My name’s Lilly Wachowski.
I’m out here on the picket line to support my fellow union, brothers, sisters, and siblings, for better wages, for a better future. And I’m also here because I think that this is a microcosm of a much larger issue.
There’s a correlation between what’s happening here and what’s happening in the world in terms of the flow of wealth in the world. It’s like the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The middle class is getting squeezed out, and a lot more of them are living on the margins of society than ever before.
If we can start pushing back on these oligarchs, we can start to rearrange how, not just in this industry, but all industries, are ordered.
I understand the sentiment, and I’m the first to challenge the use of social classes as rather meaningless in everyday conversation. People tend to be far too loose with their concepts and ‘middle class’ doesn’t have much explanatory power. But with this limitation in mind, it can be useful shorthand, especially when it is understood that there are relatively few of the proletariat in the global north – some might say none.
In many cases, the better off workers are labour aristocrats(LA) or petite bourgeois (PB) (which is true of a significant proportion in the global north). Those who identify as middle class tend to be LA/PB. Their interests are more broadly aligned with the haute bourgeoisie, too. Not so much as their interests are aligned with other LA/PB but, often, more than they are aligned with the world-proletariat. Enough to make them fear losing their privileges and to fight for capital.
Almost anyone with a pension, for example, is in a real bind. They most likely invest in fossil fuels (and possibly arms, tobacco, alcohol, patents, pharmaceuticals, etc). As much as they may fear climate change, they also fear having no pension after contributing for a lifetime. Faced with this contradiction, their motives are only fundamentally opposed to those of even fossil capital some of the time.
I agree that in many cases, the purpose of using the ‘middle class’ as a concept is to conflate several materially distinct classes. But the conflation of better-paid workers with LA/PB is accurate more often than not, in the global north. When middle class does equate to LA/PB, is functionally to exploit the proletariat, even if they are not really in control of the way that they do so.
By “better paid worker”, I really meant anyone still able to afford rent. I understand that most people who make more money than that are legitimately petite-bourgoisie/labor aristocrats.
There’s a case to be made that even those who can’t afford rent by their own wages aren’t fully proletariat. The fact that they can still survive is due to reliance on the super-exploitation of the global south, which pushes them towards being labour aristocrats. (Albeit, this part of the transfer is wealth from south to north is under threat.)
But for the people identifying as middle class who can’t pay rent, is it an ideological thing? i.e. they think they’re middle class because they’re parents were or because although they get low wages, they’re in a ‘middle class’ job? I’m not sure I’d call relatively poor people middle class. But there are people who call precarious knowledge workers ‘middle class’ just because they don’t get their hands dirty at work.
In this sense, ‘better-paid workers’ does not necessarily equate to ‘better-off proles’. I should’ve been clearer that I reframed your comment. Still, this is why you’re original point was fundamentally right—‘middle class’ is a slippery term and not nearly so useful as class concepts defined in relation to the means of production.
I’m no expert, but in my opinion the middle class is really defined by owning your home but still working for a wage.
They’re definitely in it. But it’s nebulous.
Do you know of Novara Media? Aaron Bastani criticised a Telegraph(?) story recently. The story got the main narrative right: that something needs to be done about interest rates because it’ll hit ‘homeowners’ with mortgages.
But it used an example of some tit (apologies to all tits out there, bird-like and mammal-like for the negative metaphor) who was crying that they took out a variable rate on £1.something million on a £6m property – having put down a £1.7m deposit. Boo fucking who.
His point was that this homeowner wasn’t really representative of the middle class, but the paper ran with that idea.