Should I stop using the label ‘middle class’?
It’s felt useful for a while, but maybe I’m making a distinction that doesn’t need to exist
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Speaking with friends building a working-class political movement recently, I learned they’ve explicitly cut the term middle class from their work.
I got it immediately… and it gave me pause.
I got it, because, right — there is no “middle class.” Under capitalism, there are only workers (those who produce) and capitalists/owners (those who own the means of production).1 Further classifying workers by relative income or wealth only divides us and benefits capitalists. We need to act in solidarity as one working class in opposition to a capitalist system if we want to see any change in our culture and economy.
And.
It gave me pause, because middle class has been a really useful term in my work.
I’ve long noted how I came into personal finance media as a rare working class writer among journalists with middle class backgrounds. I’ve written about how financial education and news is filtered through the lens of middle class creators.
It’s not insignificant that our culture of money is shaped by people who have a particular level of wealth, ownership, access to debt, academic pedigree, work experience, financial education and cultural cache the vast majority of us don’t have. It’s important to recognize when the person telling you you’re stupid for having credit card debt had family wealth that bought them their first car, made a down payment on their first house or covered their living expenses while they were in college. Or even the non-financial wealth of family members who’d gone to college who could help them navigate scholarship applications and roommate selection.
That’s middle-class wealth.
It’s not insignificant that I was a first-generation college student from a rural town who worked full-time and paid all of my own bills while attending a public university. That perspective impacts how I navigate our financial systems, and it impacts how I talk about them.
It has felt really important to me to highlight that distinction.
But in the grander scheme, is it so important?
Who even is ‘middle class’?
When I categorize people as “middle class,” who am I even talking about, exactly?
No one seems to be able to agree on a clear definition for middle class, or whether they’re part of it or not.
Despite widespread observation of widening wealth inequality in America, a slim majority of Americans still identifies as middle class, according to a 2024 study from Gallup. But the actual circumstances of those who identify as middle class vary quite a bit:
51% of people earning between $40,000 and $100,000 per year identified as middle or upper-middle class.
30% of people earning less than $40,000 per year identified as middle or upper-middle class.
17% of people earning more than $100,000 identified as working class.
In 2022, Pew Research put out a calculator that got a lot of attention for helping you figure out whether your household income makes you middle class. But even that’s not a straightforward equation; it’s based on where you live in the country. A report from Rand further complicates the definition, pointing out that, depending on how you measure it, we might have a shrinking middle class — or a steady middle class with shrinking income.
Even if we can define middle class with a clear equation, like Pew attempts, that class status means different things to different people. I might see middle class as a status full of privilege and access compared with my own upbringing, but I’ve heard from many people who identify with that status and associate it with financial struggles that sound exactly like mine. What working class means to me middle class means to a lot of people. Trying to make the distinction seems to add more confusion, not clarity.
Which leads me to believe the distinction between working class and middle class doesn’t really matter.
The divide that really matters
The problem we’re facing isn’t so-called middle class people getting a little bit more than us. The problem we’re facing is the system that creates a class of billionaires made up of fewer people than most high schools. The problem isn’t people who inherit homes and savings and jobs and businesses from their parents; I’ve heard from them, and they’re in just as much turmoil as the rest of us. The problem is the people who inherit dynasties — the power to move culture and politics to their will in ways that are only now becoming visible to most of us.
The problem isn’t the minute difference between working class and middle class — it’s the vast divide between almost all of us and a tiny few people who own everything we need.
What really matters is that the median American owns about $166,000 in wealth, while about 1,100 individuals own $1 billion or more. Just under 22 million Americans (8.5% of the adult population) even own $1 million or more.
If those numbers don’t feel like they mean much (because some brains don’t love numbers), here’s an image that always gets me — that’s most of us, down there in that tiny yellow sliver:
What good does it do to divide that tiny sliver further?
Name the system, change the conversation
“Middle class” personal finance gurus, experts and creators are desperately clinging to the mirage of class status they’ve been promised will protect them from the fickleness of capitalism. They’ve been given a set of budget culture rules to do it.
When the rules seem to work for them, they’re excited to tell the rest of us about it. Bless their hearts — they have no idea of the different barriers we face. The system keeps them from knowing, so when they see us struggling they can genuinely believe it’s because we’re not following the right rules. It’s how the system keeps everyone from seeing its culpability.
I know a lot of people take issue with blaming a “system.” A system can’t exist in a vacuum; it’s created and perpetuated by people who benefit from its existence. And all of those people sharing budget culture financial advice are perpetuating a harmful capitalist system. They accept budget culture without question because it keeps their mirage of security alive.
But we have to name the system, because we can’t change it if we don’t know it exists. And so few people are truly aware of the structures of capitalism and budget culture, by design.
“Middle class” people didn’t create budget culture. It’s a creation of the capitalist system that needs them to believe they can do the “right” things to take control of finances that will never be in their control.
It’s still important to name the nonsense lessons budget culture tries to teach us about money. It’s still important to learn to be skeptical of one-size-fits-all financial advice that completely ignores our lived realities. But I can probably adjust my language and avoid aiming that critique at the other workers who started life a few inches ahead of my starting line.
Instead of calling out the “middle class” financial gurus for their myopic perspectives on money, I could work harder to call them in to this new kind of conversation and broaden their perspective. To share with them the misfit stories we’re gathering here. To help them see the nuances the system is hiding from them. To make them hear, maybe for the first time, “needing to earn a living is absurd” and “budgeting doesn’t work.”
I feel resistance to this change. The middle class distinction has been important to my perception of myself as working class, and it’s been useful to my work in naming budget culture.
But nuance is important; injecting nuance into our cultural conversation about money is the whole reason this newsletter exists. Eliminating a catchall label is inconvenient — but I always appreciate a nudge to think more carefully about the words I’m using!
What do you think?
How would you feel about eliminating middle class from your vocabulary?
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Yes, this goes for those of us workers and solopreneurs who own small businesses, too. This will have to get its own post soon enough, but you are not a capitalist if you work for yourself. You’re a worker who’s taking back the means of production — this is what we want!
It does feel meaningless at this point. I think another meaningless distinction is the collars. For a time it made sense to define something as white collar, blue collar or the vaguely offensive pink collar. But there is limited manufacturing, many jobs are service, and those that are in the trades pay better than supposed white color jobs. The more we realize that we are all in the same soup, the better we can address what is really happening.
This is such an interesting conversation- it feels to me like “middle class” has meant people earning a living wage with the added perception/illusion that they have more leisure time, own a home. Paid by salary vs. hourly. So it’s that proverbial “American Dream” when your job is more secure and you’re not trading time for money. Then again, even those working for a salary can be called on to work crazy hours to feel secure, and without overtime pay. So still being extracted to the benefit of the billionaires, just with more money?