What are the differences between American and British social classes

Class is about a position in the institutional structure that governs the economy. That’s because this is the main thing that will determine income and thus your overall life prospects.

So the owners are the dominant class and that means the people at the top are the major owners of the businesses and banks. But there are degrees of size of businesses and the distinction between the capitalist elite and the small business element is a fuzzy boundary — but there is this distinction in both countries.

In “The Meaning of Marxism” by (non-Marxist) British socialist GDH Cole — writing in the ’40s — he notices that the change from the old to the new middle class had advanced very far in UK. This was also occurring in USA. So what is this distinction?

The old middle class were people who owned a farm or small business, like a small grocery or an owner of a small factory. As Cole points out, this class had already very greatly declined in Britain by the ’30s and ‘40s. But he also notes that members of the families with this background often moved on to the new kind of middle class position — as salaried professionals, managers and government officials.

Among professionals Cole also notes the distinction between the people in some kind of administrative power position related to other workers — like a company lawyer, or whatever — versus the lower level professionals who he calls “the black coated proletariat”. I suppose this is because in the ’40s in Britain it was standard garb back then for the lower level professionals — teachers, librarians, social workers and what not — to wear suits. I think he probably would include office clerks and sales people among the “black coated proletariat”.

The working class is very much the majority in both UK and USA. This class is made up of those who who have no independent source of livelihood — such as property income or owning a small business. So they must seek work from employers, and they work in subordinate positions. They do not have power to manage other workers, such as power of hiring and firing and the like. So this is the working class, and its more than 60 percent of the economically active population in USA — more if we add the lower level professionals like teachers, staff writers and the like. In that case more like three fourths. (On the size of the working class in the USA, see Michael Zweig, “The Working Class Majority”.)

Union membership is much higher in UK than in USA where it is now only 11 percent (less than 7 percent in the private sector — about where it was at in 1930). On the other hand, I have the impression that de-industrialization has gone farther in the UK than in the USA. I don’t have the statistics on this at my fingertips but USA still produces 19 percent of total world manufactured output.

Wages and the situation of the working class in general have declined in both countries but I think in different ways — workers in UK have the NHS, not the horrid health non-system we have in USA. In the USA this deterioration in the life prospects of the working class has gone very far. Wealth inequality is more extreme in the USA. Also, social mobility is actually lower in USA than in any of the countries of northern Europe. Thus the class structure of the USA has become quite rigid.

Because the USA didn’t inherit any European feudal structure the various effects or echoes of that in UK or other Euro countries we don’t have, so this can lead to a misleading impression of the USA — in fact inequality of social circumstances between the lower working class and the upper 10 percent has gotten to be very extreme in the USA.

As Irene Colthurst points out in her answer, the USA has inherited the racist legacy of the slave regime set up under the early British colonialism here. As a result of this social practices of racializing disfavored groups— especially people of African ancestry — became entrenched, and there is still both a very high level of racial inequality and also persistent patterns of race discrimination.

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