Art by bigskycastle
The "middle class" as if that's even a thing isn't the problem though. Wine moms with white picket fences are a symptom of a systemic problem, they are not the systemic problem themselves.
Cool art anyway but that bugs me. Most "middle class" families are just workers who the system is rewarding for their compliance
Depends on if we can get away with interpreting "middle class" in the image, not as a physical group of people, but as a mindset.
"Middle class" being the mindset where you find your needs are met well enough that scarcity is no longer an issue but not so secure as to feel confident in fighting to get others their share.
True, I do think the concept of the "middle class" needs to go away entirely. The idea of a "middle" implies that there is a class of wealth above and below said middle. There is only the working class and the ruling class, wealth classes aren't relevant concepts in a functional society.
It stopped being a particularly meaningful term when the distinction between "middle class" (bourgeoisie) and "upper class" (aristocracy) stopped being meaningful. After that it's just been used to make some variation of "those more privileged workers who get tasty good boy treats as a reward for being white landowners in the imperial core" feel special and separate from other workers.
There's definitely an analysis to be made about how the intersection of privilege, land ownership, and petty capital ownership creates a reactionary class of precarious but entitled shitbags who are simultaneously murderously terrified of losing their meager fiefs and rewarded enough by the system that they support it against any and all change, but "middle class" is too empty and propagandistic a term now.
I think there is something of a "class between" the working and ruling, of people who don't quite run the system but are protected by it enough that they have an incentive to defend the people who do run it. Perhaps there's better ways of describing them.
This gets said a lot here but honestly I'm a bit skeptical. There certainly does seem to be a strata of society who, while not capitalists, are doing well enough under capitalism that their interests don't align with the proletariat at large. Perhaps there are more accurate terms, like "labor aristocrat" or whatever, but in American parlance, it does end up getting translated to middle class. And we see it in American politics, Trump's most active supporters fit almost perfectly into the American perception of what we call "upper middle class".
Also, I'm not the biggest Marx expert and I kind of suck at remembering sources, but I'm pretty sure both Marx and Engels have actually talked about this. Marx did use the term middle class on occasion, and Engels talked about how the workers of certain wealthy nations were "bourgeois proletariat" because they had access to market speculation through stocks and real estate.
That's a vibe.
Middle class isn't a purely imaginary invention of bourgeois media. Middle class is whiteness. It's petite bourgeoisie. Labor aristocrat. It's people with more toys than they know what to do with, boats and trucks and four-wheelers and RVs. Economically they may be downwardly mobile, but they generally get pulled into fascism by nostalgic fantasies and scapegoats.
Middle class is a signifier that obscures the underlying class realities, conjuring images of hardworking families but speaking of settlers. Similar to how farmer makes us think of a simple but honest pitchfork wielder rather than the kulak bourgeoisie they are.
If labor aristocrats find leftism on their own they can be embraced, but otherwise focus should be on immigrant workers, service workers, enslaved prisoners, industrial workers, gig workers, renters, and solidarity with the global proletariat.
The elite bourgeoisie are the real enemy but their violence will be enacted by middle subclasses.
