I have been on lecture about British society and there are huge differences between former states.
It is much more complex than that. There are not two classes of people, nor are there three as it is often claimed (this is not just Britain I am talking about). However, in Britain, there are many so-called middle class values within the working classes; a middle class derived from both working and the lower echelons of the upper class; people who seem to be upper class of some sort, but whose roots lie in 19th century working class Ireland; blah blah blah. As I said: it is quite complex.
Some base these social distinctions solely on employment, some on ownership of property, some on whether or not you had a library card as a child, or if you have seperate knives and forks for fish, whether the milk goes in your teacup before or after the tea, perhaps even by where your parents were on the social scale. In some parts of the world, if your house has a proper floor rather than one made of mud, you might be considered middle class.
Quite a few of the Poles I have worked with have, if not grown up on farms themselves, have had close family members working on farms. But agriculture alone is not enough to make social distinctions between people. Some parts of Poland have lots of small farms, other parts have much larger farms, on a par in scale with many western (or northwestern) European farms. Likewise, townsfolk may also be well-off or not.
At long last, back to Poland. Wasn't communism supposed to level out all the people into those who are equal and those who are more equal than others? I'm more interested in how history has shaped Polish society (as an example of a country which has come from feudalism, into industrialisation and through communism).
And so on and so on. What was the question?
