Word: classlessness
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...great bugaboo of Soviet life, is being sacrificed to pragmatism in order to get things done. And the regime is facing a growing gap between Russia's government and its citizens, brought about by the onslaught of technology and the rise of new and striving classes in the "classless society...
This tale of delay is not uncommon in the Soviet Union, which long regarded service jobs as demeaning and accorded them low status and pay. In a classless society, a plumber, a waiter or a barber was thought to lack self-respect because he had to cater to others. The result, not surprisingly, has been a severe shortage of trained people in the whole range of service occupations...
Nobody, of course, is hypnotized into gambling, and illegal gambling flourishes today because the customers are there. Once considered either the elegant pastime of the rich or the grubby escape of the poor, it is now virtually classless. Who plays which game? Dealers and other psychologists offer only rough generalizations: competitive types favor man-against-man games such as blackjack; intellectual types and women more passive pursuits such as roulette; craps, with its rattles, pitches and shouts of "Baby needs shoes!" attracts the assertive male. As for horseplayers, according to one sociologist, about 60% are lower- and middle-class...
...both sides of the Atlantic, the fast expansion of credit-card systems is paving the way for what may some day be a cashless society. But it won't be a classless society-at least in Europe. Beginning next month, a favored few will be able to flash what promises to be the most patrician card of them all: a plastic ducat bearing the famed five-arrow emblem of the House of Rothschild and the blue-and-yellow racing colors of Guy Edouard Alphonse Paul de Rothschild, 57, head of the Paris branch of the family...
...actually keeping them marching along together is not nervousness, though there is still some of that, or just good will, though there is a lot more of that. It is above all a common share in America's vast affluence, a common stake in a country, as nearly classless as any in the world, that gives the worker a better life than he has known since the wheels of the industrial revolution first started to turn...