Social Class

Throughout history in every class society there has been an oppressed class and a ruling class. The oppressed class creates the wealth of the society and the ruling class who controls that wealth. In The New Class Society, Robert Perrucci and Earl Wysong (1999) argue that a new "double diamond" class structure equates to a system that will create more poor Americans and keep them powerless to correct the situation. The bottom part of the class structure represents 80% of the population, including the comfort class, the contingent class, and the excluded class. The top of the double diamond is smaller and represents the privileged class, about 20% of the population made up of the super class and the credentialed class. The authors argue that the class system is organizationally based, with the privileged class able to rely on their class status and the workings of the class system (policy, army, judiciary) to maintain advantage: "Large organizations through various levels and groups of �gatekeepers' within them direct, channel, and legitimate the distribution of...resources to individuals and groups" (Perrucci and Wysong, 1999, 8). In the face of globalization and the loss of manufacturing class stratification has become even more pronounced in the U.S.

Despite the reality of class stratification, Americans are politically passive. Social and political issues are undermined by "Oprahfication", what the authors

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at lower in socioeconomic status than the U.S. average...with the top quartile of the population underrepresented" (Socioeconomic, 2002, 1). Perrucci (et al, 1999) argues that class position is fixed dependent on four kinds of critical capital: consumption capital, investment capital, credentialed skill capital, and social capital. The credentialed skill capital component of class position refers to access to elite universities and high-paying jobs. During the Vietnam War it was relatively simple for those from upper socioeconomic classes attending elite schools like Harvard and Yale to avoid military service. This was not the case for many individuals from the lower classes. In The Working Class War, historian Christian G. Apply "calculated that 80 percent of the American soldiers in Vietnam hailed from poor or blue-collar homes. Harvard's graduating class of 1970, in comparison, contained just two veterans among its nearly 1,200 men" (Freeman, 2002, 2). It is ironic that the figure of 80% should be a result in this study because that is the percentage of the population Perrucci (et al, 1999) argues is in the lower diamond of the new class structure in American society. By all accounts military service is a hierarchical wor

Category: History - S