Everyone knows what I'm talking about, even the few decent politicians we have are constantly bemoaning the "disappearance of the middle class," and we here in lefty land usually have the same response, which goes something like "So your saying the solution to the disparity of rich and poor is to invent a conceptual middle ground and focus all your attention on that, instead of the divide itself. Smells like liberalism to me."
I still agree with this, but I got to thinking the other day, and I think the instinct to talk about the "middle class" may actually be a latent anti-capitalist instinct coming out. This is pretty rough around the edges, it was just a stray train of thought, but the way I see it, Capitalism wants to mediate all human experience through the market, through transaction, through money. People, I think instinctively, feel this tendency to basically flatten all of life, and naturally revolt. Problem is, of course, that to most people, capitalism is unambiguously good, or at the very least, necessary in the same way air is necessary to breathe, and it's difficult to square that contradiction.
This, I think, is where the "middle class" comes in, it is essentially a category of people who live under capitalism, with all that entails, but who instinctively revolt against defining their existence in capitalist terms (i.e. wealth, money, possessions, etc). Rich and poor are both categories defined by their relation to capitalism, whereas the "middle class" is completely nebulous vis-a-vis relations of production, so defining yourself as such opens, or perhaps leaves open, the possibility of identifying your existence in some other fashion. Essentially calling yourself middle class means that you'd prefer not to (:zizek:) think of yourself predominantly in market terms, which is a privilege the truly destitute don't have, hence the connotation of comfortableness associated with it, but I do think it's indicative of an instinct that runs counter to the totalizing nature of capitalism.
Thoughts?
EDIT: Based on many responses, I think I was unclear about something crucial, which is that I’m am referring to the mindset of an average American who isn’t particularly political who passively identifies with the term middle class when invoked by politicians or others.
The liberal understanding of class, as we know, is "income level". Liberals will use the terms income and class interchangeably. When liberals say "middle class", they would mean somebody who has around the median income. Liberals are often ignorant to ways of receiving income other than a wage, sometimes even thinking that billionaires earned their wealth by being payed a very high wage.
As leftists, we know that class is not how much income you receive but instead how you receive income. Class is your role in the labor process. Marx described 2 characteristics of a persons role in the labor process: relation to labor and relation to means of production. The proletariat is forced to sell labor for a wage because they don't own means of production. The bourgeoisie purchases labor and owns the means of production. So we must ask ourselves, "How can there be a middle of those 2 things?" The leftist understanding of "middle class" is that there are people that do not fit perfectly into either class but have some of the characteristics of each class, some examples below.
When people talk about the disappearance or shrinking of the middle class, it is unclear whether they are speaking of an increased cost of living for median income workers or the lack of class mobility, the ability to ascend economic class. These 2 possibilities are perhaps intertwined. Liberals believe that capitalism has an inherit meritocracy where any person could be a janitor at a factory and steadily get promoted to be the factory owner. There is also a fetishization of the small business as the mechanism for class mobility. Liberals have this fantasy that you start with nothing but a dream and then through the powers of hard work and determination you can become a wealthy business owner, rags to riches. Small business are often paired with some sappy origin story for the Liberal to live vicariously and then the Liberal can feel good about themself for enabling class ascension to occur.
A prerequisite of leftism is having class consciousness, knowing that capitalism is a class based economic system and knowing your own class in the system. To be against capitalism, you have to know that the capitalist class exploits the working class. You describe the label as instinctive, or I would say involuntary. Rejection of capitalism is something that I would describe as a voluntary response.
With your proposal that people label themselves as middle class because they reject capitalism, I believe that you have created a sort of "enlightened centrism" of class awareness. The working class person does not have class consciousness because of alienation, so they apply the golden means fallacy to their class position. Similar to "enlighten centrists" of economic theory, this is an involuntary response from ignorance and insecurity. As you observed yourself, this allows the person to position themselves in a way that is harder to criticize.
This being said, I do not think that calling oneself "middle class" is anti capitalism, but instead a defense mechanism for ignorance and/or insecurity, alienation from labor.
edit/ adding a thought
If we consider that in the Liberal fantasy of meritocracy, that people are not only able to ascend class but expected to ascend class. That one should start from nothing and one day retire owning a business or rental properties. That the middle class is a necessary transitional state between being a wage worker and being a business owner. Then if you are not "middle class", you are falling short of the Liberal expectation of class ascension. This could be another reason that people label themselves middle class.
This describes pretty well what I’m talking about, but to be more exact, I haven’t so much created it as hypothesized it in the minds of un-class conscious Americans.
No, definitely not, but if there’s anything to my shower thought at all, it may be indicative of a sort of instinctive protest at the existence of class or the need to define oneself in terms of class by mentally positioning yourself on safe ground separate from the two obvious class antagonists, rich and poor. This also allows them to see themselves as not political, because the most obvious political conflict involves the other classes, not the middle directly (in their minds, at least). It’s a psychological phenomenon I think I’m describing.
This just sounds like you are describing Marx's Theory of Alienation.