Me after working retail: I can tell if you own a house by the way you speak. We are members of different species.
The “Middle Class” is not an economic class but a social class created to undermine working class solidarity.
I know that Labor Aristocracy is somewhat controversial, but it seems pretty plain to me that bribing a large segment of the working class with crumbs from imperial extraction is the most successful strategy the bourgeoise have ever employed.
This is all true, though I would also say that there's an important point to be made about whether someone is net-exploited vs. their direct relation to exploitation wrt their personal employer.
Part of the problem of misaligned interests within the working class is that due to imperialism, the working class of the imperial core feels their exploitation to a lesser degree and the global south to a greater degree. It's true that the working class of the US is still not paid the full value of their labor as measured by the difference between what the products they create are sold for vs. what they're paid, the funny money math of financialized imperialism along with imperialistically-cheap imports means they get more from their labor than they seem to put into it.
Another way to think about it is in purchasing power vs. exploitation. Inflated purchasing power due to inflation is like giving everyone a raise but without it coming from the employers (it comes from the suffering of the global south). So every non-imprisoned person in the US feels their exploitation that much less, can recognize it that much less. The imperially-driven material conditions of the US have kept its working class floating above the exploitation they otherwise would've recognized.
That's changing, though. It's becoming more clearly proletarianized because wages, and employment, and labor rights are decreasing for younger generations. They see more poverty in their futures and they see that the promise of a certain standard of living was a lie. But they still aren't ready to be class conscious. More and more are, but the vast, vast majority are easily coopted into liberalism because they don't see their bosses picking their pockets, they think they are doing "pretty well" or that their trajectory is one of a "middle class" existence.
tl;dr: the contradictions of capitalism are vastly decreased in the imperial core for the majority of the population to the point that they fail to be class conscious. This makes the "middle class" a thing that is resistant to class consciousness and less well-aligned with class interests. This is due to imperialism itself, but it will also resolve itself because capitalism will inevitably attempt to hyperexploit the imperial core's working class as well.
Ah! The "it'll resolve itself" is about the better-off top-30% portion of the imperial core's working class realizing the material component of their exploitation and class. Not that they become coherent or socialist or anything like that. Unfortunately, class consciousness is a necessary but insufficient component of getting a strong socialist contingent in any country. Nascent class consciousness can be directed down reactionary paths and this is particularly easy in the imperial core given its powerful propaganda machines.
Sure would be neat to have a vanguard party. I at least know some coherent anti-imperialists and it seems like there are 100X as many of us as there were 15 years ago, so there's some medium-term (20 years let's say) hope of forming a coherent political bloc that doesn't get exterminated and can survive for the cool zone where recruitment can really pick up.
My assumption is that the US will fail to respond successfully to dedollarization and profitability crises in light of China stabilizing the global south, so attempts at social fascism will generally fail along with it.
The thing about maintaining a non-productive class like that (or at least a class that draws more from the social surplus than they provide) is that it can only be maintained by constant extraction and accelerating extraction at that.
The middle class of today is the imperial version of the "poor whites" who supported confederate slavocracy. They didn't directly benefit from slavery any more than they would a wage slavery system, but they were invested in it's perpetuation and expansion because they were receiving the tailings of the slave oligarchs.
Much like the confederate slave system, the modern imperial system is only sustainable as long as new markets of labor can be violently expropriated. What's happening in Ukraine is exactly that. A shoving down of an entire nation of workers into sub-poverty wages to maintain enoigh surplus to service both the Western "middle class" and the bourgeois profit. They will do the same with Taiwan and all of East Asia too. If at any point these republics are able to reform themselved either along revolutionary socialist lines or nationalist lines, it will pull the rug out from under the expropriation that is necessary to maintain the global "liberal order".
I've never even read maoist third worldist theory, but I'm feeling like I might need to soon.
Back when I worked at CVS, I had a customer berate me for not knowing how iPhones worked
When I told him I couldn't afford a smartphone at all, he looked at me like I had passed through a flaming hole in space-time
Them: "Hey employee, have you tried this 50$ item that the store you work at sells?"
Me: laughs in poverty
Oh, you should have seen the glares I got when I hurt my ankle and was sitting on a stool
Tangential retail anecdote: it always makes me laugh when customers threaten to take their business elsewhere. Make my fucking day, asshole, it's just one less infant for me to babysit. Even then, they'll probably be back once they learn that having a crying fit at the Rite Aid doesn't get them any better results.
the way some customers act about "taking their business elsewhere" and how we are "setting prices" i just assumed these boomers actually legit thought every retail hell they hit up was a worker owned cooperative where we had democratic price setting meetings and everyone got a cut of the profits.
Customer: Hey sonny, I used to run a business, have ya'll ever heard of the concept of "loss leader."
Me, having walked away from almost finishing a business degree: The urge to hit you with every over priced book I bought for business school classes increases
Of course. They have cushy fake jobs that pay them twice as much as us so they can afford an asset that is guaranteed to appreciate in value - a house.
Outside of my retail job I am a communist. At work I am a fascist, believing that customers are subhuman abominations that must be eradicated
Some of these super elderly customers... you can tell by the way they behave that they don't really understand the neoliberal, contract-based world they built for themselves. They genuinely think of "the general store" as a privately owned business owned by a single guy you can directly barter with.
Retail has ruined the way I see the elderly, now every time an old person talks to me even outside of work I tense up and start to shake a little
if you work in academia, you can get the same experience and takeaways regarding the elderly. Especially if you work with senior professors, who are more often than not complete dunces, even in things they should be experts in.
I just always expect them to start fucking complaining, and then they treat me like a moron because I have a stutter
I think it's a manifestation of the latent culture of violence and supremacy in America. There comes a point where the culturally correct behavior is to degrade and insult those below you as a sort of rite of passage into the "upper crust" (a totally fictitious position with no real political power).
When you reach that level, you're expected to keep those below you down. To pull up the ladder and spit on the unfortunate.
Bad take: the middle class exists but most people have no idea what it actually is. The middle class are the property and business owners, the upper class are government officials, the millionaires, and technocrats. So when I say kill the middle class, just know I mean it.
So the middle class is 1% of the population and the upper class is 0.01%. Seems like dedication to outdated terminology rather than useful descriptors.
Like a lot of our political terms it comes from France when there was a lot of political strife between merchants and aristocrats. I think a modern definition of class should be rich and poor. Very easily the millionaires are excluded, and so should like the managers at McDonald’s and shit not for being rich but for being class traitors.
It's not about declaring the middle class a lie. It's just about recognising that all proles have a shared interest, even snobby house-owners, in changing the economic system.
