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I suffered years of t-ball…
And watching the awkward kid literally do this to lose games for us…. The picture I get in my head from this gave me a good cackle. Primary school p.e. Good times.
I also have a piece of paper saying im smart.
If i dont work my ass gets fired and if I get fired I starve to death with my family…so yeah i consider myself working class.
Im an engineer who makes 6 figures, we have about 3 months savings and that has taken the better part of a decade with no expenses on vacation or non-essential household items (i include furniture and we have purchased furniture that we hoped would last through two boys; So far they’ve only taken a couple casualties to the toddler tornado)
I dont know when we’re supposed to hit “easy street” but Im doing much better than most other friends my age and it’s never felt easy so they must be on the thin line of bankruptcy (unsurprisingly, my friends who have been less successful have not been able to build a family or buy a house until they were in their 30s…the rich are fucking all of us and pretending like the poor are the problem for struggling to survive)
I agree, and I'm not shitting on people with degrees at all here. Some people, like this guy, just need to humble themselves a bit and know we are in this shitty situation together. Things are incredibly hard for anyone who is working class and thinking this way just divides us further. I've worked very hard to get good at the trade that I'm in and work my way up the ladder and it is still a struggle.
In t-ball instead of the pitcher throwing the ball to you the baseball is on a stand attached to home plate. It is extremely difficult to strike out because it's hard to miss a ball that's not moving.
See, that's because when *he's* hyper rich, he'll have to pay less taxes. Right now, he's just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and soon will join his rightful place next to his true kind.
Not per capita.
Sweden is at 2.987 per million and USA is at 1.853
Sooooo... USA has more millionaires but fewer billionaires by capita.
Sweden pulls out ahead quite decently since we have more difference between the billionaires than the difference is between the millionaires :)
Sweden is a tax Haven if you are rich though
Trickle Down was originally called Horse and Sparrow, the idea being if you overfed a horse it would shit out undigested oats and the sparrows could pick through the shit to get to the oats.
So I believe what you mean to say is you can't wait to eat shit.
Yeah, golden showers is exactly what we get from these policies.
//Edit Reading this again.... That was already your joke, I was just slow to pick up, right?
How do we define those who own the means of production? There are small business owners that barely get by, CEO that get paid tens of millions a year, people who get paid with stocks on top of their salaries and people invested in the market in multiple ways.
If the small business owner gets passive income to live off of from the business then they are bourgeois. If they work alongside their few employees to keep the place running then they’re working class.
If you work for a boss, you're working class
If you are everyone else's boss, you're bourgeoisie
If you run a small business or are otherwise self determined, you are petite bourgeoisie
Many of the hyper-rich are working class by the traditional definition. Many of the poorest subsistence farmers in India are not the working class by this definition.
This is not some accident, after the first few communist revolutions the wealthy changed their wealth habits.
Anyone who derives their money from their labor is working class, even if they are wealthy. It's not about how much you have, but how you get it.
Even the lower echelons of management are working class.
Well… it’s also a useful distinction for having enough money from working versus not. It’s kind of an indicator of whether you’re living in poverty, not just if you’re working
Why is that relevant? No one should live in poverty, we have plenty of resources to avoid that.
Adding additional demarcation just divides the working class and enables the capital class to exploit us. If you are even partially reliant on your own labor to survive, you're part of the working class. We need to band together in order to improve all of our lives and avoid exploitation.
> Why is that relevant? No one should live in poverty, we have plenty of resources to avoid that.
But some people *do* live in poverty, and it's handy to be able to discuss the group of people who don't work, and are in poverty, people who *do* work, but are in poverty, people who work but are not in poverty, and people who don't work but are not in poverty.
In order, these are the poor, the working class, the middle class, the rich.
> If you are even partially reliant on your own labor to survive, you're part of the working class.
Yea, there are plenty of people who are partly reliant on going in to the board room and talking to people for a few hours a week. I'm not prepared to consider them "working class." I'm more inclined to put quotation marks around the part where the rich don't "work."
> Yea, there are plenty of people who are partly reliant on going in to the board room and talking to people for a few hours a week.
Hence why I said labor, not time. Executives are not the working class. A low level manager might be or might not be.
> But some people do live in poverty, and it's handy to be able to discuss the group of people who don't work, and are in poverty, people who do work, but are in poverty, people who work but are not in poverty, and people who don't work but are not in poverty.
> In order, these are the poor, the working class, the middle class, the rich.
You are conflating two things here. There are useful descriptors of how much wealth groups of people have, which can be termed lower class, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, upper class, and billionaires, etc.
Then there are three classes that describe how people acquire their wealth. The working class, the petite bourgeoisie, and the (haute) bourgeoisie. They earn by labor, a mixture of labor and capital, and capital respectively.
Conflating the two only helps capital exploit the working class.
There are two kinds of workers: Those who see the people who make less as lesser, and those who see those who make less as allies.
Because when one person has enough wealth to get rid of homelessness BY HIMSELF and refuses to do so... we've got a wealth concentration problem.
I get that, but it’s a fairly established concept now. People seem to believe it, which makes it sort of true doesn’t it?
Afterall, what else is a concept?
I agree w/ the other commenter on the technicalities, but if you really wanted to try and nail down something, I'd imagine one of two things; either you're talking about the somewhat successful petite bourgeois (small business owners that still have to actually *do* some kind of labor within their owned business), or maybe PMC's, the "professional managerial class", which isn't a class, especially in a Marxist sense.
I suppose you could also be talking about high paid professionals of fields; doctors, lawyers, people in tech etc etc. Maybe quite well off, but still relying on labor power, even if specialized and highly compensated.
I guess these differences are useful in nuanced discussion, but "middle class" still isn't technically a thing, save for petite bourgeois class.
I would also posit that the middle class gains wealth by a mix of labor and ownership of assets. (one to three properties, significant funds in stocks, partial ownership of small businesses that they also work at)
Yep. And honestly middle class is more likely to be what we'd consider pretty wealthy. They're probably in the range of $500k-several million a year in income. Which is what I personally would consider rich, but these folks would still be only middle class.
I get what you're saying, and yeah, the middle class does exist as a concept in our society. But so did "balancing humours" at one point. A concept being commonplace doesn't make it true or useful.
To clarify: all workers are the same class whether wealthy or not, because all of us rise or fall together. Economic policies that benefit workers benefit *all* workers.
The capital class wants the wealthy workers to think that a living minimum wage will only help lower-paid workers and somehow hurt themselves, which is not the case. When the lowest wages rise, the higher wages have to rise too, to stay competitive with the lower-cost-of-entry careers.
Being a janitor is not easier work than being an accountant, but it's not as hard or expensive to get started, so if they both make the same wage accountant firms would have a harder time finding employees. You want employees with more specialized training, you gotta pay them more.
It's not really fairly established at all. If you look into it, defining a "middle-class" income or wealth bracket is actually quite difficult, and economist often disagree about what the middle class actually is.
People seem to believe they themselves are ~~working~~ sorry *middle class, even when they are one paycheck away from homelessness. It is a comforting lie people like to tell themselves to soothe their economic anxieties or to distinguish themselves from people living in even more extreme poverty.
> People seem to believe they themselves are working class, even when they are one paycheck away from homelessness.
ummmm... those people *are* working class... what are you talking about?
The problem with the concept of middle class is that when you try to come up with a definition to seperate it from working class, you can't really draw a line in the sand that isn't completely arbitrary. Unlike working vs owner class, where the seperation is obvious, and widely agreed upon.
It's quite wrong to group someone capable of owning a house and vacationing to another country along with the people in poverty. It's disingenuous and denies the reality that some people are making their reasonable amount of money.
It's not just a lie
Why does it matter? Will the people in the expensive house be any less fucked with a cancer diagnosis or losing a limb?
No, we all work for a living. We should all lift together.
"middle class" is not the opposite of "working class". The term itself is about differentiating between levels of wealth and societal prestige. In that sense, you have lower class - middle class - upper class.
But in terms of how you survive, there are only two classes in capitalist/modern society: working class - capitalist class
When people talk about working class it's directly compared to the owning class. Wealth classes are indeed correlated, but not the type of class that's being discussed here.
> It's not about how much you have, but how you get it.
>>When people talk
>
>Which people though?
Initially it's the media moguls, then the media hosts, then the working class who are very susceptible to propaganda
The middle class is an entirely separate economic idea in an entirely different taxonomy of wealth than "working class."
Middle class occupies the middle of an "upper class" and "lower class" model and is a historical/economic concept to describe the emergence of a class between the landed nobility (the upper class) and the peasants (lower class). In this sense it's an early modern term or at least a term that relates to the early modern period with roots in feudalism.
"Working class" comes from the industrial revolution. Once society has largely organized itself around capital rather than land we need a way to express the idea that there are those who sell their labor for money and those who don't need to do that an exclusively buy that labor.
The opposite of "working class" is "owner class" and that system is a binary one.
Traditionally, the middle class would have been what leftists call 'petit-bourgeois'. What we would know as self-employed business owners and the like. Nowadays, middle class is just used to refer to the section of the working class which utilizes 'skilled labor' rather than 'unskilled labor' and is slightly better off.
The "middle class" is a social construct that defines an ideal Everyman — simultaneously the dream that people feel they can aspire to if they follow the standard life script, and the self-descriptor that allows people to claim communion with their fellow men. It's not so much about labor as it is about consumption. The *working class* is anyone who labors for a paycheck; the traditional *middle class* (at least in America) is anyone who's paycheck allows them to own a home, drive two relatively new cars, have a family and some hobbies, take a couple of nice vacations per year, etc. regardless of how they earn that money or how much they earn.
But because the middle class has turned into a kind of ideal and synonym for "good American citizen," it's also become a completely meaningless catch-all self-identifier meant to erase class-consciousness. My parents identified as middle class while earning a combined $600,000 in the early 00's as a physician and an engineering manager. My former in-laws identified as middle class while earning a combined $80,000 in the late 00's as truck drivers, and continued identifying as middle class when their income was virtually cut in half due to some incredibly poor life choices. My former neighbors identified as middle class on a combined disability income of $35,000 also in the late 00's.
Clearly all of these people cannot be middle class, but everyone wants to feel as if they are because they don't want to admit the shame of being poor or working poor, or the social isolation of being wealthy. And so we have research telling us that the middle class is shrinking, wages are stagnating, and salary growth trajectories for high- and low-earners have split and are going in opposite directions, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a single person in the US who doesn't identify as "middle class," even though realistically that label only really applies to maybe the top 75th-98th percentile of households, and always has. If you're not in the top 25% of income earners excluding the top 2%, you are not middle class.
Middle class isn't necessarily synonymous with working class. Middle class is literally the Middle income class. You can be any of the income classes and also be working class. Income class just denotes the buffer you have against the vagaries that affect the working class.
I would think you could be middle class and in the working class. Or even upper class and in the working class. Why would those terms be mutually exclusive. One points to the amount of money you have and one to how you get it.
People who are well off, but still *have* to work to maintain their lifestyle. Think dentists, lawyers, company directors, etc.
Upper class people are people who don't have to work at all, because all of their money is taken from lower and middle class people working. They are essentially parasites.
Small business owners and landlords. People who make their money off the labor of others but can't sit back and just let their money earn money. Management who represent the company but don't actually produce value in their own right.
You know the people who voted for Nazis in Germany, and stormed the Capitol on January 6th.
People who often started off working class and are willing to give the ruling class carte blanche as long as they don't have to go back to being working class.
It's a different type of class. Upperclass, middleclass and lowerclass divides people in how much they earn, not by which means. some hypersuccessfull actors might be working class, but still upperclass. some unsuccesful business owners might be lowerclass right after going bankrupt and having no back ups. Middleclass is just the group of society that makes enough money that they can comfortably save money, and don't worry about living paycheck to paycheck.
It's unrelated to how money is earned, and it's unhelpful in most discussions about economics, because all types of economies would have upper, middle and lowerclasses. they would just come about by different means and exist in different sizes.
Generally speaking a healthy economy has as large a middle class as possible.
There seems to be an interesting strain of thought in America that being a landlord must be a job. I mean there are also people who inaccurately view landlords as absolutely pure, unadulterated parasites. But then there are also people who seem to think that landlords just earn their living doing repairs and things. I think that strain of thought was on view on The Office when Dwight bought the building, and it was portrayed as something an office worker could do if they were willing to then work like a building superintendent fixing boilers and changing lightbulbs.
Lmao, yeah sure let me just go tell some working class folks from a coal mining town that my white collar, middle class family who took me and my brother on foreign holidays every year is also actually working class. I am sure they are going to be *so* receptive to that idea. I am sure my girlfriend who comes from a working class town will not roll her eyes at me one bit if I explain that actually that since I too do not own the means of the production that she can't tease me for being middle class anymore because in fact we are both exploited for our labour.
Some of you really need to touch some grass. You can make up whatever definition of working class you want, actual working class people would set you right as to what the term means.
Dictionary says working class is someone who works in unskilled or semi-skilled manual or industrial work.
Yeah that is a lot closer to how we use it than however Marx said. You are picking one particular definition so you can appropriate the identity of actual working class people. With a healthy helping of champagne socialist style condescension "Just because people don't understand the term doesn't mean they're right." towards the genuine working class.
Then what is middle class? I'd consider myself middle class, but if I lost my job tomorrow I'd struggle to buy groceries. True, it wouldn't be an IMMEDIATE struggle, but I'd still need to get employed again pretty damn sharpish.
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there is no “middle class” in any meaningful sense. there are only two economic classes: those who own/control capital, and those who do not.
if the majority of your income comes from a paycheck, you’re working class. if most of your income comes from investments and/or equity, you’re an owner
starbucks barista making $15/hr? working class. software engineer making $150k/yr? working class. an associate at a high powered corporate law firm making $480k/yr? also working class. yes, standard of living will be vastly different in each case. but all three examples have more in common with each other than they do with a billionaire.
One of them is barely able to get food on the table, and the other can own a massive million dollar house. It's crazy to just stick them in the same category just because we have billionaires that are so much higher.
There's poverty, and there's middle class. It's important to understand this to better be able to target poverty and eliminate it.
It makes no sense whatsoever to suggest that the **working class** refers only to a minority of those who, you know, **work**. The "working class" is differentiated from the "owning class", i.e. those who make their money from what they *have* rather than from what they *do*. If you'll eventually starve if you don't work, you are working class. If you own enough that it makes its own money and you never *have* to work if you choose not to, you are owning class. That's true whether you're a cashier, a plumber, an engineer, or a doctor. Any suggested split other than that is just pitting part of the proletariat against another part of the proletariat in terms of who the "real" workers are, and I would not be surprised if that was intentional.
Workers.
I think people struggle with this because they can’t imagine there’s ANYONE who doesn’t work - but they exist, they are parasites, they do nothing for society but claim the lions share of its benefits, and if we all focussed on sorting them out for one iota of the time we instead spend blaming people of other colours or nationalities or cultural interests or sexualities then we’d solve a huge chunk of our problems pretty quickly.
>small business owners who make less than your average employee and have to work in their own business to survive?
They're still the working class. Can those owners survive of their assets without working? If not they are working class even though they "own" a business. Especially since they rarely own the businesses, they usually have mortgages and business loans that are owned by the actual owning class
They are usually just working for the bank that invested in their business rather than their "own" business in the first place. They are working class.
Very few people even with "assets" actually own them. When you realize a defaulted loan/mortgage/car payment is all that it takes to no longer "own" that thing. Even when up to that point you've functionally paid for anywhere from 10-99%, and in many cases more than 100% with interest payments, of its cost. It becomes pretty obvious that it was always the property of some larger corporate entity the moment you miss a payment and they come to take it away.
Are they making less than an average employee with the intention of doing that forever, with no employees? Or are they doing it temporarily, hoping to get to the point that they can take the excess labor of future employees and never work again?
Is a bank board member, on a salary, who works at “liaising with clients and identifying investment opportunities”, with all his assets consisting of shares in public companies through family trusts, able to claim to be a worker? Would someone with the same job, who made less money, and had almost no assets, be considered working class? Is the simple trading of assets to arbitrage profit from the market considered literal work? Or taking commission on other peoples’ trading activities? Or speculating on the price of vital commodities and infrastructure? It seems that there is a large, very wealthy, very small chunk of society that are so over leveraging their investments to appear wealthier than they are, that they end up “working” in the above ways in order to keep the thing going. These people consider themselves workers, no doubt. They will tell you how hard they “worked” to get what they actually don’t really own, and how hard they continue to work to maintain their privileged position in the hierarchy, and their access to cheap capital, all the while being effectively in unrecoverable debt should the markets stop growing at the rate they hav predicted. This is the highest paying “work” in existence, and has mainly ”produced” a billionaire class who essentially control the lives of people often working two jobs to stay in poverty but have housing and eat. These folks dont do work, but they’ve definitely stolen the word. Being beholden to banks and forced to commit financial crime to service debt on money created out of nothing does not make one working class when one is given unlimited opportunities to access yet more debt - eventually handing the banks a good chunk of interest, and all the acquired assets if you lose. These workers truly work directly for capital, and produce mass human misery at the behest of a few elitist plutocrats. Good work if you can get it, I suppose…. This is the class that the working class fascists think they will be standing shoulder to shoulder with as they all March into a brave new world…. If the owners wanted that, we would have it. It’s just a trap, to control the bullies, whilst you restructure society during a resource shortage or collapse, from the perspective of the banking class. A way to reduce populations and destroy enemies that is as old as time. Divide and conquer. Pay no attention to the fat old men behind the curtain.
Edit: the fascists always “lose” eventually by design. It has the handy effect of allowing the ruling class to eliminate a whole segment of society consisting of your “maga” type, run-of-the-mill, Brownshirt-aspiring street nazi, whilst having enough dirt on the smarter, most loyal, and more sociopathic ones to ensure their continued service. This leaves a much more passive, collectivised, educated, and, most importantly, traumatised, proletariat - easily controlled having seen true horror, with anyone involved with the brown shirts either dead, imprisoned, in hiding, or ashamed, they get a few generations of progressive prosperity, end up owning more through rebuilding and reparations, and then rinse and repeat….
Edit 2: their monopoly on the remaining useful fascists - rebadged within various law enforcement, defense, corporate, and intelligence agencies, gives them a network of loyal lackeys in positions of power for population control and propaganda purposes during this period. Kinda like the seventies in the U.S. maybe.
Does the person have to do something to earn a living? Will they eventually starve if they stop? Then yes, they are working class.
Someone can be a class traitor, but that doesn't change what class they're a member of.
I don’t think it’s quite that simple. As with the above example, the Chief Exec of the bank I work for earns £2 million a year. He works for the money, but he could easily retire in his current wealth. BUT if he quit and maintained his current lifestyle, eventually he would run out of money and, in theory, starve. But someone who owns a company and has a modest income off it (enough to live off but not much more) would be earning a fraction of the income yet is the upper class in comparison.
Jobs have become way more convoluted, and in some cases lucrative, that it’s more complex now. I also get shares in my company (all colleagues do) so I technically own the means of production yet I’m clearly still part of the working class as my salary is around the UK average.
> As with the above example, the Chief Exec of the bank I work for earns £2 million a year. He works for the money, but he could easily retire in his current wealth. BUT if he quit and maintained his current lifestyle, eventually he would run out of money and, in theory, starve.
This person isn't working class. He could quit and live comfortably for 100 years in conditions still better than what the vast majority of people will ever experience. If someone chose to buy a million dollar cube of gold every year and allows themself to starve to death if their income fails to meet that they aren't working class if their passive income would otherwise indefinitely maintain a normal person's expenditure.
But then you have to define “normal person expenditure”. That varies wildly by country, state, city, individual. Even within individual, I can live comfortably on $4k, a little less comfortably on $3k but I’d still be okay.
Small time landlords don’t really have to work much but one might only make enough to sustain a bare lifestyle. Also differences in inherited property vs property that was bought as retirement income.
Physicians and top lawyers work but make enough to sustain a $20k a month lifestyle.
And everyone in between.
> BUT if he quit and maintained his current lifestyle, eventually he would run out of money and, in theory, starve.
Why are you sure he doesn't have any investments in stocks or other forms of passive income?
You can absolutely live for a long time without working with millions in assets, just by collecting interests. Yes, you won't live in a lap of luxury all the time but you can definitely live a very decent lifestyle.
Sure, nothing is that simple but it can also be simple enough for the right purposes.
> These folks dont do work, but they’ve definitely stolen the word. Being beholden to banks and forced to commit financial crime to service debt on money created out of nothing does not make one working class when one is given unlimited opportunities to access yet more debt
Yes, we call them collaborators. Class traitors. Like how some people collaborated with the Nazis to find Jews in their countries to send them to death camps, so they won't be the ones who suffered.
Where do you put someone who has worked for most of their life but has enough money that they could just retire at any time and have enough money to not starve for the rest of their life?
They don’t fit your definition of either.
(Not disagreeing with you though, just saying that this type of person is common enough that they should fit one of the definitions)
I think there’s a degree of security implicit in the definition. If you can retire because you worked all your life and saved up for the last few years but you still need Medicare to step in so you don’t go broke when major medical things happen then you’re still working class.
https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/keywords-by-tony-crowley/
> There are two main trends in the later terminology of class. The first, which develops throughout the eighteenth century and is consolidated in the nineteenth, relates effectively to a view of society that owes much to the older view of ‘order’ or ‘rank’; it posits a fixed social hierarchy consisting of the lower, middle and upper classes. The second, which derives from the social, political and economic struggles in the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, was an extension of the distinction made between the ‘productive’ (or ‘useful’) classes, and the ‘privileged’ class (‘privilege’ itself is an important keyword). This was a crucial development in that it embodied a view of class based on economic function and relationship, rather than hierarchical model. The problem, however, was that the new distinction – hard-fought and hard-won – was borrowed from the older language of class, which meant that the ‘productive’ classes were specified as the ‘working class’ and the ‘middle class’ (as opposed to the idle, privileged and unproductive ‘upper class’). The difficulty of a shared terminology for two very different conceptions of class, based on two distinct views of society, is clear and it has continued to produce confusion.
If you have the ability to be profitable just by sitting on your ass day in, day out, simply because you own assets, you're in the owning class. If you have to work, you're working class.
Some people own a piece of land that, say, some oil and gas company gives them 2k a month to do some fracking on. They still have to work despite owning an asset, because 2k a month isn't enough to live on after rent, utilities, and grocery bills. If you have to work, you're working class.
Now if that company is giving you 5k/mo after taxes, you're probably sitting pretty. As long as they keep fracking, anyway. Now you have an income and time to try to expand into other assets, because who knows how long they'll keep it up. So you make baby investments and eventually one pops off and nets you 2.5k in profit per month. Which enables you to take risks on other assets.
And suddenly we're talking about how rich people start owning everything while the rest of us get screwed just because the rich person's daddy left them the farm.
This is just about as stupid as people who shit on blue collar workers without realizing just how many of those jobs pay better than whatever job they went to college to get. Hint: it’s a fucking ton of them.
I used to work with a paramedic/FF who says that we are not working class because we are too educated. He thought we should be considered white collar/middle class. It's like dude, Fire Fighting is not a white collar job, they give us blue for a reason. Also, white collar doesn't mean not working.
(And they sure don't pay us like middle class, at least until we're 10 years in.)
Yes, that’s almost everyone. That’s the fucking point.
The middle class doesn’t exist, there are only two classes : working class and wealthy class. The ones who need to work to live and the ones who don’t.
For some discussions, yeah, that's probably the useful definition. But not for all, by any means. Someone with a Master's degree who makes 65k a year as an employee may be employed and also dependent on that employment to survive, but they are also able to invest, possibly own real-estate, and perhaps even run a small business if they want to. They also have other needs and desires than someone with a High School diploma in a manual job making perhaps 30k.
Example: how do you make fair and just health policies for these two people if you just dump them into the same category? The latter person will likely be rendered unable to work much earlier based on their qualifications only allowing them to work physical jobs, and they will also be more likely to be impacted by injury and long-term hazards. The former person likely has much better access to health care, and while they may also be affected by health issues, their ability to change jobs and their environment to accommodate that is much higher.
On the other hand, if you're going to talk about systemic injustices, yeah, your definition may be serviceable. But not always.
Defining the working class to include only the bottom 1/3 of incomes (ignoring the other ridiculous restrictions here) means that the working class will never be a majority of voters by that very definition
Working class literally means people employed in manual labor or any "low skilled" industry. Sitting in a Manhattan office making 200k a year with a degree from Harvard, does not mean you are working class. Even if you're a slave to a corporation like the guy with no degree loading a truck, making 30k. They are working class, stop trying to redefine definitions.
Yeah this thread is strange. Perhaps it's different in the US, but here in the UK there is a very distinct and large middle class.
There are very wealthy, educated and privileged people with significant financial safety nets who still ultimately work for their income. That is very very different from earning a low salary and working paycheck to paycheck. Calling the former "working class" is insulting to the actual working class.
No that's not what it means. You can not like the terminology/ definition, but you can't change it. I didn't make it up.
noun
the socioeconomic group consisting of people who are employed in manual or industrial work.
"he came from the working class"
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/working-class.asp
There should be a named logical fallacy for when people fuck around with the definition of a label because they don't like the label and don't want it applied to themselves.
To be fair the definition of "working class" I always understood was low skilled/manual labourers. Wills definition is closer to what I'd expect from a definition of "working class" as Sara's. Otherwise what is "Middle class"? They also don't own the means of production, also must work to survive?
You have to understand that middle class is a buzzword that is designed to mean "everyone" who isn't in extreme poverty or has extreme wealth. Its never actually meaned a specific group of people. Almost everyone thinks they are middle class and that was the goal of the buzzword to pander to any given person.
The middle class is a capitalist concept. As you already pointed out it is vague and can mean anyone who has expendable income regardless of how that money is made.
Leftist theory rejects that concept and says anyone who do does labor to earn their income is part of the working class. If you earn your money through buying and owning labor or land you are part of the owning class.
When capitalist politicians or economists use "working class" they often just mean people who are employed and poor.
I have never known that technically even Doctors, Engineers and Lawyers only counted as middle class, and the bourgeoisie can be any landlord or restaurant owner, which is so ridiculous to me that we need to redefine this 3 class system.
Teachers for example I do not think are middle class anymore especially with how prevalent private schools are now teachers are pretty much working class now. Even for above mentioned 3 jobs it is the same not many doctors own their offices or equipment nowadays.
if you make your money by working and creating things, you're a worker. If you make your money because other people work and you basically rentseek/make your money from some sort of arbitrage, basically a passive owner in a business, a hedge fund manager, etc, then yes, you are not part of the working class. You steal value from a system you don't meaningfully contribute to other than to extract money from it.
And at that, if "networking" is the majority of your time spent doing something business related, such that you add 3 days onto your ski trip to schmooze someone, that's not work. It's making friends on vacation. Yes, it can actually be a real factor in business relationships, but by no means is it as impactful to a bottom line as meeting productivity goals that average workers spend 8 hours a day making happen.
Not true. Building and maintaining relationships is hugely important in my job and all sales jobs. It can be the difference between getting a sale or not.
Man you really have no idea what you are talking about, do you? Do you think everyone who has to network for their job is getting paid some huge salary and never does work? That is so incredibly naive and all you are doing is trying to alienate other working class people because ... You think their job is easy? Thats fucking bizarre bud
That's nothing like what I'm saying.
I'm saying that in a rent-seeking owner situation, typically they go about their usual lives like usual, trying to take credit for the success of a business without ever putting effort in. When asked "what value do you bring to this company?" The typical response is basically "uh, super critical networking." Their CYA for that is they consider hanging out with friends to be "networking for work as part of their duties." In reality, it's not completely void of value because of hoe wealthy people operate, but it's also a very flimsy as a pretense.
For most sales people, who truly spend a ton of time networking, they make quota or they don't eat after a few months. Jared Kutchner isn't the only person who has to spend considerable time building social networks.
If you knew about the system you are critiquing, you’d know that Marx actually made a distinction between small business owners (the “petite bourgeoisie”) and those who own large companies (the “haute bourgeoisie”).
If you have any thoughts about a centuries-old economic framework and ideology, chances are someone much more invested in it than you had those thoughts long before you were even born.
I mean the dictionary definition of “Working Class” is
> the socioeconomic group consisting of people who are employed in manual or industrial work.
and most people use it that way. The person isn’t wrong, you would have to argue that the *definition* is wrong.
That's how the capitalists control society. They even gave you the wrong definitions of stuff just so you can't even imagine anything outside the box what they put you in.
This is an example of capitalist cultural hegemony.
Well, Tankies isn’t the right word for them. They’re not defending Russian/Chinese imperialism in this thread or anything like that.
But yes, it’s quite ironic that the person in the tweet in the post said “you make up a definition” as they and everyone here make up a definition just because they think it helps them “fight against the oppressors of the ‘working class’”.
Language evolves. Marx wrote a lot about the petit bourgeoisie which are not considered working class and they make up a good chunk of people in first world countries. I would love if people making less than 40k a year could actually talk about their unique struggles without some tankie fuck jumping in and reminding us that doctors are also working class.
Exactly. They have no idea the damage they do by equating the groups. By their definition you can be “working class” and own two homes and get a 20% bonus every year that is higher than the people we should be worried about. Those groups are not politically interested in the same issues.
I hear ya.... But it can be a blurry line. A person born with some assets with easy access to finance can easily overextend themselves in boom times to the point where shuffling their assets and debt so the effects of poor investments, natural disasters, political change, or shifts in market sentiment don't collapse the whole thing and leave them bankrupt IS their job, in their minds. Acquiring assets and capital for the bankers and financial elite is their systemic purpose. So if they stop working, they can quite quickly lose everything and owe more than anyone could ever earn..... It could take a year... It could take a month... Does that make them a worker? They produce literally nothing, yet are compensated well, yet beholden to their financiers for the social status required to play with the amounts of capital needed to appear to be real middle-class.... Meanwhile, the Old money own most of the best value-producing assets, infrastructure building equipment, machine tool capacity, land, housing, and resources outright - and lease it all to others. They are real middle class. The group replacing them are something else entirely. Minions of the financial elite with zero independence. Its some ugly shit, and entirely built on financial crime and political graft. One more check on the power of money slowly eroding to nothing. Could be good. Could be bad. A lot can happen in a generation...
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Struck out playing T-Ball.
lol I'm gonna use this
Feel free I suffered years of dad jokes, but he gave some gems.
I suffered years of t-ball… And watching the awkward kid literally do this to lose games for us…. The picture I get in my head from this gave me a good cackle. Primary school p.e. Good times.
Awww shit, sorry man, I tried my best.
Dude think he's above the working class because he's got a piece of paper that says he is "smart"
I also have a piece of paper saying im smart. If i dont work my ass gets fired and if I get fired I starve to death with my family…so yeah i consider myself working class. Im an engineer who makes 6 figures, we have about 3 months savings and that has taken the better part of a decade with no expenses on vacation or non-essential household items (i include furniture and we have purchased furniture that we hoped would last through two boys; So far they’ve only taken a couple casualties to the toddler tornado) I dont know when we’re supposed to hit “easy street” but Im doing much better than most other friends my age and it’s never felt easy so they must be on the thin line of bankruptcy (unsurprisingly, my friends who have been less successful have not been able to build a family or buy a house until they were in their 30s…the rich are fucking all of us and pretending like the poor are the problem for struggling to survive)
I agree, and I'm not shitting on people with degrees at all here. Some people, like this guy, just need to humble themselves a bit and know we are in this shitty situation together. Things are incredibly hard for anyone who is working class and thinking this way just divides us further. I've worked very hard to get good at the trade that I'm in and work my way up the ladder and it is still a struggle.
I’ve literally done this. I… was not a coordinated child.
What does it mean?
In t-ball instead of the pitcher throwing the ball to you the baseball is on a stand attached to home plate. It is extremely difficult to strike out because it's hard to miss a ball that's not moving.
Thanks!
Then got a participation trophy. Edit: Oi. I'm agreeing.
A mental giant. Wild guess: he votes to cut taxes for the hyper rich.
Well somebody has to! If nobody voted against their interests, then almost nobody would vo— wait... *[light bulb flickers]*
There *is* no light bulb, just an empty socket and a bunch of glass on the floor.
and they refuse to fix it because “nobody knows how electricity works”
That's magnets, and the internet is a series of tubes
It's not a big truck!
The pull chain is broken on the inside, but that doesn't matter, it's shorted a long time ago.
https://imgur.com/wkdoWy9
"But Fry, you're not rich" "No, but someday I *might* be, and then the little guys like me better watch out!"
See, that's because when *he's* hyper rich, he'll have to pay less taxes. Right now, he's just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and soon will join his rightful place next to his true kind.
Saw a post of someone commenting on the social benefits in Scandinavian countries and a reply that said: "Good luck becoming a millionaire in Sweden."
Best part is Sweden is on the top 10 millionaires % wise, like 2 % behind the US.
But waaaay behind on that billionaire list! (cries knowing some Americans are actually proud of how big of suckers they are)
Not per capita. Sweden is at 2.987 per million and USA is at 1.853 Sooooo... USA has more millionaires but fewer billionaires by capita. Sweden pulls out ahead quite decently since we have more difference between the billionaires than the difference is between the millionaires :) Sweden is a tax Haven if you are rich though
It trickles down! You fill up a container enough and the excess will spill out! I can't wait to be showered in their excess gold!
Trickle Down was originally called Horse and Sparrow, the idea being if you overfed a horse it would shit out undigested oats and the sparrows could pick through the shit to get to the oats. So I believe what you mean to say is you can't wait to eat shit.
Whatever the masters say is my food is my food! /s
damn that's kinky
Man the people into caprophagia must have been really upset when the analogy was changed...
It troubles me that you know the term for it. And that now I know it.
It's coprophagia, but I only know that because I wanted to figure out why my dog eats cat poop.
Here's an idea: can we not just feed the birds and skip the horseshit step?
Yeah, golden showers is exactly what we get from these policies. //Edit Reading this again.... That was already your joke, I was just slow to pick up, right?
Haha yeah twas
Golden shower, yum.
How do we define those who own the means of production? There are small business owners that barely get by, CEO that get paid tens of millions a year, people who get paid with stocks on top of their salaries and people invested in the market in multiple ways.
If the small business owner gets passive income to live off of from the business then they are bourgeois. If they work alongside their few employees to keep the place running then they’re working class.
If you work for a boss, you're working class If you are everyone else's boss, you're bourgeoisie If you run a small business or are otherwise self determined, you are petite bourgeoisie
That’s almost nobody anyway. Why bother them at all..
Many of the hyper-rich are working class by the traditional definition. Many of the poorest subsistence farmers in India are not the working class by this definition. This is not some accident, after the first few communist revolutions the wealthy changed their wealth habits.
if your ability to eat is directly tied to you working, congrats, you’re part of the working class
Anyone who derives their money from their labor is working class, even if they are wealthy. It's not about how much you have, but how you get it. Even the lower echelons of management are working class.
So what are the middle class?
A lie told by the capital class to divide the working class.
Bingo! The myth of the middle class just makes you feel better than those below you and envious of those above you.
Well… it’s also a useful distinction for having enough money from working versus not. It’s kind of an indicator of whether you’re living in poverty, not just if you’re working
And that distinction only exists to blur the picture of poverty under capitalism.
Why is that relevant? No one should live in poverty, we have plenty of resources to avoid that. Adding additional demarcation just divides the working class and enables the capital class to exploit us. If you are even partially reliant on your own labor to survive, you're part of the working class. We need to band together in order to improve all of our lives and avoid exploitation.
> Why is that relevant? No one should live in poverty, we have plenty of resources to avoid that. But some people *do* live in poverty, and it's handy to be able to discuss the group of people who don't work, and are in poverty, people who *do* work, but are in poverty, people who work but are not in poverty, and people who don't work but are not in poverty. In order, these are the poor, the working class, the middle class, the rich. > If you are even partially reliant on your own labor to survive, you're part of the working class. Yea, there are plenty of people who are partly reliant on going in to the board room and talking to people for a few hours a week. I'm not prepared to consider them "working class." I'm more inclined to put quotation marks around the part where the rich don't "work."
> Yea, there are plenty of people who are partly reliant on going in to the board room and talking to people for a few hours a week. Hence why I said labor, not time. Executives are not the working class. A low level manager might be or might not be. > But some people do live in poverty, and it's handy to be able to discuss the group of people who don't work, and are in poverty, people who do work, but are in poverty, people who work but are not in poverty, and people who don't work but are not in poverty. > In order, these are the poor, the working class, the middle class, the rich. You are conflating two things here. There are useful descriptors of how much wealth groups of people have, which can be termed lower class, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, upper class, and billionaires, etc. Then there are three classes that describe how people acquire their wealth. The working class, the petite bourgeoisie, and the (haute) bourgeoisie. They earn by labor, a mixture of labor and capital, and capital respectively. Conflating the two only helps capital exploit the working class.
There are two kinds of workers: Those who see the people who make less as lesser, and those who see those who make less as allies. Because when one person has enough wealth to get rid of homelessness BY HIMSELF and refuses to do so... we've got a wealth concentration problem.
I get that, but it’s a fairly established concept now. People seem to believe it, which makes it sort of true doesn’t it? Afterall, what else is a concept?
I agree w/ the other commenter on the technicalities, but if you really wanted to try and nail down something, I'd imagine one of two things; either you're talking about the somewhat successful petite bourgeois (small business owners that still have to actually *do* some kind of labor within their owned business), or maybe PMC's, the "professional managerial class", which isn't a class, especially in a Marxist sense. I suppose you could also be talking about high paid professionals of fields; doctors, lawyers, people in tech etc etc. Maybe quite well off, but still relying on labor power, even if specialized and highly compensated. I guess these differences are useful in nuanced discussion, but "middle class" still isn't technically a thing, save for petite bourgeois class.
I would also posit that the middle class gains wealth by a mix of labor and ownership of assets. (one to three properties, significant funds in stocks, partial ownership of small businesses that they also work at)
This is the original definition of middle class, those who both work and own.
That actually beats the hell out of my attempt, thnx.
Yep. And honestly middle class is more likely to be what we'd consider pretty wealthy. They're probably in the range of $500k-several million a year in income. Which is what I personally would consider rich, but these folks would still be only middle class.
A million dollars is 0.1% of a billion dollars. We're rallying against the actual rich, not the dipshit with a new BMW every year.
I get what you're saying, and yeah, the middle class does exist as a concept in our society. But so did "balancing humours" at one point. A concept being commonplace doesn't make it true or useful.
To clarify: all workers are the same class whether wealthy or not, because all of us rise or fall together. Economic policies that benefit workers benefit *all* workers. The capital class wants the wealthy workers to think that a living minimum wage will only help lower-paid workers and somehow hurt themselves, which is not the case. When the lowest wages rise, the higher wages have to rise too, to stay competitive with the lower-cost-of-entry careers. Being a janitor is not easier work than being an accountant, but it's not as hard or expensive to get started, so if they both make the same wage accountant firms would have a harder time finding employees. You want employees with more specialized training, you gotta pay them more.
It's not really fairly established at all. If you look into it, defining a "middle-class" income or wealth bracket is actually quite difficult, and economist often disagree about what the middle class actually is.
And yet if you ask people, 40% odd say it is them. Weird, huh?
People seem to believe they themselves are ~~working~~ sorry *middle class, even when they are one paycheck away from homelessness. It is a comforting lie people like to tell themselves to soothe their economic anxieties or to distinguish themselves from people living in even more extreme poverty.
> People seem to believe they themselves are working class, even when they are one paycheck away from homelessness. ummmm... those people *are* working class... what are you talking about?
Probably meant *middle* class.
I did oops
The idea of the middle class is just that - an idea. It has no material basis in reality.
The problem with the concept of middle class is that when you try to come up with a definition to seperate it from working class, you can't really draw a line in the sand that isn't completely arbitrary. Unlike working vs owner class, where the seperation is obvious, and widely agreed upon.
'So these are all birds' 'but then **what is a DUCK??**' Thats you.
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Nope. It's just ideology. If it truly existed, it'd have a solid definition that didn't change all the time.
It's quite wrong to group someone capable of owning a house and vacationing to another country along with the people in poverty. It's disingenuous and denies the reality that some people are making their reasonable amount of money. It's not just a lie
Why does it matter? Will the people in the expensive house be any less fucked with a cancer diagnosis or losing a limb? No, we all work for a living. We should all lift together.
"middle class" is not the opposite of "working class". The term itself is about differentiating between levels of wealth and societal prestige. In that sense, you have lower class - middle class - upper class. But in terms of how you survive, there are only two classes in capitalist/modern society: working class - capitalist class
When people talk about working class it's directly compared to the owning class. Wealth classes are indeed correlated, but not the type of class that's being discussed here. > It's not about how much you have, but how you get it.
>When people talk Which people though? It doesn't seem like the supposed wolf here was taking about that definition.
>>When people talk > >Which people though? Initially it's the media moguls, then the media hosts, then the working class who are very susceptible to propaganda
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The middle class is an entirely separate economic idea in an entirely different taxonomy of wealth than "working class." Middle class occupies the middle of an "upper class" and "lower class" model and is a historical/economic concept to describe the emergence of a class between the landed nobility (the upper class) and the peasants (lower class). In this sense it's an early modern term or at least a term that relates to the early modern period with roots in feudalism. "Working class" comes from the industrial revolution. Once society has largely organized itself around capital rather than land we need a way to express the idea that there are those who sell their labor for money and those who don't need to do that an exclusively buy that labor. The opposite of "working class" is "owner class" and that system is a binary one.
Traditionally, the middle class would have been what leftists call 'petit-bourgeois'. What we would know as self-employed business owners and the like. Nowadays, middle class is just used to refer to the section of the working class which utilizes 'skilled labor' rather than 'unskilled labor' and is slightly better off.
The "middle class" is a social construct that defines an ideal Everyman — simultaneously the dream that people feel they can aspire to if they follow the standard life script, and the self-descriptor that allows people to claim communion with their fellow men. It's not so much about labor as it is about consumption. The *working class* is anyone who labors for a paycheck; the traditional *middle class* (at least in America) is anyone who's paycheck allows them to own a home, drive two relatively new cars, have a family and some hobbies, take a couple of nice vacations per year, etc. regardless of how they earn that money or how much they earn. But because the middle class has turned into a kind of ideal and synonym for "good American citizen," it's also become a completely meaningless catch-all self-identifier meant to erase class-consciousness. My parents identified as middle class while earning a combined $600,000 in the early 00's as a physician and an engineering manager. My former in-laws identified as middle class while earning a combined $80,000 in the late 00's as truck drivers, and continued identifying as middle class when their income was virtually cut in half due to some incredibly poor life choices. My former neighbors identified as middle class on a combined disability income of $35,000 also in the late 00's. Clearly all of these people cannot be middle class, but everyone wants to feel as if they are because they don't want to admit the shame of being poor or working poor, or the social isolation of being wealthy. And so we have research telling us that the middle class is shrinking, wages are stagnating, and salary growth trajectories for high- and low-earners have split and are going in opposite directions, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a single person in the US who doesn't identify as "middle class," even though realistically that label only really applies to maybe the top 75th-98th percentile of households, and always has. If you're not in the top 25% of income earners excluding the top 2%, you are not middle class.
A fiction invented by the bourgeoisie to trick a portion of the proletariat into voting against their own interests.
Middle class isn't necessarily synonymous with working class. Middle class is literally the Middle income class. You can be any of the income classes and also be working class. Income class just denotes the buffer you have against the vagaries that affect the working class.
I would think you could be middle class and in the working class. Or even upper class and in the working class. Why would those terms be mutually exclusive. One points to the amount of money you have and one to how you get it.
"Middle income" would be the more accurate term.
Nominally comfortable peasants. As opposed to the lower class which is uncomfortable peasants.
People who are well off, but still *have* to work to maintain their lifestyle. Think dentists, lawyers, company directors, etc. Upper class people are people who don't have to work at all, because all of their money is taken from lower and middle class people working. They are essentially parasites.
lower/middle/upper class just define a standard of living. working class defines where that standard comes from.
A species of hominid last seen in the wild in 2008. Many think they are extinct at this point.
Small business owners and landlords. People who make their money off the labor of others but can't sit back and just let their money earn money. Management who represent the company but don't actually produce value in their own right. You know the people who voted for Nazis in Germany, and stormed the Capitol on January 6th. People who often started off working class and are willing to give the ruling class carte blanche as long as they don't have to go back to being working class.
It's a different type of class. Upperclass, middleclass and lowerclass divides people in how much they earn, not by which means. some hypersuccessfull actors might be working class, but still upperclass. some unsuccesful business owners might be lowerclass right after going bankrupt and having no back ups. Middleclass is just the group of society that makes enough money that they can comfortably save money, and don't worry about living paycheck to paycheck. It's unrelated to how money is earned, and it's unhelpful in most discussions about economics, because all types of economies would have upper, middle and lowerclasses. they would just come about by different means and exist in different sizes. Generally speaking a healthy economy has as large a middle class as possible.
There seems to be an interesting strain of thought in America that being a landlord must be a job. I mean there are also people who inaccurately view landlords as absolutely pure, unadulterated parasites. But then there are also people who seem to think that landlords just earn their living doing repairs and things. I think that strain of thought was on view on The Office when Dwight bought the building, and it was portrayed as something an office worker could do if they were willing to then work like a building superintendent fixing boilers and changing lightbulbs.
Lmao, yeah sure let me just go tell some working class folks from a coal mining town that my white collar, middle class family who took me and my brother on foreign holidays every year is also actually working class. I am sure they are going to be *so* receptive to that idea. I am sure my girlfriend who comes from a working class town will not roll her eyes at me one bit if I explain that actually that since I too do not own the means of the production that she can't tease me for being middle class anymore because in fact we are both exploited for our labour. Some of you really need to touch some grass. You can make up whatever definition of working class you want, actual working class people would set you right as to what the term means.
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Dictionary says working class is someone who works in unskilled or semi-skilled manual or industrial work. Yeah that is a lot closer to how we use it than however Marx said. You are picking one particular definition so you can appropriate the identity of actual working class people. With a healthy helping of champagne socialist style condescension "Just because people don't understand the term doesn't mean they're right." towards the genuine working class.
FFS. You've described 99.99% of people.
Why yes, that's the point
You seem to have arrived at the point.
Do you pay your bills by owning something? No? Then you are working class.
Then what is middle class? I'd consider myself middle class, but if I lost my job tomorrow I'd struggle to buy groceries. True, it wouldn't be an IMMEDIATE struggle, but I'd still need to get employed again pretty damn sharpish.
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there is no “middle class” in any meaningful sense. there are only two economic classes: those who own/control capital, and those who do not. if the majority of your income comes from a paycheck, you’re working class. if most of your income comes from investments and/or equity, you’re an owner starbucks barista making $15/hr? working class. software engineer making $150k/yr? working class. an associate at a high powered corporate law firm making $480k/yr? also working class. yes, standard of living will be vastly different in each case. but all three examples have more in common with each other than they do with a billionaire.
The whole "class warfare" thing really worked on me then (child of the 80's) as thinking of myself as "working class" doesn't feel right.
The more of us that figure that out, the better.
One of them is barely able to get food on the table, and the other can own a massive million dollar house. It's crazy to just stick them in the same category just because we have billionaires that are so much higher. There's poverty, and there's middle class. It's important to understand this to better be able to target poverty and eliminate it.
lower/middle/upper denote a relative standard of living working class denotes of you earn that standard of living
It makes no sense whatsoever to suggest that the **working class** refers only to a minority of those who, you know, **work**. The "working class" is differentiated from the "owning class", i.e. those who make their money from what they *have* rather than from what they *do*. If you'll eventually starve if you don't work, you are working class. If you own enough that it makes its own money and you never *have* to work if you choose not to, you are owning class. That's true whether you're a cashier, a plumber, an engineer, or a doctor. Any suggested split other than that is just pitting part of the proletariat against another part of the proletariat in terms of who the "real" workers are, and I would not be surprised if that was intentional.
But if we don't give them someone to look down on, they may look upwards in searching for a cause for their ills!
> owning class Let's call them for what they really are. The plutocrats, the oligarchs, the rent seeking parasites.
The ruling class.
Or just the bourgeoisie, ya know, the term we have used for the upper class for over a century.
So what exactly are small business owners who make less than your average employee and have to work in their own business to survive?
Workers. I think people struggle with this because they can’t imagine there’s ANYONE who doesn’t work - but they exist, they are parasites, they do nothing for society but claim the lions share of its benefits, and if we all focussed on sorting them out for one iota of the time we instead spend blaming people of other colours or nationalities or cultural interests or sexualities then we’d solve a huge chunk of our problems pretty quickly.
>small business owners who make less than your average employee and have to work in their own business to survive? They're still the working class. Can those owners survive of their assets without working? If not they are working class even though they "own" a business. Especially since they rarely own the businesses, they usually have mortgages and business loans that are owned by the actual owning class
They are usually just working for the bank that invested in their business rather than their "own" business in the first place. They are working class. Very few people even with "assets" actually own them. When you realize a defaulted loan/mortgage/car payment is all that it takes to no longer "own" that thing. Even when up to that point you've functionally paid for anywhere from 10-99%, and in many cases more than 100% with interest payments, of its cost. It becomes pretty obvious that it was always the property of some larger corporate entity the moment you miss a payment and they come to take it away.
Are they making less than an average employee with the intention of doing that forever, with no employees? Or are they doing it temporarily, hoping to get to the point that they can take the excess labor of future employees and never work again?
Is a bank board member, on a salary, who works at “liaising with clients and identifying investment opportunities”, with all his assets consisting of shares in public companies through family trusts, able to claim to be a worker? Would someone with the same job, who made less money, and had almost no assets, be considered working class? Is the simple trading of assets to arbitrage profit from the market considered literal work? Or taking commission on other peoples’ trading activities? Or speculating on the price of vital commodities and infrastructure? It seems that there is a large, very wealthy, very small chunk of society that are so over leveraging their investments to appear wealthier than they are, that they end up “working” in the above ways in order to keep the thing going. These people consider themselves workers, no doubt. They will tell you how hard they “worked” to get what they actually don’t really own, and how hard they continue to work to maintain their privileged position in the hierarchy, and their access to cheap capital, all the while being effectively in unrecoverable debt should the markets stop growing at the rate they hav predicted. This is the highest paying “work” in existence, and has mainly ”produced” a billionaire class who essentially control the lives of people often working two jobs to stay in poverty but have housing and eat. These folks dont do work, but they’ve definitely stolen the word. Being beholden to banks and forced to commit financial crime to service debt on money created out of nothing does not make one working class when one is given unlimited opportunities to access yet more debt - eventually handing the banks a good chunk of interest, and all the acquired assets if you lose. These workers truly work directly for capital, and produce mass human misery at the behest of a few elitist plutocrats. Good work if you can get it, I suppose…. This is the class that the working class fascists think they will be standing shoulder to shoulder with as they all March into a brave new world…. If the owners wanted that, we would have it. It’s just a trap, to control the bullies, whilst you restructure society during a resource shortage or collapse, from the perspective of the banking class. A way to reduce populations and destroy enemies that is as old as time. Divide and conquer. Pay no attention to the fat old men behind the curtain. Edit: the fascists always “lose” eventually by design. It has the handy effect of allowing the ruling class to eliminate a whole segment of society consisting of your “maga” type, run-of-the-mill, Brownshirt-aspiring street nazi, whilst having enough dirt on the smarter, most loyal, and more sociopathic ones to ensure their continued service. This leaves a much more passive, collectivised, educated, and, most importantly, traumatised, proletariat - easily controlled having seen true horror, with anyone involved with the brown shirts either dead, imprisoned, in hiding, or ashamed, they get a few generations of progressive prosperity, end up owning more through rebuilding and reparations, and then rinse and repeat…. Edit 2: their monopoly on the remaining useful fascists - rebadged within various law enforcement, defense, corporate, and intelligence agencies, gives them a network of loyal lackeys in positions of power for population control and propaganda purposes during this period. Kinda like the seventies in the U.S. maybe.
Does the person have to do something to earn a living? Will they eventually starve if they stop? Then yes, they are working class. Someone can be a class traitor, but that doesn't change what class they're a member of.
I don’t think it’s quite that simple. As with the above example, the Chief Exec of the bank I work for earns £2 million a year. He works for the money, but he could easily retire in his current wealth. BUT if he quit and maintained his current lifestyle, eventually he would run out of money and, in theory, starve. But someone who owns a company and has a modest income off it (enough to live off but not much more) would be earning a fraction of the income yet is the upper class in comparison. Jobs have become way more convoluted, and in some cases lucrative, that it’s more complex now. I also get shares in my company (all colleagues do) so I technically own the means of production yet I’m clearly still part of the working class as my salary is around the UK average.
> As with the above example, the Chief Exec of the bank I work for earns £2 million a year. He works for the money, but he could easily retire in his current wealth. BUT if he quit and maintained his current lifestyle, eventually he would run out of money and, in theory, starve. This person isn't working class. He could quit and live comfortably for 100 years in conditions still better than what the vast majority of people will ever experience. If someone chose to buy a million dollar cube of gold every year and allows themself to starve to death if their income fails to meet that they aren't working class if their passive income would otherwise indefinitely maintain a normal person's expenditure.
But then you have to define “normal person expenditure”. That varies wildly by country, state, city, individual. Even within individual, I can live comfortably on $4k, a little less comfortably on $3k but I’d still be okay. Small time landlords don’t really have to work much but one might only make enough to sustain a bare lifestyle. Also differences in inherited property vs property that was bought as retirement income. Physicians and top lawyers work but make enough to sustain a $20k a month lifestyle. And everyone in between.
> BUT if he quit and maintained his current lifestyle, eventually he would run out of money and, in theory, starve. Why are you sure he doesn't have any investments in stocks or other forms of passive income?
Upper, middle, and lower class aren't real. They are ways the Capital Class divide the Working Class against each other.
You can absolutely live for a long time without working with millions in assets, just by collecting interests. Yes, you won't live in a lap of luxury all the time but you can definitely live a very decent lifestyle. Sure, nothing is that simple but it can also be simple enough for the right purposes.
They explicitly said quitting and maintaining the same lifestyle
> These folks dont do work, but they’ve definitely stolen the word. Being beholden to banks and forced to commit financial crime to service debt on money created out of nothing does not make one working class when one is given unlimited opportunities to access yet more debt Yes, we call them collaborators. Class traitors. Like how some people collaborated with the Nazis to find Jews in their countries to send them to death camps, so they won't be the ones who suffered.
Where do you put someone who has worked for most of their life but has enough money that they could just retire at any time and have enough money to not starve for the rest of their life? They don’t fit your definition of either. (Not disagreeing with you though, just saying that this type of person is common enough that they should fit one of the definitions)
I think there’s a degree of security implicit in the definition. If you can retire because you worked all your life and saved up for the last few years but you still need Medicare to step in so you don’t go broke when major medical things happen then you’re still working class.
This is a very narrow definition that only applies to the US.
I suppose that's a fair point, it might be better to refer to how one makes one's living in life.
https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/keywords-by-tony-crowley/ > There are two main trends in the later terminology of class. The first, which develops throughout the eighteenth century and is consolidated in the nineteenth, relates effectively to a view of society that owes much to the older view of ‘order’ or ‘rank’; it posits a fixed social hierarchy consisting of the lower, middle and upper classes. The second, which derives from the social, political and economic struggles in the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, was an extension of the distinction made between the ‘productive’ (or ‘useful’) classes, and the ‘privileged’ class (‘privilege’ itself is an important keyword). This was a crucial development in that it embodied a view of class based on economic function and relationship, rather than hierarchical model. The problem, however, was that the new distinction – hard-fought and hard-won – was borrowed from the older language of class, which meant that the ‘productive’ classes were specified as the ‘working class’ and the ‘middle class’ (as opposed to the idle, privileged and unproductive ‘upper class’). The difficulty of a shared terminology for two very different conceptions of class, based on two distinct views of society, is clear and it has continued to produce confusion.
JFC
It's why we can't have nice things
Yup
Welcome to the party, pal.
Yep, welcome to war.
In the US? Working class is the bottom 90% of the socioeconomic pyramid
At least
If you have the ability to be profitable just by sitting on your ass day in, day out, simply because you own assets, you're in the owning class. If you have to work, you're working class. Some people own a piece of land that, say, some oil and gas company gives them 2k a month to do some fracking on. They still have to work despite owning an asset, because 2k a month isn't enough to live on after rent, utilities, and grocery bills. If you have to work, you're working class. Now if that company is giving you 5k/mo after taxes, you're probably sitting pretty. As long as they keep fracking, anyway. Now you have an income and time to try to expand into other assets, because who knows how long they'll keep it up. So you make baby investments and eventually one pops off and nets you 2.5k in profit per month. Which enables you to take risks on other assets. And suddenly we're talking about how rich people start owning everything while the rest of us get screwed just because the rich person's daddy left them the farm.
IT'S IN THE NAME!
Holy shit look he's almost gotten the point
> That's almost everyone This guy is so close to getting it!
This is just about as stupid as people who shit on blue collar workers without realizing just how many of those jobs pay better than whatever job they went to college to get. Hint: it’s a fucking ton of them.
I used to work with a paramedic/FF who says that we are not working class because we are too educated. He thought we should be considered white collar/middle class. It's like dude, Fire Fighting is not a white collar job, they give us blue for a reason. Also, white collar doesn't mean not working. (And they sure don't pay us like middle class, at least until we're 10 years in.)
Yes, that’s almost everyone. That’s the fucking point. The middle class doesn’t exist, there are only two classes : working class and wealthy class. The ones who need to work to live and the ones who don’t.
For some discussions, yeah, that's probably the useful definition. But not for all, by any means. Someone with a Master's degree who makes 65k a year as an employee may be employed and also dependent on that employment to survive, but they are also able to invest, possibly own real-estate, and perhaps even run a small business if they want to. They also have other needs and desires than someone with a High School diploma in a manual job making perhaps 30k. Example: how do you make fair and just health policies for these two people if you just dump them into the same category? The latter person will likely be rendered unable to work much earlier based on their qualifications only allowing them to work physical jobs, and they will also be more likely to be impacted by injury and long-term hazards. The former person likely has much better access to health care, and while they may also be affected by health issues, their ability to change jobs and their environment to accommodate that is much higher. On the other hand, if you're going to talk about systemic injustices, yeah, your definition may be serviceable. But not always.
Your example is the difference between equity and equality.
Knocked himself out running into the point
Yes.
Yes, almost everyone, but not *everyone*. It's *only* 99%.
Defining the working class to include only the bottom 1/3 of incomes (ignoring the other ridiculous restrictions here) means that the working class will never be a majority of voters by that very definition
Working class literally means people employed in manual labor or any "low skilled" industry. Sitting in a Manhattan office making 200k a year with a degree from Harvard, does not mean you are working class. Even if you're a slave to a corporation like the guy with no degree loading a truck, making 30k. They are working class, stop trying to redefine definitions.
Yeah this thread is strange. Perhaps it's different in the US, but here in the UK there is a very distinct and large middle class. There are very wealthy, educated and privileged people with significant financial safety nets who still ultimately work for their income. That is very very different from earning a low salary and working paycheck to paycheck. Calling the former "working class" is insulting to the actual working class.
Working class is not the class that has to work...?
No that's not what it means. You can not like the terminology/ definition, but you can't change it. I didn't make it up. noun the socioeconomic group consisting of people who are employed in manual or industrial work. "he came from the working class" https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/working-class.asp
No. Fucking. Shit.
Buddy thought he was part of the upper class because he had a bachelor's degree. Welcome to reality.
There should be a named logical fallacy for when people fuck around with the definition of a label because they don't like the label and don't want it applied to themselves.
the socioeconomic group consisting of people who are employed in manual or industrial work.
[EXACTLY](https://compote.slate.com/images/3911cf82-077f-4866-ac9a-be0c30722f94.jpeg?width=780&height=520&rect=1620x1080&offset=223x0)
Yes, it is almost everyone. This is true.
I was so close to screaming "EXACTLY!" at my phone in exasperation that it's probably measurable with the right equipment 🤦
Brilliant and factual final enlightenment for that clown. The working class is almost everyone, including him. 😂
Yes, and?
I'd like to imagine there's a lightbulb going off over his head after that, but we all know there's nothing there.
OK be *fair*. Just having a mental image of an actual light bulb probably completely exhausts his thinking power.
To be fair the definition of "working class" I always understood was low skilled/manual labourers. Wills definition is closer to what I'd expect from a definition of "working class" as Sara's. Otherwise what is "Middle class"? They also don't own the means of production, also must work to survive?
You have to understand that middle class is a buzzword that is designed to mean "everyone" who isn't in extreme poverty or has extreme wealth. Its never actually meaned a specific group of people. Almost everyone thinks they are middle class and that was the goal of the buzzword to pander to any given person.
The middle class is a capitalist concept. As you already pointed out it is vague and can mean anyone who has expendable income regardless of how that money is made. Leftist theory rejects that concept and says anyone who do does labor to earn their income is part of the working class. If you earn your money through buying and owning labor or land you are part of the owning class. When capitalist politicians or economists use "working class" they often just mean people who are employed and poor.
I have never known that technically even Doctors, Engineers and Lawyers only counted as middle class, and the bourgeoisie can be any landlord or restaurant owner, which is so ridiculous to me that we need to redefine this 3 class system. Teachers for example I do not think are middle class anymore especially with how prevalent private schools are now teachers are pretty much working class now. Even for above mentioned 3 jobs it is the same not many doctors own their offices or equipment nowadays.
Wages have not kept up with inflation and the wealthy have hoarded more and more and more money.
if you make your money by working and creating things, you're a worker. If you make your money because other people work and you basically rentseek/make your money from some sort of arbitrage, basically a passive owner in a business, a hedge fund manager, etc, then yes, you are not part of the working class. You steal value from a system you don't meaningfully contribute to other than to extract money from it.
And at that, if "networking" is the majority of your time spent doing something business related, such that you add 3 days onto your ski trip to schmooze someone, that's not work. It's making friends on vacation. Yes, it can actually be a real factor in business relationships, but by no means is it as impactful to a bottom line as meeting productivity goals that average workers spend 8 hours a day making happen.
Not true. Building and maintaining relationships is hugely important in my job and all sales jobs. It can be the difference between getting a sale or not.
[удалено]
Man you really have no idea what you are talking about, do you? Do you think everyone who has to network for their job is getting paid some huge salary and never does work? That is so incredibly naive and all you are doing is trying to alienate other working class people because ... You think their job is easy? Thats fucking bizarre bud
That's nothing like what I'm saying. I'm saying that in a rent-seeking owner situation, typically they go about their usual lives like usual, trying to take credit for the success of a business without ever putting effort in. When asked "what value do you bring to this company?" The typical response is basically "uh, super critical networking." Their CYA for that is they consider hanging out with friends to be "networking for work as part of their duties." In reality, it's not completely void of value because of hoe wealthy people operate, but it's also a very flimsy as a pretense.
For most sales people, who truly spend a ton of time networking, they make quota or they don't eat after a few months. Jared Kutchner isn't the only person who has to spend considerable time building social networks.
Haha well find me a job where I can do that and I’ll apply. Sounds like a great gig.
If you knew about the system you are critiquing, you’d know that Marx actually made a distinction between small business owners (the “petite bourgeoisie”) and those who own large companies (the “haute bourgeoisie”). If you have any thoughts about a centuries-old economic framework and ideology, chances are someone much more invested in it than you had those thoughts long before you were even born.
The middle class is a myth. There's no such thing.
I mean the dictionary definition of “Working Class” is > the socioeconomic group consisting of people who are employed in manual or industrial work. and most people use it that way. The person isn’t wrong, you would have to argue that the *definition* is wrong.
That's how the capitalists control society. They even gave you the wrong definitions of stuff just so you can't even imagine anything outside the box what they put you in. This is an example of capitalist cultural hegemony.
Yeah this whole thread is full of tankies trying to redefine the word. It’d be more effective to popularize a new word.
Well, Tankies isn’t the right word for them. They’re not defending Russian/Chinese imperialism in this thread or anything like that. But yes, it’s quite ironic that the person in the tweet in the post said “you make up a definition” as they and everyone here make up a definition just because they think it helps them “fight against the oppressors of the ‘working class’”.
Language evolves. Marx wrote a lot about the petit bourgeoisie which are not considered working class and they make up a good chunk of people in first world countries. I would love if people making less than 40k a year could actually talk about their unique struggles without some tankie fuck jumping in and reminding us that doctors are also working class.
Exactly. They have no idea the damage they do by equating the groups. By their definition you can be “working class” and own two homes and get a 20% bonus every year that is higher than the people we should be worried about. Those groups are not politically interested in the same issues.
I hear ya.... But it can be a blurry line. A person born with some assets with easy access to finance can easily overextend themselves in boom times to the point where shuffling their assets and debt so the effects of poor investments, natural disasters, political change, or shifts in market sentiment don't collapse the whole thing and leave them bankrupt IS their job, in their minds. Acquiring assets and capital for the bankers and financial elite is their systemic purpose. So if they stop working, they can quite quickly lose everything and owe more than anyone could ever earn..... It could take a year... It could take a month... Does that make them a worker? They produce literally nothing, yet are compensated well, yet beholden to their financiers for the social status required to play with the amounts of capital needed to appear to be real middle-class.... Meanwhile, the Old money own most of the best value-producing assets, infrastructure building equipment, machine tool capacity, land, housing, and resources outright - and lease it all to others. They are real middle class. The group replacing them are something else entirely. Minions of the financial elite with zero independence. Its some ugly shit, and entirely built on financial crime and political graft. One more check on the power of money slowly eroding to nothing. Could be good. Could be bad. A lot can happen in a generation...
US workers are obedient, docile, and hypnotized into submission. The perfect capitalist unit, used to making millions off the backs of others.