Many Americans always believe that they too will someday join the 1%. As John Steinbeck noted, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
However, Gregory Clark, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, found that social mobility had diminished significantly in the past 100 years in the US.
“America has no higher rate of social mobility than medieval England or pre-industrial Sweden,” Clark said. “That’s the most difficult part of talking about social mobility, is because it is shattering people’s dreams.” He said social mobility is little different in the United States than in other countries, where ancestry strongly predicts adult social status. “The status of your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, and your great-great grandchildren will be quite closely related to your average status now”.
The only way to change this is to remove the mechanism that creates it. End this market/money system, and instead build system based on access to the wealth and abundance of the world that would eliminate the need for politics, the market, money and many other ills that plague the world. The American Dream is no dream at all. It’s just propaganda. It keeps the hamsters on wheel, hoping for a better life that never really arrives. Rags-to-riches is a reigning US myth. Most life histories consist of riches-to-riches, and rags-to-rags.
There are only two contending classes in our society, the working class and the capitalist class. The former has nothing to sell but their ability to work, in exchange for a wage or salary, or claim benefits if unable to find work or too sick or elderly to work. The latter, on the other hand, own all of society's means of production and distribution, and so can command the labor-powers of the former. The latter literally lives off the collective labor of the former. If social mobility is defined as movement out of the working class and into the capitalist class, and vice versa, then there is very little of it. However, the improvement of such mobility shouldn't be our goal because the division of society into classes and their relationship to each other is exploitative, oppressive and unjust. Anyone who thinks otherwise is lying to themselves and others. Our true goal should be the abolition of the capitalist class system and the state, fought for by the working class, united and self-organized.
George Carlin summed it up best many years ago, " They call it the American Dream because the only time most people will ever experience it is when they are asleep."
It's always been a lie that America's economic system supplied some sort of equal opportunity to everyone for social mobility. Sure we occasionally see the cliche of a small business started in a garage lead to vast wealth, but statistically for everyone of those that succeeds there are hundreds of thousands that don't. For working class capitalism is like the lottery. Some people do occasionally win, but it's very rare. And as John Lennon said “The rich let a few of us succeed, to give the rest of us false hope.”