The five hundred year growth of the middle class has made the world what it is today. Unfortunately, few people recognize this phenomenon, how significant a change it represents, and the freedom it has brought to people. Before Gutenberg, Columbus, and Luther, about eighty percent of the people in the world were serfs or slaves; hereditary tyrants ruled most countries; and these tyrants fought wars of imperialism amongst themselves. Today fewer than half of humanity work as landless peasants; slavery and hereditary tyranny does not officially exist outside of the Islamic world; and all the European colonial empires have disappeared. The accelerated expansion of the middle class has now extended all over the globe, not merely Western Europe and America.

These recent advances have depended primarily on the growth of communication technology starting with the modern printing press. The role of communication in human advancement is not new, however. The whole history of mankind is the Age of Information, not the last thirty years or so. Human progress has always depended upon improvements in the Quality, Quantity, and Quickness of information exchange. The accumulation of information about farming led to the formation of civilization 5000 years or so ago. The early farming states developed writing to keep track of that information and mathematics to decide who owned what land and owed what taxes on that land. This enabled cities to grow into states and then empires, the political basis for the various civilizations. People in these societies lived longer than the previous Hunter-Gatherers or Nomadic Barbarians, but generally enjoyed less personal freedom.

The four major ancient civilizations, China, India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, moved somewhat in parallel to develop the agricultural tyrannies and their empires, each having roughly the same class structure consisting of four major levels. The ruling classes were the Warriors, split into Royalty and Nobility, and the Literati, split into secular bureaucrats and religious hierarchies. They used serfs and slaves to do the hard work of raising crops, tending the animals, and doing other menial jobs. The middle class, often formally called Artisans, made the tools, handled trade, did specialized work like fishing, and other activities outside of the sphere of the other three classes. They tended to learn reading more than the warriors or the serfs.

Starting with the development of the modern printing press by Gutenberg, common people had greater access to information. As more people became literate, they gained increased access to various skills, resulting in an expanding middle class. Most of the modern advances in information technology have developed in America over the last century and a half. As a consequence, English has become the common language of the middle class, and has led to the world MEGACULTURE, a development allowing hundreds of millions to communicate instantly throughout the world, for economic, cultural, artistic, or other purposes.

Use of modern communications technology lifts a person up out of ignorance and oppression more than any other factor, whether or not such proficiency extends into the workplace. Nevertheless, in general, the more literate the population in any given country, the more skilled becomes the labor force. Of course, those in the ruling classes before this phenomenon began, the Nobility, Royalty, the Religious Literati, and the Bureaucrats, did not accept without resistance the growth of the middle class in political and economic power. Starting about five hundred years ago, after Gutenberg made it possible, people in all classes began learning to read in order originally to access the Bible and other religious works, but found that as they gained this skill, they could also find a higher level of employment and so the middle class began to grow as reflected in the Read=Work Curve following

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The Read-Work Curve represents the growth of literacy and the middle class in the Anglo-American superculture, but can extend to other cultures with a different year axis. This phenomenon does not depend only on economic factors, but extends into cultural, linguistic, religious, political and other aspects of human activity as well. The first middle class culture, that of the Hebrews, also started first with the desire for everyone to read scripture, followed by increased skill and employability, although their development along these lines started at about the time of Ezra and Nehemiah two thousand years before. After people enter the middle class and acquire relatively more wealth, this complex process does not stop either, but continues to flourish and expand into all other spheres in harmony similar to that expressed in the curve above for literacy and work alone. Joining the middle class improves a family in more ways than merely financial.

The ruling classes did not accept the loss of their power passively. Several attempts to halt the rise of the middle class have taken place, starting with the opposition by the entrenched Religious Literati, in what we popularly call “the Spanish Inquisition.” The Royals and Nobles have also resisted unsuccessfully the growth of the middle class.

The most successful reactionary movement opposed to the growth of the middle class solidified around the work of Marx and other socialists in the late nineteenth century. This regressive movement has served to place more power in the hands of the bureaucrats, the Secular Literati, not the hereditary tyrants whom they used to serve, nor their erstwhile allies in the Religious Literati. The true class struggle involves therefore the middle class versus the bureaucrat class. Consequently, the Left is not progressive, but reactionary. The idea that an elite group must rule the common workers, Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat,” did not originate with him originate with him, but goes back at least to Plato’s idea of the rule by Philosopher-Kings. The truly new concept in Marx’s dialectical materialism is the rejection of Religion as the “opiate of the people.” In previous times the Secular Literati and the Religious Literati tended to work together, so that socialists have actually weakened themselves by cutting out their former partners.