This isn’t particularly helpful, though, as it doesn’t explain why these classes exist. Class traditionally refers to how we engage with societal production and distribution, like wage laborers, business owners, sole proprietors, artisans, etc. By focusing on the outcomes of this class distinctions, you obscure the mechanisms by which they persist and are reinforced.
It’s helpful to divorce class from simple material wealth, and return to how we engage with production and distribution. The true “middle class” is the small business owner, in reality most people are working class.
I certainly don’t disagree, but I think it’s very useful to highlight how this has changed (IMO) in recent decades. I think there was a time when the boomer generation was earning relatively good incomes that allowed them to live comfortably and accumulate wealth (mainly in houses and the stock market). I think this arrangement between capital and the (predominantly white) working class created a situation where even those workers without much wealth could be “bought off” and swear allegiance to capitalism. This wasn’t sustainable of course, as the postwar industrial boom and then the gains from neoliberalism were never sustainable. Couple that with the fall of the Eastern Bloc and with it the “threat of a good example”, and I would say that this arrangement lasted as late as the GFC at most. I think this helps explain how older people today - even if they are solidly working class - might still be hostile to anything they think is “socialism” while younger generations do not share those opinions, it seems.
Yep, you’re referring to the “labor aristocracy.” The working classes in the imperial core are bribed by the spoils of imperialism into complacency. What’s causing the rise in radicalization is a decline in imperialism, due to global south development (largely due to projects like BRI and trade with China). This is why the US Empire is surging to the right, as imperialism is being brought inward and austerity forced on the labor aristocracy. This is causing radicalization:
So it’s important not just to look at the local, but also the international aspects of class. There’s also the fact that the US is a settler-colony, and this is the primary contradiction within Statesian society.
There was an article with a pretty compelling argument a while ago that basically said the true poverty line in the US is over 100.000$/year family income (when you look at what that number was originally supposed to measure).
Below that you’re getting fucked left and right.
Every dollar a family earns between 40k and 100k makes them poorer, because it triggers benefit losses (like health care & child care) that exceed income gains.
So what the US reports as “the middle class” are actually the working poor
I was reading Michael Roberts’ blog the other day, and he pointed out something similar. The official calculations for inflation significantly understate it for various reasons. However, if you look at actual labor hours needed to cover the essentials of life, and you use the median income amount from 1950 (for the US), then that number comes out about $102k per year. Said another way, for a standard of living based on real life, to have the standard of the median American in 1950, you would need to earn over $100k today. But if you take that 1950 median income and just adjust it for official inflation, you only get to like $42k.
If one paycheck is all that stands between half of the people and homelessness, can it really be called the “middle” class?
So I learned it this way:
Upper Class - can live a luxurious life without working at all, and even have domestic employees etc.
Middle Class - can live comfortably but only if they work
Lower class - cannot live comfortably even if they work, and can very easily end up homeless (no social safety net)
The dude who taught me this was my Sociology of Work teacher over twenty years ago.
This isn’t particularly helpful, though, as it doesn’t explain why these classes exist. Class traditionally refers to how we engage with societal production and distribution, like wage laborers, business owners, sole proprietors, artisans, etc. By focusing on the outcomes of this class distinctions, you obscure the mechanisms by which they persist and are reinforced.
It’s helpful to divorce class from simple material wealth, and return to how we engage with production and distribution. The true “middle class” is the small business owner, in reality most people are working class.
I certainly don’t disagree, but I think it’s very useful to highlight how this has changed (IMO) in recent decades. I think there was a time when the boomer generation was earning relatively good incomes that allowed them to live comfortably and accumulate wealth (mainly in houses and the stock market). I think this arrangement between capital and the (predominantly white) working class created a situation where even those workers without much wealth could be “bought off” and swear allegiance to capitalism. This wasn’t sustainable of course, as the postwar industrial boom and then the gains from neoliberalism were never sustainable. Couple that with the fall of the Eastern Bloc and with it the “threat of a good example”, and I would say that this arrangement lasted as late as the GFC at most. I think this helps explain how older people today - even if they are solidly working class - might still be hostile to anything they think is “socialism” while younger generations do not share those opinions, it seems.
Yep, you’re referring to the “labor aristocracy.” The working classes in the imperial core are bribed by the spoils of imperialism into complacency. What’s causing the rise in radicalization is a decline in imperialism, due to global south development (largely due to projects like BRI and trade with China). This is why the US Empire is surging to the right, as imperialism is being brought inward and austerity forced on the labor aristocracy. This is causing radicalization:
So it’s important not just to look at the local, but also the international aspects of class. There’s also the fact that the US is a settler-colony, and this is the primary contradiction within Statesian society.
There was an article with a pretty compelling argument a while ago that basically said the true poverty line in the US is over 100.000$/year family income (when you look at what that number was originally supposed to measure). Below that you’re getting fucked left and right.
Every dollar a family earns between 40k and 100k makes them poorer, because it triggers benefit losses (like health care & child care) that exceed income gains.
So what the US reports as “the middle class” are actually the working poor
I was reading Michael Roberts’ blog the other day, and he pointed out something similar. The official calculations for inflation significantly understate it for various reasons. However, if you look at actual labor hours needed to cover the essentials of life, and you use the median income amount from 1950 (for the US), then that number comes out about $102k per year. Said another way, for a standard of living based on real life, to have the standard of the median American in 1950, you would need to earn over $100k today. But if you take that 1950 median income and just adjust it for official inflation, you only get to like $42k.
Middle: in between homelessness and millionaires
Nor even “the working class”.
The precariat.
Yeah cuz the lower class don’t get paid at all. Homelessness is rampant all over the states
Median class? Mode class?