The Question of Class
Class, despite what many well-known political pundits and economic “experts” would have you believe, isn’t defined by a magic number you earn more/less than. Nor is it a specific set of certain jobs. And it’s definitely not a single or series of identity markers. It’s about where those earnings come from. A person’s class is defined by their relationship to ownership.
Do you live off the money your owned assets and investments (financial, real estate, business enterprise, capitalizable goods, etc.) provide? You are the bourgeois or “ownership” class. Do you have to spend your time working to be paid a wage to live? You are the proletarian or “working” class.
You can be working poor or lower working class. Some essential production jobs are. Many are, in fact. At the other end of the scale is the upper working class: well-paying jobs that are mostly clustered around a society’s centers of capital accumulation (currently: tech/media, finance/insurance, health, weapons/energy). If you’re paid by someone else to work (i.e., you’re not an artisan whose remuneration for your craft allows you to "pay yourself") and that’s the money you live off, you’re some shade of working class. The lower to upper gradations are value classifications (magic numbers) and therefore not individual class relationships but largely subjectively-defined cohorts within one concretely-defined class.
The same goes for the bourgeoisie. Within the ownership class there can also be carved the same range of cohorts, lower to upper. Some make “just enough” from their assets to live while avoiding working (think Grey Gardens). Others own vast holdings and accumulate wealth at an almost unbelievable rate. But none "work" beyond responding to an email now and then or having a meeting to intervene with the management of the value of their assets, even if (and especially when) they "run" their own companies. Companies that, just like all of their assets, depend on the work of a mix of business and industrial labor to maintain their value. Thorstein Veblen’s writing on the "leisure class" and the sub-classes that serve its interests while avoiding the "industrious" labor of production teases some of this distinction out, though his examples are now 100+ years old.
So, what’s that mean for the term "middle class", the least concretely defined but most talked about "class"?
If we retain our conception of class as a relationship and not a magic number, job or identity, it must mean people who have some mix of income from labor and assets. People who sit between or in the middle of the two clearly defined sides of the renter/rentier divide. People who make much of the money they need to live off their assets but work occasionally or casually to comfortably fill out their income. That might look like a landlord-cum-web designer, or a "well-invested" freelance project manager. It could, arguably if taken over the course of a person’s life rather than as a snapshot of a particular moment in that life, look like someone who retires young with a hefty pension or golden parachute or smart financial investments. Something to think about.
If viewed through this lens (though few of them would likely articulate it in this way), the American liberal obsession with the state of the "middle class" makes a lot more sense. It isn’t just some amorphous, undefinable "middle" section of the income scale or set of dog whistling cultural markers, it’s a class of people who want to keep profiting off their individual investments and the ownership of their private property so they don’t have to work too hard. So that they can shove off the hardest work to the actual underclass: the working poor. The middle class generally doesn’t have the skills to be artisans or the accumulated wealth to become lower bourgeoisie, so they’re ultimately at the whims of the ownership class, who liberals (as, overwhelmingly, people of middle-class or upper-working class standing with jobs near accumulative centers themselves) mediate for.
It also helps explain why, so often, the interests of this "middle class" oppose those of the lower working class: because the profitability of their investments depend on the continued subjugation of productive/industrious workers. Just short of the cusp of the ownership class, the middle see themselves, as Steinbeck famously quipped, only temporarily embarrassed. And, of course, nothing like the poor, laboring masses who prop up the value of their assets, who work under or for them, rarely with them.
This should be the starting point for any fruitful discussion about the relationship between job and class or income and class. Without a concrete understanding of this relationship, “class” becomes an entirely subjective set of signifiers to be argued over endlessly.
However, this isn’t the end of the discussion by any means. Building off this framework, these are some consequent lines of inquiry:
What of celebrities and other notable figures, whose primary “asset” is their own person, brand or “expertise", which they rent though not as traditionally waged labor? Of people for whom speaking engagements (not for a single employer but a breadth of private associations and/or firms) pay the bills?
What of David Graeber’s classification of “Bullshit Jobs” which exist only in service to capital and its accumulation rather than production? Of people whose jobs at those accumulative centers pay them, sometimes quite handsomely, for little more than their strategic wasting of time and resources?
What of the cross-class solidarities of upper working class, “middle” class and bottom-stage bourgeoisie cohorts? Of people who see their class standing as indicated by shared consumptive habits and work to augment their ability to consume by collaborating across class lines?
What of corporate managers? Those whose waged work is centered in remanding workers into the logic of their firm’s bourgeois owners? Why is it that they’re paid so much better by those owners than those productive workers in their thrall?
And, hey: why’s the ownership class overwhelmingly male and white? Anything to do with the historical domination and subjugation of all other classes (working, peasantry, artisan, etc.) across imperialist, racist, chauvanist lines by this small, powerful class? Why and how are these behaviors reproduced?
More inquiries abound. Stop having the same conversation that can be so easily waylaid by deleterious ripostes made in (often, purposefully) obscurant bad faith. Instead explore the extent to which the very real definitions of class affect power and the control of our everyday lives inside and outside work.
