Submitted by Marvin Miller

Societies divide their populations into classes–groups of people who have power, prestige, privilege, and property to a greater or lesser extent. Many different bases have been, and are, used for such classification–caste, race, sex, ancestry, birthplace, religion, language, for a few examples. People in different classes regard and treat each other differently. Such differences conflict with the humanistic ethic, which calls on us to regard and treat others as our equals.

Sex is not usually thought of as a class distinction. But in most places in the world women do not have all the rights that men have, e.g. rights to educational and employment opportunities, to political participation, and even to decide what goes on inside their own bodies. In some places, female fetuses are aborted because they are female.

Racism assigns people with particular physical characteristics to inferior status, placing them in a lower class than those with different appearances.

In the Bible, the stories of Abraham and Jacob, and the tenth commandment, refer to a society in which some people had servants and others were servants.

In England some people have titles of nobility which give them higher status than others. The revolutionaries who created our country banned such titles in the Constitution. But inequalities of income and wealth have created a society here that is as much divided by class as is Britain.

There are various ways of classifying people economically. The Federal government has an official poverty line based on income, calling people with less than a specified income “poor”and qualifying them for some anti-poverty benefits. But the poverty line is based on the cost of food, as it was in the 1930s when it was established. The price of other necessities, such as housing and health care, has gone up much faster than that of food, so people who aren’t “poor” can still be homeless.

Politicians often talk about the middle class. Conservatives also often use the term “class warfare”, by which they mean informing those who are not in the ruling class that  class warfare is being waged against them by the ruling class.

In one way of thinking about class, the poor are those who don’t have enough purchasing power for their current needs, the middle class are those who have enough for these but are insecure about having enough for their future needs, and the rich are those who have enough for current and future needs and for whom additional wealth means greater power in competition with others of their class. That’s why, for the rich, too much is never enough.

People in Boston Ethical think of ourselves as middle class. But when we use this term, we may subconsciously think of a distribution like the normal distribution, with most individuals in the middle and few at either end. The income and wealth distributions are very far from normal. Imagine a chart of wealth distribution on an eight inch wide sheet of paper. Zero wealth is at the left side of the sheet. Bill Gates’s wealth, which has been estimated at eighty billion dollars, is at the right edge. Donald Trump’s claimed ten billion is one inch from the left edge. A million dollars is 0.0001 inch from the left edge. To those in the Gates, Walton, or Koch class,the wealth of almost everyone is microscopic.

Purchasing power is political power — the power to offer campaign money to a candidate one likes and to an opponent of a candidate one doesn’t like. A society with grossly unequal political power cannot honestly be called democratic. Progress toward democracy requires reduction in disparities of economic class.