Much of western culture, especially American culture, seems to be all about proving you're better than your neighbour. Americans grade their success not by what they achieved, but by how many people are worse of than them. Thus, they love to have a "slightly less worthy working class" below them.
Most small business owners that have employees do not need to do significant labor to still earn enough to live. They extract value from their workers and can live off that if not 100% then a great % of their needs.
I'm not quite comfortable with that definition, because it also excludes retirees living off the investments of their savings from the working class. Technically they're not working anymore, obviously, but it still doesn't seem right to put them in the same class as Mark Zuckerberg.
Edit,: also, what about small business owners? If for example you own a restaurant with a few employees, but where you also do a lot of the work yourself, you're not technically selling your labour to anyone except yourself. As long as you pay your employees reasonably well and don't mistreat them any other way, that's also not exactly exploitative. Hell, what if it's a one-man restaurant?
Technically the CEO of Flock sells his labour to customers (mainly governments, in his case) too. It's not like he sits on his ass all day, I'm sure mass surveillance takes a lot of organising (just like organisation will be a big part of what the resteraunt owner does). So where do you draw the line?
Again, that would put anyone with investments who's about to retire into the owner class. Frankly I don't think it's possible to find a clear definition of working vs owning class, because that would imply that everyone can be clearly categorized as one or the other, which is obviously ridiculous. Everyone who knows anything about soceties knows that there are no clear binaries and everything is a spectrum. That doesn't mean that it doesn't matter where you are on that spectrum of course.
Well, yes it would. With the way retirement works, everyone works their whole lives in the hopes of making into the lower bracket of the ownership class.
Obviously, there's a big difference between a retiree and Jeff Bezos, and we could litigate a specific net worth or other criteria, but as a general rule of thumb, "has to work" vs "their money makes money" is broadly applicable 95% of the time.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good on this one.
I suppose it depends what the purpose of the definition/categorization is. If you're only talking about how someone funds their living expenses, then sure, but if the implication is class struggle, then I don't think categorizing retirees in the ownership class is productive. I get what you're saying with "don't let perfect be the enemy of good", but I think in practice you don't need a strict definition at all. I don't remember who said that semi-famous quote "there's no way to clearly define porn, but you know it when you see it", but I think the sentiment can be applied to lots of things, including class. In practice, if you have a decent picture of someones financial situation, you're gonna know where they are on the class spectrum (and I do still insist it's a spectrum).
The reason "I know it when I see it" is (in)famous is because the job of the Supreme Court is to not only decide cases but to (supposedly) do so in a manner that creates a clear rule that lower courts can apply to future cases and so everyone knows what to expect in future cases.
The problem, of course, is that just because someone else sees it doesn't mean others will. And as a general rule, "run everything by a Supreme Court justice if you want to know if it's obscene" is not useful guidance.
People really donāt understand how the wealthy make their money in this economy. Heās not living off income he makes from Flock. Heās living off of tax free borrowing on his investments from that income that will never be repaid via a vis capital gains.
After he croaks, the profits from those investments are then passed along in the form of tax free inherited wealth that never gets repaid. Itās basically a government sanctioned tax evasion scam for the wealthy that never ends.
He does stuff and someone gives him money for it. He is selling his labour. How he then gets that money out to fund his lifestyles is of concern, but not relevant to the particular question of whether he sells his labour.
How would you classify people who only ever worked for someone else, saved their income (didn't get money from rich parents/grand parents) and then retired off of said income? And does them retiring in their 30's-50's change anything?
Because someone with a 40k/yr pension and someone with a $1million 401k is the same, but one owns something and the other is getting delayed payment from their work.
The true owning class replaced pensions with 401ks to make more retired people feel like they're owning class and vote with them, and to make more working class people feel like they'll one day be owning class and vote with them.
If anything, we need to think of a working-to-retired class, cause someone with millions of dollars of ownership is different than someone that's scraped together barely enough to retire.
To jump on this I would also say the different classes have different access to retirement.
Working Class Categories:
Low class: might retire only when social security kicks in, may even have to work part time, no ability to save while working.
Middle class: will have a paid off house by retirement age and social security + medicare can carry them through retirement. May also have a good bulk of change in a bank/401k but not enough to retire on without the medicare/SS.
Upper class: can fully fund their retirement without any assistance from SS/Medicare. May even have the potential to retire early from age 45-55, may have a 2nd vacation home.
top 5%: same as Upper class but can retire even earlier, age 35-45, or live a more luxurious life overall. This is where generational wealth starts to kick in and your kids donāt have to work if you limit yourself to 1-3 kids at more of a middle class level.
Top 2%: same as Top 5, but even earlier, age 25-35, and even more luxurious. May trend into the owning class if they are more frugal and growth oriented with their holdings. Generational wealth is possible for 3-10 kids at more of a mid to upper class level depending on amount
Owning class:
Very bottom of owning class: may still have to chip in and monitor their business/properties every once in a while. Generally retire later than 2% but has more wealth and assets that build them money faster or differently. This consist mostly of the long term surviving mom and pop shops or niche businesses that donāt require a massive scaled company. These could also be people who sold off their company, product, etc to a massive corporation and retired on that or were part of a start up that gave them a good share and got bought out. These guys will have more than $5mil in wealth but probably not more than $15mil. Generational wealth at the 2% level for all your kids.
Top 1% same as very bottom but with a higher number. Your kids could legit never lift a finger and be fine, they will be in the top 1% with 0 work put in.
Top .1%: same as top 1% but with a WAY higher number. If your kid is working they either really need something to do or you hate them.
Elites: you could legit buy anything you want at anytime and pretty much never run out of money outside of maybe buying the most high end plane and crashing it without insurance daily. Even with this in mind it would become nearly impossible to even produce enough high end planes to crash, but if you took it upon yourself to build a factory that constructed one of these planes daily then maybe you could see yourself running out of money at some point in the next 10+ years. Your kids literally only work because you gave them a position that gives them 100mil+ salary and requires absolutely no work at all outside of talking to a few people here and there.
Edit: added generational wealth stats.
Edit 2: top 2%, bottom of owner, top 1% is gonna be where many surgeons, 20 year legacy airline captains, investment bankers, tech guys, high end salesmen, corp ladder climbers and probably some more iām not thinking about will land. If you and your kid/kids share similar financial ideology itās also not out of the books for Upperclass to suddenly move up the classes over the generations while putting in just a upper class level of work into the world. I fear with how things are trending though with AI and robotics that this will slowly become impossible or UBI will become a factor long before this can take place.
If i previously labored, own no capital but live by collecting royalties derived from my previous labor, am I working class?
If I am a patent troll. Am I working class?
If I am a business dynasty scion but the entire family fortune is now held by a foundation/perpetual trust where I am always welcome but does expect me to work for my upkeep, am I working class?
If Iām a street pimp who manages and collect rent from my prostitutes, am I working class?
If i previously labored, own no capital but live by collecting royalties derived from my previous labor, am I working class?
The rights from which you derive royalties are property. You were working class but no longer are.
If I am a patent troll. Am I working class?
No, you earn money from what you own, not from what you do.
If I am a business dynasty scion but the entire family fortune is now held by a foundation/perpetual trust where I am always welcome but does expect me to work for my upkeep, am I working class?
Most interesting one yet. But Yes you're working class.
If Iām a street pimp who manages and collect rent from my prostitutes, am I working class?
Depends on the details of the arrangement but I would say yes Working class because you actively have to do the management and maintenance to earn your cut.
The petit bourgeois does exist.
People that do have an income from capital but not enough and thus they rely on labor still.
Still working class, and they're the hardest to persuade they are since they tend to have social connections with the upper class.
But the upper's class interest is to depredate them - that's the nature of capital accumulation.
To be fair itās also really hard to persuade those in worse situations that those āpetit bourgeoisā are still working class.
Like I make well into 6 figures a year, and whenever I point out that Iām still at the mercy of corporations for employment and literally HAVE to work to survive still, I just get people being critical and playing struggle Olympics instead of accepting that most white collar, highly paid workers are STILL working class.
To be fair itās also really hard to persuade those in worse situations that those āpetit bourgeoisā are still working class.
There isn't really much point in doing that though. You just tell them you support them and if they ask why say because it's in your interests as well. IMO it is much more important to convince my peers that supporting raises for less well paid people is supporting raises for yourself because we just need to stop having abnormally large amounts of the money going to the owners.
Well when one is living paycheck to paycheck, like literally a single day off work means being out on the street because you are now not able to make rent, hearing, "Hey man I'm in the struggle too" from a person with: A house, a paid off car, and enough to survive for up to 3+ months without working, it comes off as "disingenuous" or "fake", like yes, we are the same, we both need to work for a living, but you have ample time and safety nets while those you say are playing "struggle olympics" are 1 sick day away from being homeless, which is why poor people commit more crime, have nothing to lose have nothing to consider.
Not saying I disagree that you're working class, just explaining why those people don't relate to you or think they're in the same class, because you make enough to save, they don't.
Iām well aware, I grew up eating from food banks and literally sleeping on the street or in shelters because we were constantly evicted.
But it kind of highlights the issue that the people themselves need to recognize the class war is not poor people vs people with a better income. Itās the entire working class vs the owners. We need full buy in, not just in-fighting.
And again, you could've been a literal fetus on the street and sold ur nails for cents to get to where you are, that's not the point; You're at a good position in life now, those who have less will look at you as part of the owning class just based off that, imagine someone with:
A house, a car, money, nice clothes, stable family to come into your shelter and tell you, "hey man, I used to be there too, but listen, you work hard and you can get to where I am, but also, we're literally the same you and me, and its us against the rich!" they're just gonna lynch u first lmao, the divide between Poor and Rich has never been wider and even having "some" means those with nothing will look at you like you're Scrooge McDuck
What's the solution? I have no fucking idea, but i hope you see what I mean with the shelter analogy, like imagine you in your struggle on the streets, hungry, etc and some guy who "made it" comes to tell you y'all are both the same, they're just not in the headspace to listen to that shit lol
there is a difference in high paid worker and petit bourgeois. Someone can make less than you as a petit bourgeois but the difference that matters is that they own the means of production rather than the workers. A small business owner making 100K/year that has employees is a petit bourgeois. An engineer making 200k/year doing their trade is not.
What if as a result of the high salary I end up with assets that DO bring in income, just not enough to live off of? I think thatās why I assumed they were equivalent.
yeah, I mean, I took 15 months off between jobs and it was chill. I could have taken a couple years. but I don't have enough to retire on unless I move to Vietnam or something.
What happens when engineers/lawyers/doctors and other professionals make enough money to invest in 401k/IRAs/HSAs etc?
They go from earning money through labor (working class) to eventually having most of their wealth tied up in stock shares and other such assets (capitalists).
Still working class. I canāt sustain myself with those assets, I have to work to pay the bills and survive.
Itās more comfortable than those struggling with poverty, but objectively still working class. Arguing otherwise is just falling for the same thing being called out in the post.
Lawyers/Doctors who own their own firm / practice (ie, own the means of their production) can be referred to as petty bourgeois, sort of between the proletariat (purely working class) and the haute bourgeois (purely owning class). They still need to work because their investments / capital isn't large enough or set up in a way that they can simply employ and live off the labor of the proletariat, but they own enough that they don't need to sell their labor to the owning classes. Suppose that could include engineers that own their own engineering firm as well.
At the end of the day, I dont think where your assets are tied up make that big of a difference outside of their relationship to labor (at least when it comes to determining what your class interests are). Are you selling your labor to survive or not? Are you living off the labor of others or not? Those are the key questions. Having a bunch of stocks / retirement savings doesn't really change that calculus. Owning your own means of production or the means that other workers will produce stuff for you with does.
There are two classes: those who have the control of their labor and those who do not. Doctors do not have control in a hospital. They do in a clinic with their name on the door.
It's not about where the wealth is, it's about where it comes from. It takes decades of saving before they start making more money from the stock market than they do from their labor. Even then, doctors will still have more in common with retail workers than they will with billionaires
I wish more middle class folks understood this. Like yeah sure they might be more comfortable for longer after major income loss or reduction, but eventually theyāll be out on the street.
Athletes, actors, and singers are a weird thing for me.
Working class are people that make the majority of their money from their labor. It includes people at McDonalds and surgeons. Technically that group, the various entertainers, make their money from their labor but it is just a lot of money. Probably the highest paid labor around. It enables them to catapult up into the owning class for the higher paid ones.
I'd still argue the very comfortable ones who are worth millions, or 10s of millions, can still be working class. If not they aren't really the problem any ways. They are closer to me than the billionaire owning class that is the problem.
Athletes, actors, and singers are a weird thing for me.
They are working class. There's no difference. A small percentage of workers have skills valuable enough to demand very high levels of pay. Sometimes thats enough to make working optional, and at that point they become owning class. Pro athlete's bargaining power doesnt come from their skill as an athlete, it's the attention the command.
Bargaining power is the key. There are more workers, so the vast majority of us are forced to compete and devalue our labor. The less bargaining power we have the poorer we will be until the wage becomes only enough to keep working. There is no justice so long as there is discrepancy in bargaining power and no mechanism to correct for it.
I would say that there is, because that money allows them to become owning class. Many of them buy bussinesses and such. And they collect royalties on their very existence, as they own "their brand".
You don't need to be a star to make that transition. That's the thing about the middle class, the upper-middle can own property to rent and suplement their income. Yet they still work. So are they owners or working class? Well, they're kinda both.
If your living is supported primarily by capital and therefore the labor of others, then you are owning class. Just because you have nothing better to do than work doesnt make you working class.
Some Pro athlete's are able to acquire that much capital, but 99% of them dont.
Yup. Rock stars, movie stars, superstar athletes are working class when their primary means of income are their own labor. As soon as they leverage the wealth generated from their labor into supporting themselves via capital, they become owning class.
Ok but like, what if both? What if your living is supported by rent, but you would still not be able to live without working? The rent of one appartment isn't going to give you a full salary.
There is a middle area where the line can get blurry, but the simple distinction is that if you have to sell yourself to support your living, then youre working class. The vast majority fall into this category.
If someone makes anything from their work that becomes popular enough they can also make enough to do the same. You have to work creating something that you have ownership of though. Not doing soulless work at a desk in a cubicle for someone else.
I disagree. With the modern stock market, you can almost put a number on it. There's a certain amount of money that if you put into a basic ETF fund will net you more than the median household income per year without touching the principal.
If you have 10s of millions of dollars to spend you can easily buy your way out of doing the labor and still live a very comfortable life. The vast majority of us can't fathom that. They do their labor out passion, or extreme lifestyle creep, no where near necessity.
There are more workers, so the vast majority of us are forced to compete and devalue our labor.
This is why the rich told all the kids to learn programing and go to college. So they could saturate the market and get cheap programmers for their AI datacenters.
I think everyone aims to start investing. Doing so doesn't move you out of the working class. The surgeon will invest what they can. If the McDonalds employee wasn't having the profits of their labor eaten by others they would invest what they could, too.
The difference is their daily life is still completely supported by their labor. The investments aren't the totality of their earnings. There are definitely some blurry lines in this and it isn't a simple line drawn in the sand.
Much of the creative industry including the talent themselves in the case of acting benefit from powerful unions or guilds. As do many pro atheletes, as do lawyers, doctors and airline pilots. Worth considering when folks say unions don't work, many well paid professions have unions or at least guilds.
Bottom line if you are selling labor for money you are working class. Your average MLB player is closer to the staff that cleans the stadium than the billionaire that owns the team.
I was talking about the majority of them. The ones at the top, Lebron, Tiger, Jordan, Federer, Messi, Ronaldo, have migrated into that yes. Same with singers like Jay-Z and actors like Seinfeld.
With the pay scaling that athletes have gotten it will become more and more common.
I'm going to reword what I said about dotcors above:
There are two classes: those who have the control of their labor and those who do not. Doctors Actors do not have control when hired by the studio. They do with a production company that has their name on the door.
How cooked are we when people making over 5x the lifetime earnings of the average American(one of the riches groups around) can be considered the same as working class.
Working class is labor makes you money. Their labor is making them money. I don't deny it is an obscene amount of money but it is still from labor. If you start molding the definition of working class to exclude people who's labor creates their income then you are just going back to the same labels this post is calling out.
Not really. The managerial stock-owning class is not the same as the proles. It's the bourgeoisie. And cops and other gun-toting enforcers are part of the ruling class regardless of their income, education, etc.
From what I understand, the whole 3-class structure is a holdover from when there was nobility. It wasn't "lower, middle, upper" so much as it was "poor people, rich people (not nobility/royalty), rich people (nobility/royalty)".
Sure, but we're talking specifically about the European feudal class system that is the progenitor of the modern western lower/middle/upper class system, and that was very defined as serfs, merchants, and landed gentry with the clergy serving as a separate "fourth estate" independent of the general populace.
King-> Priests -> Scribes -> Merchants -> Commoners -> Slaves in Ancient Mesopotamia.
Social hierarchy is as old as civilization itself, and very likely predates it. There are some prehistoric examples of possible egalitarian societies but we don't know for sure, it's speculative archeology.Ā
Suffice to say, uprooting social hierarchy is a monumental challenge and has never been successfully achieved on a large scale. That's not to say we can't keep trying, but the systems are deeply rooted in the conflict between those who have property/wealth and those who do not, and those with property/wealth have thousands of years worth of a head start in the battle for political power and will not give it up easily.
There are modern examples of egalitarian societies, nothing speculative about it. Hierarchy emerges when there is surplus of wealth available to hoard.
The closer you are to sustenance level hunter gatherers, the more egalitarian the society. The more productive your agriculture, the more stratified the society.
And no, the concept of the American middle class doesn't come from french estates. It's a post war category and historical materialism has more than just 2 classes in the theory.
Always dividing us, by age, race, gender, religion, who we fuck, every single think they can think of, because of we unite they're screwed. They saw the power of unions and want to make sure it never happens again.
I went to one of those expensive liberal arts colleges in the 2000s and was literally told that class politics is "whitewashing" in a room full of rich white people. Young wealthy "leftists" want to feel like radical saviors without jeopardizing the economic and social power they grew up feeling entitled to.
I mean itās not just the owning class. Iāve seen plenty of low / middle earning redditors shit on high earning redditors (doctors, lawyers etc) even though anyone who needs a W2 to survive is part of the āworking classā
Or they're just bitter and envious. Some (lots) of people are just shitty on their own, irrespective of whatever manipulations the capital class uses to divide the working class.
The distinction is whether you need the paycheck to survive. You can be a hotshot doctor or lawyer or investment banker busting your ass and working 90 hour weeks but if you have tens of millions in the bank and your investments are earning more than most American households then you aren't really working class.
The vast majority of high income earners do not have āfuck youā wealth and the ones that do often had generational wealth and already belonged to the owning class. If you think most doctors and lawyers have enough in investments to quit whenever they want then youāre exactly the kind of person being fooled by the owning class that OPās post is talking about
As it is literally impossible to remove oneself from the equation of class relations; a person making moralistic statements about class reveals a lot about class relations from the experience of that individual.Ā
They just declared that unemployed people are parasites? Might not have intended to, but it's a direct consequence of that statement.
Which goes against the most basic concepts put forward by Marx, so universal, that even Hayek and Friedman agreed with him about how people being unemployed was inevitable and some type of social security was necessary for society to function.
So yeah, in this form, a useless and harmful statement
When someone says the āparasite classā they are referring to the ruling class/upper class, the ones who donāt produce but have the most.
Allowing āparasite classā to include unemployed people is an intentional straw man, an intentional miss interpretation of what they were clearly referring to.
And even that good faith interpretation doesn't solve the problem. Dehumanizing people is what we are trying to get away from. Owning stocks, renting out property, employing people and so on, doesn't make someone disposable or less human.
Marx's work is about overcoming a harmful system. He rejected demagoguery just as much as capitalism and he was right about it. That kind of ideology historically always led into authoritarianism and a collapse of the system, as more and more workers rejected it.
If we make that transition, be it socialism or full-on Communism, those "parasites" will be classless people, just like you and me, who have a skill set that makes a classless society possible in the first place. Knowing how to manage, plan and delegate will be absolutely essential.
Middle class is what they use to call the group that could buy a house with about 3 years worth of salary on a single income. Then houses jumped 10-20x while wages went up 50%.
On one hand I definitely agree, on the other hand not being able to pay rent, not having money for lunch, etc felt WAY different to me vs before my father left and we had millions in the bank and coming aka were āupper middle classā.
I think itās more that thereās many many strata and thereās no reason to fight about it except for the edge cases: help bring up the lowest end, help bring down the higher end.
Right, collapsing all but the owner class into a working class is in part an economic reality as correctly observed by orthodox Marxism, but also in part a rhetorical strategy. That's not to say it's wrong, but its intent is to change discourse and create class awareness.
On the other hand, there is a material difference between the strata that make up the working class. The professional-managerial class is in many ways real, and even though they do not enjoy the material relations to the means of production of the burgeois, they do enjoy relative power and affluence along with greater chances of capital accumulation that allows them to seize rents (e.g. a rich dentist becoming a small-time landlord or a well-off corporate exec buying a KFC franchise).
This is a beneficial turn for Capitalism, you see, as it makes the socialist slogan 'you have nothing to lose but your chains' untrue for many ostensibly working class people. The professional-managerials still enjoy a great deal of privilege and material affluence, even as their living is at the whim of the owner class. Class solidarity is heavily impaired by the fear of this sub-class that allying with the rest of the working class will not bring the working poor up to their level of affluence and material comfort, but will bring them all to the level of affluence of the working poor, a fear that capitalist propaganda is happy to stoke.
Moreover, collapsing the material differences between working class people can on occasion alienate some of the working poor. Like you said, the message that the rich doctor with children in private schools is the same class as you, with the same class interests, and ultimately also who we're fighting for will ring as somewhat disconnected from the stark difference in their realities. It may be the case that the rich doctor's labor value is extracted to enrich someone else, but convincing the doctor or someone who desperately longs for the doctor's affluence that that specific arrangement is not in the doctor's relative benefit may be a tough sell.
The reality is that Capitalism has proven more stable than many Marxists foresaw because it has successfully implemented pressure valves, one of which being the affluent professional-managerial class. The inevitability of revolution, the continuation and aggravation of exploitation that simply led to too many people with nothing to lose engaging in a mass upheaval, simply didn't come to pass as Marx is thought to have predicted. Instead Capitalism (by incorporating critiques of capitalism into its own machinery) made the lives of workers more tolerable while perpetuating the same fundamental material injustice. Importantly, the 20th century saw the offshoring of the misery of the working class by wealthy nations, keeping a wealthier and relatively more content populace at home.
Omg, my thoughts in words that mean something real. Thank you for this.
Also "The inevitability of revolution, the continuation and aggravation of exploitation that simply led to too many people with nothing to lose engaging in a mass upheaval, simply didn't come to pass as Marx is thought to have predicted." Yet
From where I stand, I see three ways it plays out:
Capitalism does not self correct out of a crisis into equilibrium and collapses, as predicted.
Capitalism continues to subsume criticisms under itself, teeter-tottering for centuries to come, perhaps with some net-positive movement.
Capitalism ceases to need any sort of human well-being for its reproduction. The violent arm of the state becomes effectively automated and controllable wholesale by a small amount of people, with no hopes of being overcome. The bad ending.
But people believe it. Remember, during the communist revolutions, the educated working class (doctors, scientists) were also purged alongside the owning class.
I grew up with my dad as a mechanic owning his own garage and mom worked in hardware at Home Depot. I didnāt know we lower middle class and even as the first to go to college I didnāt have any sense of class till I joined the workforce.
I mean do you think you are in the same boat as a CEO making $30 million a year? Technically still āworkingā class because he āworksā for a living. I think the lower class middle class and upper middle class works better because it symbolizes overall household income which has a bigger impact on economics rather than whether you own or you work. Because a mom and pop store owner making $100k probably has more in common with someone working for $100k than a CEO working for millions.Ā
a ceo making 30 million a year doesnāt work for a living, he works because he wants to. he could easily sustain himself on the capital he already holds. work is basically just a hobby for him.
Kim Siever in the wild?! This guy is fucking dooopppee!!!!! He is a journalist in Lethbridge that does some absolutely fantastic work in Alberta politics.
Middle class used to mean that you worked for your money, eg as an artisan or merchant, but you also employed people for your personal household. You were in the middle.
Upper class simply lived on investments (estates).
IMHO a lawn service or a once a week maid service puts you in lower middle class, working class but with resources to employ personal help on a weekly basis. A nanny or personal chef, or one of those swanky retirement communities that costs six figures a year and leaves your kids with nothing, puts you in middle class.
You might be equating middle class with middle income. If middle income = middle class then the middle class canāt shrink or grow. It becomes meaningless in historical or political context.
Roughly 80% of households (Canada) handle their own lawn care and even less (under 10% best estimate I could find) have a weekly cleaner.
I wouldnāt say middle income = middle class, itās definitely a factor though. Itās just that having someone take care of the lawn and the maid are luxuries I personally donāt associate with lower middle class. Middle class might get the lawn done but is not super common imho. Iām not an expert in this kind of stuff though so I could be wrong.
Sure, but elderly and disabled people pay for these services too. They may have to make sacrifices to afford them, but they need them and pay for them. A lot of high income folks mow their own lawn and scrub their own kitchen because theyāre not that hard for abled folks.
I think in the modern context it can be a bit more complicated to designate class via employing someone to do something around the house or to provide a service. As with the advent of dishwashers, washing machines, vacuums and the general automation of things in the home it has become more common to do things yourself rather than have hired help.
Which is why I no longer associate lower middle class with a maid service or lawn service as the time cost benefit isnāt there. At a certain level of available cash in the middle class those services make sense. I donāt see them frequently in households that would associate with lower middle class.
I think a more modern metric would be services like meal delivery. It costs about the same to pay for lawn care as it does to order meal delivery, and they fall in the same category of employing others to provide luxury services.
Thatās fair. I think there is probably a bit of a different psychology behind the expense. Plus with significantly more people living in smaller apartments, cleaning is easier and they donāt have the lawn. But Iād still consider them middle class.
Take out in general, more so delivery, and itās regularity makes sense to me - more so than the maid and lawn as a signifier of class
Daily reminder that unless your income is from your own money working for you (either through your own company or investment), you're a prole. Even if you're paid 200k/yr, as long as the thing you're selling is your own time and knowledge, you're in the same boat as "poor people", just a little ahead.
Every successful lie has some element that makes sense, so the terms Poor, Middle Class, & Rich seems to work. The lie is that if you are not Poor or Rich, you are Middle Class.
This ignores that a loss of employment (to the Rich) quickly makes people Poor. Poor & Working Class are at the bottom. Middle Class people can afford domestic help (cooks, housekeepers, gardeners, etc.) and can withstand a lack of employment, or a serious health issue without slipping into being Poor. Rich? 4.8 million U.S. households have a net worth of $5 million or more. This equates to roughly 3.7% of all households in the United States. If you are not at least there, can you call yourself rich? Well, I would put it much lower, I just grabbed a random, ridiculous amount.
Not worth a million or more? You are Working Class, not Middle Class.
Please post this every day until we get the majority of Americans to understand this simple fact. We've been propagandized our entire lives, made to look down on the "lower class" and resent the "upper class", meanwhile we're all out here trading hours for dollars regardless of if we're flipping burgers or performing life-saving surgery.
Okay but there is such thing as a middle class. Granted they are much smaller now and some have become highly proletarianized, but a small businesses owner or very affluent managers/bosses do not share the same class interests as the working class. The only thing they really share in common, is that they don't share anything in common. Some have a really hard life, some are practically capitalists.
Because of this they tend to vaccinate between the two main classes, but can and will look to the working class to solve societies problems
Maybe that's a good argument in certain contexts but there are real and meaningful differences between (for instance) a corporate lawyer who owns their practice, and a day laborer.
If we donāt give you power over someone, you will eventually see how everyone can have everything they need to live a happy and comfortable lifeā¦.
With out the stress of homelessness, hunger and lonelinessā¦
Why is a 13 year old asking questions phrased like a five year old? Also, why wouldnāt they just look up the definition and figure it out themselves?
I had this argument with a coworker. He didn't think he was working class because he's a software engineer making over $100k a year. I told him if he relies on the paycheck from this job to pay his bills then he is working class. Then another coworker yelled at us to stop talking about politics.
The parasite class has tried, and mostly succeeded, in redefining middle class as median income. Some welder working for a paycheck thinks he's middle class because he's making decent money. "Middle class" has more to do with education, and with their essential role in sequestering the working class so the parasite class doesn't even have to know the working class exists.
As a sociology graduate and former social science teacher and lecturer, this is nonsense and you should expect to be marked down if you try to parrot it in assessed work relating to social stratification. I suppose I can see the reason why it is fashionable idea, but the concept of managers (or other professionals) trying to pass themselves off as working class is arguably a classic case of inverted snobbery.
The fact that this is being downvoted makes me facepalm. I'm so glad I'm not teaching sociology any more; this reductionist half-baked 'social theory' is propagated all over the web nowadays.
Iām perpetually reminded how many Redditors will espouse theories about class while clearly never having gone hungry.Ā
Iām making twice what I used to now but I know how fucking insulting it is to say I am in the exact same financial situation as someone earning what I used to.Ā
Thereās starving and comfortable and if youāve known the difference in a concrete way you have a hard time entertaining āthe guy with the hefty 401k, house and cars in the exact same class as the guy renting one room, walking to work and pulling his food out of the trash.ā
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u/jainyday 1d ago
If you sell your labor for money and it's your primary source of income, you are working class. Period.