Class conflict looks markedly different in our time than it did in earlier eras. We still tend to picture organized labor on one side and factory owners on the other, conferring over how to deal with the rebels. In other words, two organized sides confronting each other.
But that is not the typical situation today. The owners of transportation companies do not gather in Prague cafés to devise plans for driving down truck drivers’ wages. Truck drivers may complain about the Prague café crowd over a beer, but that has no practical significance.
More often, people from similar backgrounds simply gravitate toward one another. They see the world in much the same way and often have little idea that other groups face very different problems. When they proudly reject Putin’s gas, they genuinely do not know anyone who keeps his home at 15 degrees Celsius, spends the entire winter in poor health, and eventually loses his mother to an illness related to those conditions. Nor does it occur to them that someone may live in a region where there truly are no jobs and cannot afford to move to Prague. It is not merely arrogance. They have genuinely never met anyone like that.
It follows naturally that when such people speak up, those in the café crowd assume there must be some sinister motive or conspiracy behind it. Hence the stories about Russian agents and Foltýn’s “swine.”
This does not mean that social classes are hermetically sealed, with the possible exception of Britain. Yet even where different social environments mix to some degree, there are enough mechanisms to separate a person mentally and completely from his former milieu, old friends, relatives, and so forth.
In fact, this is not so much class hatred as class ignorance.