of one person or one couple with three children, the grandmother, the canary and the neighbor’s son who comes to have a snack and stays all afternoon playing play), I realize with dismay that they are evicting me from little less than the queue of hunger.
49% of Spaniards consider themselves middle class, because it is ugly to say before the cameras or the pollster that one is poor or is upper class. Those who have no qualms about recognizing themselves as rich are people we don’t usually hang out with, and who never come across a pollster in Callao. The interviewer in the folder, a sociology intern, is not allowed to enter the luxury housing estates, and if they were, the most he would get is someone from the service opening the door for him and telling him that the gentlemen don’t find at home.
For politicians who take this phantasmagoria of the middle class as the preferred addressee of their speech, these are all advantages: Pedro Sánchez clings to the phrase “the middle and working class”, as if they were synonyms (it is very likely that this middle class work, although they probably also have some patrimonial pinch; and of course it is more questionable that every worker can proclaim himself middle class, despite his bourgeois aspirations), and offers them free commuter train, wherever there are. Ayuso’s middle class, on the other hand, does not travel by public transport, so they need other types of aid.
And it is that the government of the Community of Madrid not only does not see the poor, that million and a half of Madrilenians (almost 22 out of every 100 households) who, according to the Cáritas report, are at risk of social exclusion, but also considers that households with incomes of more than 100,000 euros per year have difficulty making ends meet. Take note, friend Isabel: the mortgage on the townhouse with a swimming pool and community green areas, the apartment in Benalmádena and Christmas in Baqueira, the bills on the SUV and the Mini (because the townhouse in question is to be taken for granted and if you run out milk, the closest thing is the gas station minimarket), with what it costs now to fill the tank, the children’s private school, rhythmic gymnastics or cello classes, the salary of the “girl” whom we have had to register with Social Security… They arrive as drowned at the end of the month as a family from Vallecas, with their father unemployed and all living off their grandfather’s pension.
I believe it, but the joke in bad taste of the Ayuso scholarships is not only in the level of income that they will be able to have access to, in that they are separated from academic performance or go to private educational centers, or that icing on the cake disgust that it is that a private company is going to “manage” them (come on, that looks like a scholarship like this computer on which I write looks like a leg of black-legged ham), but rather, with its policies neoliberals, are throwing stones at their own roof. Because the chair they sit in, the salary they earn, depends on the very existence of these middle classes.
And it is that the political discourse insists on the middle classes not so much because of the illusory conviction that they are the majority of voters, but because it knows of their strategic importance. The middle class is not only a certain level of income, it is a way of thinking and being in the world, a whole worldview. The Aristotelian virtue of the middle term, or the “fair mean” claimed by the French doctrinaire liberals: neither dictatorship nor revolution.
Europe understood it perfectly after the Second World War, even if it required the trauma of devastation to do so. Focus efforts on the numbing power of economic progress and the material well-being of the population; create a consumer society that, thanks to mortgages, bills and installment payments (the overdue bill of the motorcar of the Placid of Berlanga, who knew how to laugh so well for decades at all the traps they made us fall into), charter flights and vacation packages, could enjoy the luxuries until then reserved for a few. In this way, people were kept distracted from politics and institutional stability was preserved with a centripetal bipartisanship (social democracy and Christian democracy) around large basic consensuses: European integration or the welfare state. Redistributive justice is not a moral ideal, but a political strategy: West Germany went from selling 900,000 pairs of nylon stockings in 1950 to 58 million pairs in 1953. And just like that, a nation forgets Nazism.
Our politicians, however, are allowing inequalities to grow dangerously: in Madrid alone, the difference in income has doubled from 2017 to 2021. If in 2015 a Spaniard spent 28% of his average salary paying for housing, today he spends 41 %, and up. The salary devaluation imposed by the austerity policies after the Great Recession of 2008, in the absence of being able to devalue the common currency, has forced us to work more and more and be poorer. The inflation that we are suffering these days, and no, it is not Sánchez’s fault, has come to put the finishing touch to the mirage of the middle class. And without a middle class, Aristotle warned us about 2,500 years ago, it is not possible Politeiathe best democratic form of government.
Because economic inequality couples political polarization, polarization, social conflict, and from there to civil war is a step away. They play with fire because they know that 25% of the Spanish population at risk of exclusion, more than 12 million citizens, is increasingly detached from politics and votes less in each election. But they don’t seem to want to open their eyes to another evidence: that sooner or later the day always comes when that quarter of the people get fed up and set everything on fire.
Or is that what they are looking for?
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