80% of Americans are dumbasses who think they are part of the middle class no matter if they make $20k or $250k so it's actually more inclusive than it looks lol
Still remember the big fight Hasan got into with his community over this because he didn't understand the median income in LA was still only like 30k and he wanted to frame people individually making over 70k like poor working class people because of cost of living.
Honestly I think the way working class is used is causing the same issues as the way middle class is used. Someone at or below the median is just flat out living in an entirely different world than someone at 70k. Different types of labor, different pay structures, different levels of owernship, different medical care, police, housing, legal system, everything.
Yes, they're what Marx would refer to as "Strata", groups with similar modes of production but who don't have the clear separation in ownership of capital and exploitation that makes a Class.
(Or that cross class boundaries, The intelligentsia for example, which includes prole high school teachers and adjunct lecturers and Bourgois tenured faculty at Harvard. Or the PMC.)
As decades of propaganda and reaction has done it's best to beat any kind of class consciousness out of people's heads, the class has gone from being understood as a well-defined scientific term to being an incoherent mess of meaningless market segments.
The guy who owns a construction company is "working class" because he drives a pickup truck and doesn't like gay people while the teacher who will never be able to afford children of her own is not because she went to college and has a BLM bumper sticker on her car. Who can take that crap serious?
Citation Needed Episode 91: It's Time to Retire the Term "Middle Class"
The term “middle class” is used so much by pundits and politicians, it could easily be the Free Space in any political rhetoric Bingo card. After all, who’s opposed to strengthening, widening, and protecting the “middle class”? Like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights”, “middle class” is an unimpeachable, unassailable label that evokes warm feelings and a sense of collective morality.
But the term itself, always slippery and changing based on context, has evolved from a vague aspiration marked by safety, a nice home, and a white picket fence into something more sinister, racially-coded, and deliberately obscuring. The middle class isn’t about concrete, material positive rights of good housing and economic security––it’s a capitalist carrot hovering over our heads telling us such things are possible if we Only Work Harder. More than anything, it's a way for politicians to gesture towards populism without the messiness of mentioning––much less centering––the poor and poverty.
has evolved from a vague aspiration marked by safety, a nice home, and a white picket fence into something more sinister, racially-coded,
there was never a point in American history where that wasn't the case. You do know why the 2nd amendment is about guns and the 4th is about housing, right? www.readsettlers.com
Adam and Nima are wonderful but I don't think either of them have managed to entirely cast off liberalism yet in favor of the immortal science
And by middle class, I mean I will give a paltry tax credit to people that make over 50k a year as a smoke screen to give trillions to billionaires.
I mean people here think office workers making $25k are part of the "professional managerial class" because they don't wear overalls and a hard hat and carry around a huge wrench all day.
yes, I’ve seen that a bit too. Anyone thinking that has liberal brainworms and doesn’t understand what class interests actually are yet.
Well white folks can't just come out and say "we want policies that help us but exclude everyone we think we're better than". "Middle class" just serves as a code word for that.
Chen is being melodramatic here. Of course Biden will not just deliver to the middle class, the upper class is also going to be very well serviced.
Correct, in the same way that he will not deliver to bigfoot.
Chen (that’s his family name right?) is a good poster, I stan. He could hit my back walls anytime
Middle class is code for what some would call the labor aristocracy, which really just means they have enough economic security that can they become somewhat divorced from their class interests (and often work class traitorous jobs). Obviously not all of them and there is a spectrum, but that's who they're dog whistling. The people who own homes, take vacations, send their kids to good schools.
This also corresponds to whiteness in the context of the United States.
joe biden define middle class and draw a clock challenge
