'...today, the only class which, in its 'subjective'
self perception, explicitly conceives of an presents itself as a class
is the notorious 'middle class' which is precisely the 'non-class': the
allegedly hard-working middle strata of society which define themselves
not only by their allegiance to firm moral and religious standards, but
by a double opposition to both 'extremes' of the social space - non-patriotic
'deracinated' rich corporations on the one side; poor excluded immigrants
and ghetto-members on the other. The 'middle class' grounds its identity
in the exclusion of both extremes which, when they are directly counterpoised,
give us 'class antagonism' at its purest. The constitutive lie of the
very notion of the 'middle class' is thus the same as that of the true
Party line between the two extremes of 'right-wing deviation' and left-wing
deviation' in Stalinism: the 'middle class' is, in its very 'real' existence,
the embodied lie, the denial of antagonism - in psychoanalytic terms,
the 'middle class' is a fetish, the impossible intersection of left and
right which, by expelling both poles of the antagonism into the position
of antisocial 'extremes' which corrode the healthy social body (multinational
corporations and intruding immigrants), presents itself as the neutral
common ground of Society. In other words, the 'middle class' is the very
form of the disavowal of the fact that 'Society doesn't exist' (Laclau)
- in it, Society does exist.