Life seems so nice here in middle class paradise
With our carpet, our hardwood and tile
Since no one admits, even if it fits,
Most of us are near the bottom of the pile
We’re just peasants, you and I
Serfs, after all these years
Oh, the cubicles and amenities
Devices with brilliant lights
None of it means any of us
Have anything like “inalienable rights”
Instead of toiling for aristocracy
Now we live to serve the filthy rich
We wear suits and designer shoes
Never held a shovel in a ditch
The paychecks come and then they go
Buying what we’re told to think we need
Money moves in circles, always
Returning to those who never bleed
We’re just peasants, you and I
Serfs, after all these years
Oh, we thought we pulled one over
On the kings in granite towers
“Strength in numbers!”" we shouted
And installed marble in our showers
“We're equal!” we insisted, while voting
For coddled men we’ll never meet
And we kept believing this self-made lie
While trampled beneath their feet
The irony is that what we wanted
Is what enriches our new masters
Only a healthy middle class
Ensures they gain wealth faster
Had they realized this early on
We would have had “freedom” long before
Capitalist captains chuckle at the thought
That serfs insisted on giving them more
We’re just peasants, you and I
Serfs, after all these years
They tweak the formula from time to time
Wondering how it could work out even better
We cheer (or complain, forgetting both sides are the same)
Then follow their devious plans to the letter
We’re just peasants, you and I
Serfs, after all these years
After being kept awake long past my bedtime by my 15-month-old son — who was afraid of a thunderstorm — I set down these thoughts, which had been floating through my mind for a couple of days.
Supposedly, it was the Industrial Revolution that, over a century or two, finally freed most of the world's serfs and peasants from millenia of bondage to the land and built the new phenomenon: "the middle class". The rapid expansion of democracies and republics around the globe — replacing toppling monarchies — and the recognition of people's rights ("...all men are created equal...") allegedly created a break with the past, that ugly past where only the well-born had any power and the bulk of the populace toiled endlessly.
Yet I realized there was no break. The rich and powerful still have more rights. They are richer than ever before. The increase in our standard of living — electricity, appliances, clean drinking water, amazing medical technology, communication devices, air conditioning, and so on — only serve to increase the wealth of the upper class. None of these things are provided; they are purchased by us with the wages we earn for our toils. And our toils only serve to create the products and services for which we turn over those wages — at a profit to the owning class.
As it turns out, all the things the lower classes demanded — personal property, rights to come and go as we please, protections of our health and welfare — are the very things that have served to further enrich the relatively few families still at the top.