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.
Great point about "collars." It's kind of telling about our lack of class awareness that there was never a widespread addition to the collar classification system to account for service work.
Service work is today’s “blue collar.” Service and retail are where a high school grad can enter immediately, and have replaced those post WWII manufacturing jobs since capitalists took those overseas. I welcome the day when a service worker can buy a house and support a family like a factory worker could back in the day.
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?
I think that's a vague idea that I've had of "middle class," too. There's definitely a perception that they have more access, options, freedom, leisure time. Anne Helen Petersen's book "Can't Even" opens with a good discussion about the precarity of all of that for middle class people.
It matters a lot, actually, to be able to accurately describe class without collapsing into dualities that fail to capture people's lived experiences. There is some great work about how middle class resource hoarding is a huge problem politically and logistically, as a road block to progressive organizing. (Richard Reeves has a good piece about this at Boston Review; and I think Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Aspirational Class has some insight into this phenomenon as well). Class is a distinction that is lived and deeply informs one's views of politics and what matters, and there are different cultures, histories, etc that go along with that. Not talking about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist; it just collapses class into an unhelpful blob that forgets the middle class mediates between workers and the owners, whether through ideology, culture, education, etc.
If your point is that we need more structural analysis rather than a personal one (as in, not getting stuck in our irritation over middle class peers who are incredibly insensitive and unaware of their privilege), then sure. But even then, we can start from these distinctions and bad feelings we live with on a daily basis toward an understanding of the larger system and who and how we want to align ourselves with. This is the basis of good organizing.
American politics already has a deeply impoverished class consciousness and language with which to talk about class, so quietly erasing terms because we don't have a theory to accommodate them (or because we have bad feelings about them) is unhelpful and ahistorical.
This is a great point! It's why it's so tricky to imagine eliminating the classification of "middle class."
I think the goal is to encourage solidarity among the middle class and working class — for us all to see ourselves as "working class" — to combat the organizing concerns you mentioned. If people in the middle class understood themselves as part of the working class that's being exploited by capitalists, ideally we'd see less of that resource hoarding and other behaviors that work against the wellbeing of the working class (which, we've also seen historically, work against the wellbeing of the middle class, too, but it's politically convenient to make people ignore that reality).
I agree it’s useful to have the term, but as a reminder of capitalist obfuscation and divide-and-conquer tactics rather than an actual class.
I don’t think middle class hoarding is a bigger problem than capitalist hoarding. In the US “Middle class” is a deceptive term meant to divide us in the first place. The middle class are still workers, even the scab managerial class, knowingly or unknowingly. The sooner they realize that, the better for all of us. We’re working against A LOT of capitalist propaganda here.
This is one of those areas where America and Britain diverge. In the UK "middle class" has a very specific meaning and relates to someone in probably the top 20% or so income bracket who isn't a member of the landed aristocracy (the "upper class"). It is a class with distinct markers around home ownership in specific areas, private education (confusingly many private schools are referred to as "public schools" in the UK) and jobs in the professions or in the upper echelons of academia and the civil service.
There was a really good Atlantic article a few years ago that described the "New American aristocracy", being those between the 1% and 10% of earners. I think that is probably a better characterisation than using the old "middle" vs "working" classes.
You're right on the first point, but you definitely don't have to be top 20% to be considered middle-class in the UK (probably more like above the 50th decile depending on where you live) my family were probably top 40% when my dad was working and were very much middle-class. I could list off a dozen distinctions between myself and my working-class peers, but at the end of the day class becomes a bit like pornography, you know it when you see it.
The private school thing can also be a red herring, in London and the home counties, yes, most middle-class people either go private, make their kids sit the 11-plus, or pretend to be religious to get into a local CofE school, but there is a large contingent of middle-class parents (including my own) who are ideologically opposed to selective schooling, and will make a conscious choice to send their kids to the local comprehensive. I think it's probably fair to move the distinction from 'privately educated' to 'could afford to educate their children privately if they chose to'.
I'm Scottish, so class is a slightly different kettle of fish up there, but I've lived in England long enough to recognise that while the English middle-classes can seem homoegnous in their choices (especially when it comes to driving 4x4s in the city and painting their living rooms sad beige) they're definitely not when it comes to education, and the average middle-class homeowner here probably has a lot more in common with the traditional American middle-class than with those in the 'new American aristocracy'
I think we Scots delude ourselves with the 'lad o pairts' myth when, if you look at the professions or the senior civil service, they are of a very similar class to the same ones in England.
True, but Scotland often feels less segregated along class lines, more things are freely and universally available, which erodes the distinction between kids who need dental work but whose parents can't pay for it and kids whose parents can, even at a cultural level, access to insitutions that provide the kind of extra-curricular education which used to segregate young people along class lines is more likely to be cheap or free.
The most common question I got going to uni in England was 'why didn't you stay in Scotland? It's free there!' (as if this was something I'd had no idea about beforehand) but living down here has been a real eye-opener on so many levels.
You may be right, and it may be entirely a delusion that we're any different, but I think the willingness to create inter-class solidarity in a similar way to my mother's nordic family is something that sets the Scots apart. And that in time translates into a real difference in values, even if doing impressions of my friend's very working-class nan going 'TYRONE YER TEA'S READY!' was the height of humour among the middle-class portion of my school-friends
Yes, I am aware of those jokes. When I went to university my working class accent was a source of endless amusement to the middle class kids in my year. So much so that I self-consciously softened my accent over the years so now I barely sound Glaswegian - most people think I am originally from Northern Ireland.
The difference I found was when it came to moving into a middle class career (I work in the public sector in a policy grade role). When I lived in London the middle class Oxbridge civil servants were, quite paternalistically, helpful to me in my career, safe in the knowledge that the structure of the UK civil service meant that I was no threat to them. In Scotland, and especially Glasgow, there is a strong "know your place" mentality and "getting above yourself" is seen as a cardinal sin.
So yes, we have blurred lines due to our universal services but that is predicated on two things - 1) the main beneficiary of, for example, free university fees are the children of the middle classes - fees are only one part of the equation; there are no maintenance grants and 2) so long as the working class kids who go to university stay in their lane and don't compete too hard with the middle class kids because then the sharp elbows come out. Saw that best in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis - I was working in economic development at the time so saw it first hand - graduate underemployment rose as graduate level jobs fell. Dig a little deeper and the middle class kids were fine. It was the working class graduates who were forced to take non-graduate level jobs. As soon as opportunities became scarce, the middle classes closed ranks and made sure their people were ok.
I think in addressing the problem of graduate underemployment it's important not to generalise too much, and to factor in other challenges. I was on the sharp end of that same underemployment. My first job after leaving uni was a retail one where being middle-class was actually more of a disadvantage (most of the middle-managers didn't have degrees and were suspicious of those who did assuming they'd take off the second something better came along) and while I might put my chronic underemployment (I've never once had a job that actually required a BA) down to my disabilities making me harder to employ, my sister's first post-graduation job was in a shoe-shop.
It's fascinating though to learn though that Glasgow had such a sense of ensuring people stayed in their lane when we were always taught to view it as some sort of working-class stronghold, while Edinburgh by contrast was as segregated along class lines as parts of England, but full of people bending over backwards to try and pretend those divisions didn't exist.
There was analysis done on the graduate underemployment post 2008 and a graduate recruitment scheme was introduced by Scottish Enterprise to address it. I'm not saying there weren't any middle class people in the underemployed group but it was primarily those from the lower socio-economic deciles who suffered. Selina Todd's book "Snakes and Ladders" makes it clear that social mobility only happens in the UK en masse (at a statistically significant level) when there is 'room at the top'. The rest of the time, the middle classes hoard opportunities for their children and children of people like them.
Yes, Glasgow is a more socially egalitarian place than Edinburgh but suffers from tall poppy syndrome. 'Ah kent yer faither' is a sneer of social opprobium for those who aspire to anything beyond where they were born.
I think this is an important discussion to have. I believe the term has value *and* i believe the context in which it is used matters too. I agree that when it comes to campaigning, the term can be distracting, setting up unhelpful divisions. But, we can't wish away differences in our socio-economic lived experiences and building solidarity does not require it either. In fact, I would argue that the opposite is true. False equivalence about how, and the degree to which, we are being exploited does not make us stronger (politically or otherwise). Being able to interrogate those differences is critical to understanding how they are used to divide and conquer workers and by extension, help us to build defences against such tactics by working out how we build solidarity across these real differences. Words matter and labels are a useful starting point as we seek to reason together. I think we would lose something in doing away with this term even as I agree that it (and other class descriptions) should be the starting point for conversations not the end.
There is so much knowledge to digest here. I am going to have to sit with this awhile. I am coauthoring a piece about pay inequality in the legal academia based on status and gender. The pink collar still exists and pervades education at all levels not just K-12. And I don’t foresee it getting better at a time when education is under attack and being dismantled.
It's a tough one because it comes down to a head-over-heart choice. On an emotional level I desperately want to believe that everyone who isn't extortionately rich can be united in the real class struggle, and I've seen first-hand that middle-class wealth doesn't protect people from the major seismic shocks of critical illness, disability, caring responsibilities for loved ones, and a volatile economy. It may be different for Americans who live in a country that hasn't had notions of class cemented over centuries by a small aristocracy calling all the shots, and the fact 'middle class' doesn't carry the same connotations of snobbishness in the US gives me hope that if anyone can erode the distinction it could be you guys.
That said, on a rational, practical level, in the UK at least, it still means something. When people manage to ascend a few rungs on the wealth ladder, as many do, it becomes even more confusing, and you end up with people who earn over $100,000 insisting that they're still working-class, but the more class is embedded in a culture (and that can be true of most developed countries where there is a both a long-established democratic process and a high level of economic inequality) the more those smaller differences count for a lot more than they should. And it's not always as simple as whether you went to university and what sort of degree you hold. Art schools like the one I went to attract young people from across the class divide, but among my friends the following distinguishing questions often helped:
1. How many extra-curricular activities did you do at school?
2. Did you play an instrument? And was it something deeply impractical like a french horn?
3. What did Christmas in your household look like? Were you forced to go for a walk before lunch?
4. How far did you live from your extended family? Were their houses within walking distance?
5. (If your family owned a dog) what breed was it? Where did it come from?
About half of us (including myself) came from middle-class families, the other half from that oft-eroded grey area between the lower-middle-class and the self-educated working-class. We discussed the difference, not to make anyone feel inferior or get a chip on their shoulder, but to expose any pretenders who wanted to self-identify as working-class even though their parents drove a newish Range Rover and they were the second generation to go to private school.
Other distinctions were often meaningless and laced with the kind of classism I was keen to avoid. Most of my working-class friends had books at home growing up, and many ate home-cooked meals more often than we did despite their parents having less to spend on food. Whether one of their parents worked or not wasn't a good indicator either, these days most aspirational middle-class families contain two working parents, but when I was growing up lots of middle class women and even some working-class ones could afford to stay at home and live on a single-income if they chose to. Working-class kids I went to school with spent money on their appearances but so did middle-class kids, they just did it in a subtler way, and I never really understood why having a tiny logo embroidered on the front of your polo-shirt was somehow more of a flex than being able to get a whole outfit plus your hair, nails, and lashes done for the same amount of money.
When you come from an immigrant background, class status can matter all the more, with many first-generation immigrants viewing middle-class status as something aspirational and entirely achieveable in comparison to becoming part of the top 1%. My mum came from a lower-middle-class household, but her mother grew up on a small farm in Southern Finland with no running water or flushing toilets, so paying off the mortgage on a humble redbrick semi, and sending her daughter first to grammar school, then to university was something my grandmother always treated as a testament to her hard-work and can-do attitude. I agree that the tendency of the newly minted middle-class in particular to lord it over others by implying they just aren't working hard enough is deeply unhealthy, but the older generations in particular simply don't listen when you try to explain to them that there perpetuating a flawed system.
For a long time I thought that the erosion of the class-struggle from mainstream leftwing discourse and its replacement with a more identity-based form of activism had come about because of a rise in middle-class activism, but there have been middle-class people, in the UK at least, who fought for abolition and greater rights for women for centuries. I now think it's more likely that as consumerism has evolved, and the internet has granted mass access to all of the taste-markers and status-symbols that once divided the classes more visibly, those with vast wealth have gotten better at hiding it (hence several of the world's richest men going around in trackies). And a particularly distinctive feature of the British middle-classes in particular is that they don't like to talk about money. I work in debt advice, and it takes a lot longer to build up trust and get to the root of the issue with my middle-class clients than it does with my working-class ones.
If you want to see the divide at its starkest, look at what happened in the UK in 2022. Before the mortgage-market went haywire under Liz Truss, we were all feeling the pressure of food and energy-price inflation following the war in Ukraine, but I, and many other middle-class white-collar workers, were cushioned from that because interest-rates on residential mortgages were extremely low (we had a two-year fix at 2.5% meaning the same flat we had rented for £950 per month was now £722 per month to actually own, and more than half of that was going on repayment). After our fixed rate ended, a mortgage on the same property was now £1069 a month with over £800 going towards interest.
Lower-income friends, and colleagues who didn't own their own homes couldn't understand why I was so annoyed about this, because rents had been increasing steadily for a while too, and I knew they were having a harder time coping with the cost of living than I was. But while middle-class wealth in the US is often tied up in stocks, college funds, and 401ks, in the UK pretty much all of our middle-class wealth is in our homes. Buying expensive cars, having investments, and actually paying off your student loans are way less common here so our houses with their overpriced mortgages are pretty much all we have. If solidarity among all workers of all classes and income-levels is ever to be achieved, the property-ownership divide is not one that will be easily closed.
I very much agree that broad class solidarity is our only hope against the oligarchy. AND I think that there's value in articulating the difference in the truly existential struggles of the bottom 50% versus the 50-90% segment on the chart.
I think the collective lack of understanding of JUST HOW BAD it is to be in that bottom sliver right now in America is what's led us to our current political climate -- many folks in the liberal "middle class" correctly perceive that we need a change, but fail to perceive how truly life-and-death desperate that need is for the lower end of that tiny bottom sliver, who make up a huge part of the electorate. True desperation for change, ANY CHANGE at all, leads us to a current administration who, we can't deny, are definitely making changes!
Like, hard yes to class solidarity,and making the so called "(upper) middle class" realize that we're all being exploited together in our current system. But also how do we make sure that we're not flattening out the experience of the people for whom the struggle is way more acute on the day-to-day than the "middle-class" precarity of losing your salaried job and home and savings?
I don't have a deeper point here, I'm just woolgathering, bc this topic of how we rally class solidarity (over other demographic solidarities) really keeps me up at night in our current political tailspin.
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.
Great point about "collars." It's kind of telling about our lack of class awareness that there was never a widespread addition to the collar classification system to account for service work.
Service work is today’s “blue collar.” Service and retail are where a high school grad can enter immediately, and have replaced those post WWII manufacturing jobs since capitalists took those overseas. I welcome the day when a service worker can buy a house and support a family like a factory worker could back in the day.
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?
I think that's a vague idea that I've had of "middle class," too. There's definitely a perception that they have more access, options, freedom, leisure time. Anne Helen Petersen's book "Can't Even" opens with a good discussion about the precarity of all of that for middle class people.
It matters a lot, actually, to be able to accurately describe class without collapsing into dualities that fail to capture people's lived experiences. There is some great work about how middle class resource hoarding is a huge problem politically and logistically, as a road block to progressive organizing. (Richard Reeves has a good piece about this at Boston Review; and I think Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Aspirational Class has some insight into this phenomenon as well). Class is a distinction that is lived and deeply informs one's views of politics and what matters, and there are different cultures, histories, etc that go along with that. Not talking about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist; it just collapses class into an unhelpful blob that forgets the middle class mediates between workers and the owners, whether through ideology, culture, education, etc.
If your point is that we need more structural analysis rather than a personal one (as in, not getting stuck in our irritation over middle class peers who are incredibly insensitive and unaware of their privilege), then sure. But even then, we can start from these distinctions and bad feelings we live with on a daily basis toward an understanding of the larger system and who and how we want to align ourselves with. This is the basis of good organizing.
American politics already has a deeply impoverished class consciousness and language with which to talk about class, so quietly erasing terms because we don't have a theory to accommodate them (or because we have bad feelings about them) is unhelpful and ahistorical.
This is a great point! It's why it's so tricky to imagine eliminating the classification of "middle class."
I think the goal is to encourage solidarity among the middle class and working class — for us all to see ourselves as "working class" — to combat the organizing concerns you mentioned. If people in the middle class understood themselves as part of the working class that's being exploited by capitalists, ideally we'd see less of that resource hoarding and other behaviors that work against the wellbeing of the working class (which, we've also seen historically, work against the wellbeing of the middle class, too, but it's politically convenient to make people ignore that reality).
I agree it’s useful to have the term, but as a reminder of capitalist obfuscation and divide-and-conquer tactics rather than an actual class.
I don’t think middle class hoarding is a bigger problem than capitalist hoarding. In the US “Middle class” is a deceptive term meant to divide us in the first place. The middle class are still workers, even the scab managerial class, knowingly or unknowingly. The sooner they realize that, the better for all of us. We’re working against A LOT of capitalist propaganda here.
This is one of those areas where America and Britain diverge. In the UK "middle class" has a very specific meaning and relates to someone in probably the top 20% or so income bracket who isn't a member of the landed aristocracy (the "upper class"). It is a class with distinct markers around home ownership in specific areas, private education (confusingly many private schools are referred to as "public schools" in the UK) and jobs in the professions or in the upper echelons of academia and the civil service.
There was a really good Atlantic article a few years ago that described the "New American aristocracy", being those between the 1% and 10% of earners. I think that is probably a better characterisation than using the old "middle" vs "working" classes.
You're right on the first point, but you definitely don't have to be top 20% to be considered middle-class in the UK (probably more like above the 50th decile depending on where you live) my family were probably top 40% when my dad was working and were very much middle-class. I could list off a dozen distinctions between myself and my working-class peers, but at the end of the day class becomes a bit like pornography, you know it when you see it.
The private school thing can also be a red herring, in London and the home counties, yes, most middle-class people either go private, make their kids sit the 11-plus, or pretend to be religious to get into a local CofE school, but there is a large contingent of middle-class parents (including my own) who are ideologically opposed to selective schooling, and will make a conscious choice to send their kids to the local comprehensive. I think it's probably fair to move the distinction from 'privately educated' to 'could afford to educate their children privately if they chose to'.
I'm Scottish, so class is a slightly different kettle of fish up there, but I've lived in England long enough to recognise that while the English middle-classes can seem homoegnous in their choices (especially when it comes to driving 4x4s in the city and painting their living rooms sad beige) they're definitely not when it comes to education, and the average middle-class homeowner here probably has a lot more in common with the traditional American middle-class than with those in the 'new American aristocracy'
Also, you don't need to be earning megabucks to be top 20% in Scotland. A salary of 50k puts you in that bracket.
I think we Scots delude ourselves with the 'lad o pairts' myth when, if you look at the professions or the senior civil service, they are of a very similar class to the same ones in England.
True, but Scotland often feels less segregated along class lines, more things are freely and universally available, which erodes the distinction between kids who need dental work but whose parents can't pay for it and kids whose parents can, even at a cultural level, access to insitutions that provide the kind of extra-curricular education which used to segregate young people along class lines is more likely to be cheap or free.
The most common question I got going to uni in England was 'why didn't you stay in Scotland? It's free there!' (as if this was something I'd had no idea about beforehand) but living down here has been a real eye-opener on so many levels.
You may be right, and it may be entirely a delusion that we're any different, but I think the willingness to create inter-class solidarity in a similar way to my mother's nordic family is something that sets the Scots apart. And that in time translates into a real difference in values, even if doing impressions of my friend's very working-class nan going 'TYRONE YER TEA'S READY!' was the height of humour among the middle-class portion of my school-friends
Yes, I am aware of those jokes. When I went to university my working class accent was a source of endless amusement to the middle class kids in my year. So much so that I self-consciously softened my accent over the years so now I barely sound Glaswegian - most people think I am originally from Northern Ireland.
The difference I found was when it came to moving into a middle class career (I work in the public sector in a policy grade role). When I lived in London the middle class Oxbridge civil servants were, quite paternalistically, helpful to me in my career, safe in the knowledge that the structure of the UK civil service meant that I was no threat to them. In Scotland, and especially Glasgow, there is a strong "know your place" mentality and "getting above yourself" is seen as a cardinal sin.
So yes, we have blurred lines due to our universal services but that is predicated on two things - 1) the main beneficiary of, for example, free university fees are the children of the middle classes - fees are only one part of the equation; there are no maintenance grants and 2) so long as the working class kids who go to university stay in their lane and don't compete too hard with the middle class kids because then the sharp elbows come out. Saw that best in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis - I was working in economic development at the time so saw it first hand - graduate underemployment rose as graduate level jobs fell. Dig a little deeper and the middle class kids were fine. It was the working class graduates who were forced to take non-graduate level jobs. As soon as opportunities became scarce, the middle classes closed ranks and made sure their people were ok.
I think in addressing the problem of graduate underemployment it's important not to generalise too much, and to factor in other challenges. I was on the sharp end of that same underemployment. My first job after leaving uni was a retail one where being middle-class was actually more of a disadvantage (most of the middle-managers didn't have degrees and were suspicious of those who did assuming they'd take off the second something better came along) and while I might put my chronic underemployment (I've never once had a job that actually required a BA) down to my disabilities making me harder to employ, my sister's first post-graduation job was in a shoe-shop.
It's fascinating though to learn though that Glasgow had such a sense of ensuring people stayed in their lane when we were always taught to view it as some sort of working-class stronghold, while Edinburgh by contrast was as segregated along class lines as parts of England, but full of people bending over backwards to try and pretend those divisions didn't exist.
There was analysis done on the graduate underemployment post 2008 and a graduate recruitment scheme was introduced by Scottish Enterprise to address it. I'm not saying there weren't any middle class people in the underemployed group but it was primarily those from the lower socio-economic deciles who suffered. Selina Todd's book "Snakes and Ladders" makes it clear that social mobility only happens in the UK en masse (at a statistically significant level) when there is 'room at the top'. The rest of the time, the middle classes hoard opportunities for their children and children of people like them.
Yes, Glasgow is a more socially egalitarian place than Edinburgh but suffers from tall poppy syndrome. 'Ah kent yer faither' is a sneer of social opprobium for those who aspire to anything beyond where they were born.
Learning this is what made me realize my family are working class.
I think this is an important discussion to have. I believe the term has value *and* i believe the context in which it is used matters too. I agree that when it comes to campaigning, the term can be distracting, setting up unhelpful divisions. But, we can't wish away differences in our socio-economic lived experiences and building solidarity does not require it either. In fact, I would argue that the opposite is true. False equivalence about how, and the degree to which, we are being exploited does not make us stronger (politically or otherwise). Being able to interrogate those differences is critical to understanding how they are used to divide and conquer workers and by extension, help us to build defences against such tactics by working out how we build solidarity across these real differences. Words matter and labels are a useful starting point as we seek to reason together. I think we would lose something in doing away with this term even as I agree that it (and other class descriptions) should be the starting point for conversations not the end.
All great points — context matters!
There is so much knowledge to digest here. I am going to have to sit with this awhile. I am coauthoring a piece about pay inequality in the legal academia based on status and gender. The pink collar still exists and pervades education at all levels not just K-12. And I don’t foresee it getting better at a time when education is under attack and being dismantled.
It's a tough one because it comes down to a head-over-heart choice. On an emotional level I desperately want to believe that everyone who isn't extortionately rich can be united in the real class struggle, and I've seen first-hand that middle-class wealth doesn't protect people from the major seismic shocks of critical illness, disability, caring responsibilities for loved ones, and a volatile economy. It may be different for Americans who live in a country that hasn't had notions of class cemented over centuries by a small aristocracy calling all the shots, and the fact 'middle class' doesn't carry the same connotations of snobbishness in the US gives me hope that if anyone can erode the distinction it could be you guys.
That said, on a rational, practical level, in the UK at least, it still means something. When people manage to ascend a few rungs on the wealth ladder, as many do, it becomes even more confusing, and you end up with people who earn over $100,000 insisting that they're still working-class, but the more class is embedded in a culture (and that can be true of most developed countries where there is a both a long-established democratic process and a high level of economic inequality) the more those smaller differences count for a lot more than they should. And it's not always as simple as whether you went to university and what sort of degree you hold. Art schools like the one I went to attract young people from across the class divide, but among my friends the following distinguishing questions often helped:
1. How many extra-curricular activities did you do at school?
2. Did you play an instrument? And was it something deeply impractical like a french horn?
3. What did Christmas in your household look like? Were you forced to go for a walk before lunch?
4. How far did you live from your extended family? Were their houses within walking distance?
5. (If your family owned a dog) what breed was it? Where did it come from?
About half of us (including myself) came from middle-class families, the other half from that oft-eroded grey area between the lower-middle-class and the self-educated working-class. We discussed the difference, not to make anyone feel inferior or get a chip on their shoulder, but to expose any pretenders who wanted to self-identify as working-class even though their parents drove a newish Range Rover and they were the second generation to go to private school.
Other distinctions were often meaningless and laced with the kind of classism I was keen to avoid. Most of my working-class friends had books at home growing up, and many ate home-cooked meals more often than we did despite their parents having less to spend on food. Whether one of their parents worked or not wasn't a good indicator either, these days most aspirational middle-class families contain two working parents, but when I was growing up lots of middle class women and even some working-class ones could afford to stay at home and live on a single-income if they chose to. Working-class kids I went to school with spent money on their appearances but so did middle-class kids, they just did it in a subtler way, and I never really understood why having a tiny logo embroidered on the front of your polo-shirt was somehow more of a flex than being able to get a whole outfit plus your hair, nails, and lashes done for the same amount of money.
When you come from an immigrant background, class status can matter all the more, with many first-generation immigrants viewing middle-class status as something aspirational and entirely achieveable in comparison to becoming part of the top 1%. My mum came from a lower-middle-class household, but her mother grew up on a small farm in Southern Finland with no running water or flushing toilets, so paying off the mortgage on a humble redbrick semi, and sending her daughter first to grammar school, then to university was something my grandmother always treated as a testament to her hard-work and can-do attitude. I agree that the tendency of the newly minted middle-class in particular to lord it over others by implying they just aren't working hard enough is deeply unhealthy, but the older generations in particular simply don't listen when you try to explain to them that there perpetuating a flawed system.
For a long time I thought that the erosion of the class-struggle from mainstream leftwing discourse and its replacement with a more identity-based form of activism had come about because of a rise in middle-class activism, but there have been middle-class people, in the UK at least, who fought for abolition and greater rights for women for centuries. I now think it's more likely that as consumerism has evolved, and the internet has granted mass access to all of the taste-markers and status-symbols that once divided the classes more visibly, those with vast wealth have gotten better at hiding it (hence several of the world's richest men going around in trackies). And a particularly distinctive feature of the British middle-classes in particular is that they don't like to talk about money. I work in debt advice, and it takes a lot longer to build up trust and get to the root of the issue with my middle-class clients than it does with my working-class ones.
If you want to see the divide at its starkest, look at what happened in the UK in 2022. Before the mortgage-market went haywire under Liz Truss, we were all feeling the pressure of food and energy-price inflation following the war in Ukraine, but I, and many other middle-class white-collar workers, were cushioned from that because interest-rates on residential mortgages were extremely low (we had a two-year fix at 2.5% meaning the same flat we had rented for £950 per month was now £722 per month to actually own, and more than half of that was going on repayment). After our fixed rate ended, a mortgage on the same property was now £1069 a month with over £800 going towards interest.
Lower-income friends, and colleagues who didn't own their own homes couldn't understand why I was so annoyed about this, because rents had been increasing steadily for a while too, and I knew they were having a harder time coping with the cost of living than I was. But while middle-class wealth in the US is often tied up in stocks, college funds, and 401ks, in the UK pretty much all of our middle-class wealth is in our homes. Buying expensive cars, having investments, and actually paying off your student loans are way less common here so our houses with their overpriced mortgages are pretty much all we have. If solidarity among all workers of all classes and income-levels is ever to be achieved, the property-ownership divide is not one that will be easily closed.
I very much agree that broad class solidarity is our only hope against the oligarchy. AND I think that there's value in articulating the difference in the truly existential struggles of the bottom 50% versus the 50-90% segment on the chart.
I think the collective lack of understanding of JUST HOW BAD it is to be in that bottom sliver right now in America is what's led us to our current political climate -- many folks in the liberal "middle class" correctly perceive that we need a change, but fail to perceive how truly life-and-death desperate that need is for the lower end of that tiny bottom sliver, who make up a huge part of the electorate. True desperation for change, ANY CHANGE at all, leads us to a current administration who, we can't deny, are definitely making changes!
Like, hard yes to class solidarity,and making the so called "(upper) middle class" realize that we're all being exploited together in our current system. But also how do we make sure that we're not flattening out the experience of the people for whom the struggle is way more acute on the day-to-day than the "middle-class" precarity of losing your salaried job and home and savings?
I don't have a deeper point here, I'm just woolgathering, bc this topic of how we rally class solidarity (over other demographic solidarities) really keeps me up at night in our current political tailspin.