The biggest story over the last couple of weeks is the selection of Willard Romney’s vice-presidential running mate, a man called Paul Ryan, who seems to be the worst kind of fundamentalist capitalist. A man who’s indoctrination has engendered a hatred of women, of the LGBT community, of non-white people, of non-Christian people, of non-American (i.e. foreign) people, the environment, and of the people who cannot (legally) be exploited for profit, namely the elderly, the disabled and children. A disciple of the war on education and common sense that was the Bush II era, Ryan is so obsessed with the free market that any positive actions by him, such as opposing SOPA, are purely accidental and only occur if he thinks it in any way limits the expansion and entrenchment of capitalism. He is, quite rightly, viewed as nothing more than a suited psychopath, completely devoid of empathy or altruism and desiring to force millions of Americans (and whoever outside gets in America’s way) to slow, legal deaths (abolishing Medicaid, criminalising abortion, heavily taxing the elderly etc ad nauseum).

Accordingly, the groups most at risk of Ryan’s neoliberal fundamentalism have been in outrage over the hellish future that awaits them should Romney ever win office, and anyone with even a modicum of humanity and solidarity with fellow Americans have stood by them in vast numbers pledging never to let these ultra-conservative maniacs anywhere near the reigns of power. But in all the discussion of the democidal ‘economics’ presented as the alternative to Obama, there appears to be a bunch of people who don’t have their own shout-out on the catchy posters and Internet memes detailing the horrors of Ryan and Romney. Women are there, the elderly are there, students are there, the LGBT community is there – as they should be. And there’s a type of people who always get mentioned, like a journalistic tic one can’t get rid of lest some vague demographic complains they’ve been ignored, and that type of people is the ‘middle class’.

Class warfare has been acknowledged as the driving force behind political and economic policy by the 99% for years now, explicitly so since the Occupy movement was founded last year. The ‘99%’ are the billions of people who are not in the select club of people who monopolise all of the wealth, power and control that exists on planet earth. They are not the ones sending brainwashed teenagers to kill non-white people and steal their land. They are not the gambling addicts who shop around the casinos of Wall Street and the City of London. They are the people who have to spend their whole lives worrying about whether they will have enough food to eat or a roof over their heads or whether their children can ever realise their dreams. The ‘99%’ are ‘us’.

But if the ‘99%’ encapsulates the vast majority of humanity who are being exploited by capitalists and their extreme cult of neoliberalism, who are the ‘middle class’? The ‘99%’ is a totally horizontal definition, placing everyone of all creeds, colours, races, nationalities, genders, sexualities and physicalities in the same struggle to break up the monopolisation of wealth and power; ‘middle class’ means not only that there is a group of people who have somehow gravitated towards achieving this goal more than others (possibly at those others’ expense), but that there is a whole demographic of society ‘beneath’ them who do not deserve mentioning on the flashy anti-Romney/Ryan placards. ‘Middle class’ is apparently separate from women, from students, from the elderly, from LGBT people. Why?

There is no such thing as ‘middle class’. This is a pure ruling-class invention, designed to give certain people a comfortable psychological barrier from other certain people. To put it in layman’s terms, it means that someone who works a gruelling 40+ hour week, on minimum wage, in an office or similar working environment, is pressured by their employer not to join a union, pays for the lowest form of health insurance, and has to keep working until they’re in their late 60s, can feel superior to someone in exactly the same position because they own a more expensive car, a more expensive house, wear more expensive clothes, have the latest computers and gadgets, and goes on holiday abroad at least once a year. The ‘difference’ between ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’ is material, and only ever material. Of course a well-dressed family from a quiet sub-urb can’t be the same as some ‘white trash’ low-lifes living in cramped inner-city slums, the well-dressed family has the latest iPad! Even the 5-year-old!

The old name for the middle class was ‘bourgeoisie’, that ever-increasing number of working class people who, because they can afford to delude themselves that their lives are ‘better’ than those poorer than themselves, shut themselves off from all reality and anything that might endanger the status quo of their lives. So desperate are the bourgoisie to keep their material luxuries and maintain the illusion that they are not oppressed and exploited that they will do everything the ruling-class orders them to, whether that is to avoid joining a worker’s union or to spend all day every day watching reality tv. Vote according to your own selfish economic interests; the people at the bottom don’t matter, you’re the money makers, you’re the ones who pay the taxes and use public services, you’re the ones that matter.

And to put women’s rights, LGBT rights etc. up there alongside ‘middle class’ is to depoliticise and trivialise the struggles for these fundamental freedoms. As with how neoliberalism killed off second-wave feminism in the ’80s, matters of the personal become political. The fight for LGBT rights concerns anti-discrimination laws and same-sex marriage, forgetting to mention that LGBT youth are one of the largest demographics  within suicide and homeless rates. The elderly can wring out easy sympathy and outrage when it comes to hitting them with taxes, while matters such as adequate social care and facilities and programmes for seniors merits little more than glazed, silent expressions. No one bothers to put drug addicts on those slick anti-Romney/Ryan posters, or the millions suffering from Western involvement in wars and conflicts abroad, or slogans about how a severe lack of access to things like sex education and family planning causes more pregnancies to come from poor, working class families and individuals than anywhere else. No one discusses the dehumanisation and isolation from wider social and political life of black and other ethnic minorities, how they never seem to feature in news articles or discussions between politicans about themselves. No one crusades for better housing for the poor in particular, or even housing of any kind for the homeless. How about the rates of domestic and sexual violence among ghetto communities? Or how education standards in state/comprehensive schools are non-existent, yet in that school with the expensive uniform/dress code the struggle amongst the faculty is for better pay for teachers and amongst the students for greater numbers of black/women/LGBT people within school societies; the high standard of education at these schools is a given.

The ‘99%’ is one of the best ideas to come out of this increased public awareness of and involvement in politics, yet stupid ideological myths such as ‘middle class’ segregate and stratify us as though some people are lucky enough to only be partially exploited. Sorry, but this is bullshit. It doesn’t matter whether you can send your kids to university and not worry about the debt bankrupting you, or whether you own a holiday home in the picturesque countryside, at the end of the day it is your money that is being stolen to plug up the holes in the world financial system, your taxes that buy bombs and bullets massacring non-white people thousands of miles away, your ill-spent money that churns out the packaged, faceless slurry that passes for Western popular culture, and it is your fear, selfishness, ignorance and attachment to your material goods that the ruling-class is using to psychologically divide you from working with your impoverished, unclean, homeless, ill-educated and desperately in-need brothers and sisters right at the bottom of the pile.

So stop lying to yourselves and everyone else that there are varying degrees of exploitation and class warfare waged by the people at the top (the ‘1%’). It makes no difference if they steal your business or your body, unless you are part of that exclusive club then your life is being ravaged and dismantled in every way to squeeze as much money, time and labour out of you as possible. Your fancy car will not help you win the war against the 1%, but the unshaven, smelly, working class old guy in worn-out clothes and with a shattered sadness in his eyes who tries to clean your car’s windscreen at a traffic light, and millions of others like him, will, if you can bring yourself to let them.