We’re all proletarian nowadays

Forty years ago a single skilled manual wage was enough to provide a living for a working-class man, his wife and family. Now even a middle-class couple with both partners working can't bring in enough to make ends meet.

The golden age for the salaried worker across all the OECD countries was between 1945 and 1973, when ordinary working people gained their highest percentage share of GDP. Since then the real wages of the middle and working class have stagnated or fallen, while income for the rich has rocketed and that of the super-rich has hit the stratosphere.

The facts are astounding. Contrary to the delusions of the free-market fundamentalists, the Thatcher/Reagan revolution has come at a great cost to the working and middle classes. In the US, the top one per cent have seen a 78 per cent increase in their share of national income since 1979 with the bottom 80 per cent of the population experiencing a 15 per cent fall.

Far from being a tide that raises all boats, neo-liberalism has undermined the wealth and security of the majority of the working population. In Britain for example, the liquid wealth of the bottom half of the populace has fallen from 12 per cent in 1976 to just one per cent in 2003, while the top 0.01 per cent in Britain are taking a larger share of national income than at any time in modern history and have seen their incomes rise by more than 500 per cent in under a generation.

Wage earners have coped with this structural shift by taking on unprecedented levels of debt, working more and asking their partners to join the workforce. Family life has suffered; children see less of their parents than at any time in the last 100 years and since nobody has any time, civic life has virtually vanished.

But there are signs that the general population across the globe has had enough of this rampant inequity. According to a recent FT/Harris poll, huge worldwide majorities consider income inequality to be too great. The percentages against this global shift to the rich are remarkably consistent: 87 per cent in Germany consider income inequality to be too great, 76 per cent in Spain agree. Even in Britain 74 per cent of people believe the rich should be taxed more and the poor less. What is most striking is that 80 per cent of the Chinese concur.

Clearly there is a massive global revulsion at the new global super-class. The sense of injustice that is heightened by the fact the super-rich manipulate companies and nation states, creating a whole network of tax avoidance that means in practice they pay less than one per cent of their real income in tax. With over $11tr held in offshore tax havens, politicians are still taxing their own citizens heavily while climbing over each other to offer tax breaks and incentives to the super-rich who refuse to pay their fair share.

So extreme is the current situation that it is not foolish to speak of the proletarianisation of the middle class. Indeed workers and the professional classes now have a common interest and that is changing the terms of the political and economic settlement such that they receive a greater reward for their labour.

The trouble is the governing class is still seduced by neo-liberalism – they cannot see that the vast majority of their citizens no longer want to live under a system that effectively impoverishes them for the benefit of a small cabal of owners and speculators. Even Warren Buffet has spoken of the rise of a new dynastic wealth that effectively dismantles meritocracy and destroys social mobility.

If governments do not react to the new reality of economic insecurity, they risk unprecedented social upheaval. Students of history know that revolutions occur when the middle classes make common cause with the workers. The middle classes now see themselves as wage slaves - and in the end slaves inevitably stage an uprising. ·