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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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chapotraphouse
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But, like, I come from the middle class (I think?) and things seem absolutely dire for people like me.
you american?
i know "middle class" there is weirdly broad
here the main markers of the "middle class" are:
there are more but you get the idea
Biden said being middle class was a "feeling".
It's true though, we made it up so that everyone can convince themselves they're not one of The Poors and accidentally develop solidarity
Vibes-based economic status
Vibes based economic prognosis
As ideology, that has some legs. I've known desperately poor people that nothing but a part time shift at minimum wage that called themselves "middle class" and even "capitalist" while I've also had distant relatives call themselves "middle class" that were landlords with properties all across the state.
Tangent: In the most technical sense, a profession requires a specialized body of knowledge and training, a self-regulating and self-licensing body, and a professional code of ethics. Very few occupations are actually professions in this sense.
I like keeping this fact in the back pocket for dunking on tech bros and bankers who are too far up their own asses about their "professions". Especially funny if you're a nurse or some other profession they look down on and you get to gatekeep them.
I've thought kind of a lot about the type of person this sentiment speaks to. I wonder if you would be comfortable saying more or less your occupation (or just field) and whether you live in the first world? I don't want to browbeat you I'm just looking for data points
the sentiment of the middle class not being real? it's simply not a category under capitalist relations, you own capital or don't, it's a binary. you can talk about & further define edge-cases but there is no unified middle area that complies with any marxian analysis of class. what the middle class is depends on the speaker, is it a function of income? a self-identification? this is why it's "vibes" because there isn't a coherent and dominant definition, it's just a word anybody gets to use to mean almost anything.
the middle class was real in the society from which capitalism emerged, and important to early capitalist identity, but it's not a meaningful way to understand capitalism as it functions as an economic system
GOOD post
Do you get bank holidays off and actual benefits (not the bullshit insurance most employers ship with)? Or are you in a trade?
In the US at least I think the broader working class could be divided into a few subclasses of maybe service industry, trades, and white collar/management jobs. I think their class experience is distinct enough to justify that division. So one could argue that the non service subclasses are "middle class".