E

njoying your weekend? Either savoring Sunday brunch, sweating at the gym, catching the latest flick and frocks or, hopefully, spending time outside malls with your beloveds, I wish you a good time.

One does need rest after toiling away at work for 5-6 days, often into the wee hours, in addition to braving the gruesome urban traffic. Especially if one has paid due taxes and cast votes at elections, what’s there to stop enjoying the hard-earned fruits of one’s hard work?

Yet, lo and behold, to some ultra-vigilant eyes in the country’s ivory towers, we’re all just a bunch of image-chasing, product-guzzling, service-demanding, mad middle class, with no appetite left for something as glorious as risks and revolution.

Apparently Karl Marx named us “the parasites of capitalism”. A certain politician even lamented via Twitter that we’re “seasonal humanists”, which made me reduced to a bowl of exotic tropical fruits.

I won’t dwell on Karl Marx because, after all, he also coined the term lumpenproletariat, a.k.a. the rotten working class. I suspect the man actually just despised the human race.

Let’s talk about this oft-reviled middle class. Who actually makes up the middle class? Debates have been raging longer than I have lived, but the recent general consensus for Asia Pacific by World Bank defines it as anyone with daily expenditure of US$2-$20.

That wide grouping alone is problematic. For example, an entry-level clerk may spend around $5 for daily commute and lunch, while a senior manager forks out over $5 for the same expenses. The monthly income gap between them is easily about $1,000, which will factor differently into their savings, investing, or total spending patterns, yet both, are defined as “middle class”.

Just as both teachers and pupils’ parents, nurses and doctors, factory foremen and engineers, paralegals and lawyers, reporters and editors, small and medium entrepreneurs, are all middle class mass.

While we leave experts to iron out the clear definition, let’s try to look at what this so-called middle class can do.

A quick look at prominent economic studies through the years shows that the middle class has proven to contribute to the acceleration of a country’s growth. The middle class accounted for around 18 percent of Indonesia’s population by 2010, and if you look at the country’s steady growth in recent years, it’s hard to deny the (in)-direct contribution of our middle class.

Does the middle class consume more products and services, as their income rises? Sure. Their consumption growth tends to be higher than their income growth. Yet this is not specific to Indonesia.

Quick examples in the region are China and India.

After being deprived of exposure to the outside world for decades, the Chinese middle class now roams the globe, snapping up the latest, priciest gems and gadgets that they, along with the rest of Asia that’s largely spared from the global credit crunch, pretty much rescued the luxury business in the past 3 years.

Indian new money may not be into bulk-buying Hermes handbags, but check the latest names listed over Dubai’s tony neighborhoods.

In Europe, that would be Russia. Along with other things, sojourn spots in St. Tropez and Lake Como have changed hands from chic Parisiennes and bella Milanesas to Moscovite millionaire matriarchs. Don’t get me started on the Greek islands.

But is this all that the middle class does? Heck, no. The income rise couldn’t have come from them just lounging idly around. The rise comes from their hard work, which contributes to national output, just as the taxes collected from their income.

In demanding goods and services, their value-for-money principle and willingness to pay more for higher quality call for efficient manufacturing and an effective public sector.

Their yearning for better living induces them to adapt to technologies, leading to industrial technology transfers. Along with consumption, their investment (read: risk) appetite is also growing, beyond the financial sector and into the real sector.

What is an entrepreneur, really, but someone who assumes risks in investing for future growth, all the while providing real jobs for working class? How, then, can all of these be labeled in such a slapdash manner to “parasite existence”, I fail to fathom.

Do not confuse their gusto for personal vehicles and traffic complaints with the government’s longstanding inability to provide sufficient and integrated transportation systems, urban and rural.

Do not sneer at their preference for malls and overseas concerts while forgetting government’s failure in public place development and maintenance.

Criticize urban planning and policies that enable proliferation of shopping centers at the cost of green parks, while acknowledging as well that entrepreneurs run businesses and people get jobs there.

And before accusing fledgling factory owners of being modern Count Draculas preying on workers, open your eyes to the fact that crumbling infrastructure, weak police enforcement and rampant corruption have collectively sucked out the thin cushion business owners can keep in maintaining competitiveness, domestic or global.

If the profits becomes too marginal, it will be very tempting for business owners to simply close factories and move investment to financial sectors, increasing unemployment.

If you want to shake up the slackers, as some of the middle class admittedly are, you need to smartly balance between luring and penalizing them.

Go after their taxes by providing public facilities. Lure them to poll booths by jailing corrupt officials and creating a channel in which voters can make politicians execute their campaign promises.

Acknowledge the involved ones, who so far have roamed the social media and started grass-root movements. Make it fun to be involved in thinking about the bigger issues, instead of telling them they can’t fit in.

Treat them like teenagers who have just acquired new toys — the more you alienate them, the less incentives there will be for them to turn away from their fun playthings, and the less better off the nation will be.

Before we know it, we will all fall victims to the middle class trap — learn about it, then think thrice about meddling too much in the middle class’ natural dynamics.

The worst of all, really, is to become some middle class member who earns their living from fellow middle class members, yet still subjectively point fingers at middle class’ flaws without providing workable solutions. Professional proletarian snobs?

Now while you digest this, I’ll head off to yoga, the world in which everyone is about equal, unless your seven chakras are all opened for which you’ll be the new divinity after Buddha. I promise I’ll chant a loving prayer for my middle class brethren.