A combination of two things. Absolutely massive sections of the community were either working in industry (factory or heavy-industry like mining/forging/etc) or in farming.

Quantity of people you can reach that will group together is a big factor here. Factories have many things that are strategically beneficial:

1. Lots of workers.

2. Poor conditions and treatment of workers.

3. Manual work that pisses off the workers all by itself. Nobody enjoys it.

4. Owners who can be easily identified and typically own MANY factories.

5. Workers that will identify themselves with their work and build a solidarity with others that do their kind of work. Everyone knows it is shit and everyone mutually recognises they're all struggling together.

6. Factory worker was an identity people held. Steel worker was an identity people held. Miner was an identity people held. Much like "cop" is an identity cops hold.

If you wanted to target gig economy workers I think the very first step in achieving that is building an identity for gig economy workers. They must consider themselves gig workers first before you can really tap into the same emotions that worked with the factories. They need to feel like they're not just a person doing gig work in the short term while they seek out something more permanent, while they have that mindset they will not see it as a struggle worth investing in. A miner and a factory worker have a family, they live locally nearby, they know that the mine is the only place for them to work and they know they can't uproot their family and children from their friends and grandparents to just go work somewhere else at the drop of a hat. They know they're a miner and they'll be working in the mine for the next 30 years, they can quickly understand that their conditions in the mine requires longterm organisation with their coworkers.

The gig worker must first identify as a gig worker, not a person temporarily taking some gig work in-between other things. This also applies to many other jobs -- Taxi driver? Cleaner? Retail worker? Nannies? Maids? Secretaries? Large quantities of people in these roles see these roles as things they are passing through and not things they want to do permanently.

It is easier to organise people that actually believe they're going to be doing their current job for the next 50 years. It is easier for people to see orgs as things they need to join when they know they'll be in a job for 50 years. The decrease in org membership has coincided with a MASSIVE decrease in the amount of time people spend in any one job. In fact, most things recommend switching jobs as often as every 2-5 years now.

The working class is people who sell their labor for a wage. The working class used to have a much more obvious relationship to the means of production, but nowadays (especially in the US) the imperial core has transitioned largely into a service economy, while the means of production have largely been relocated to the imperial periphery where labor can be expoited more easily. None the less, the working class remains people who sell their labor for a living, whether it is in a manufacturing, agricultural, or service context.

The PMC is the "Professional Managerial Class." Under Marxist theory, the contradiction between the Proletariat (the working class) and the Bourgeoisie (the capitalist class) forms the primary contradiction, but there are obviously many more contradictions which exist within society, and many more subclasses between which these contradictions exist. For instance, there exists a "labor aristocracy." Definitionally, the labor aristocracy are proletarians, but they are proletarians situated in such a way within the global system of capitalist imperialism where they reap many of the benefits of imperial hyper-exploitation of the proletariat of the Global South. This is an example of a secondary contradiction within subclasses of the Proletariat.

Likewise, there are contradictions within the Bourgeoisie. Most commonly, the Bourgeoise is divided into two prominent subclasses: the Haute Bourgeoisie, and the Petite Bourgeoise (the big and small Bourgeoisie). You could think of the Haute Bourgeoise as the "captains of industry." The Amazons, Facebooks, and Foxconns of the world. The Petit Bourgeoise on the other hand are the small business owners. They still accumulate capital by paying workers less than the value produced by their labor, but they are basically rowboats floating in an uneasy sea dominated by battleships.

The PMC is a social phenomenon which occurred prominently in the United States along with the phenomenon of suburbanization. At one point we had industrial cities with factories surrounded by proletarian slums. Class divisions were very pronounced geographically. You'd have a factory, then everyone who worked at that factory would live around the factory, and from these communities there would grow proletarian institutions like union halls.

Then the automobile and white flight happened. A lot of these urban factories shut down and moved to the newly built suburbs. A lot of bourgeois and proletarians settled in the suburbs simultaneously, and the automobile allowed workers to live much farther away from the means of production, much farther away from their coworkers and union comrades. Before you knew it, labor aristocrat proletarians were living across the street from petite bourgeois buisiness owners - while being atomized from their co-workers. This atomization dissolved classic proletarian institutions like centrally located union halls.

Time, and a lot of cold war propaganda passed. People came to recognize their status based on their income levels, rather than their relations to the means of production. You could have a proletarian X-Ray technician living on one side of the street making 120k/year and a petit bourgeois proprietor of a landscaping company living across the street making 100k/year. Next door you could have a middle-level manager from a Haute Bourgeois regional corporation making 80k/year. These people grew to identify with each other and their suburban lifestyles rather than their class. This is the origin of the PMC. The nexus of the proletarian labor aristocracy, the Petite Bourgeoise, and the humble servants of the Haute Bourgeoisie living in colocation, isolated from their class cohorts, and identifying with a shared lived existence revolving around homeownership, lawns, automobiles, grilling with the neighbors.

The existence of a "Professional Managerial Class" is a relatively new and somewhat disputed development in Marxist theory. The term was only introduced in the 1970s by John and Barbara Ehrenreich. I have only read summaries of their work, but based on those summaries I find their perspective to be a bit crude. Personally, I don't consider the PMC to be a new, distinct class. Rather (as I described it), I understand it to be temporary phenomenon of class collaboration. The PMC was a product of the post-war boom. The "golden age." But with the declining rate of profit, and the expiration of the United States role as sole industrial producer in the wake of WWII, the conditions which allowed the American industrial proletariat to rise to such commanding heights are gone, and will never return.

Due to the forces of international competition and financialization, the labor aristocracy which made up the proletarian section of the PMC is becoming irreversibly proletarianized yet again. The teachers, nurses, doctors, technicians, office workers, etc are all trending on a decline. A college degree isn't the golden ticket to middle class that it used to be, and the dependable union pensions on which an honest worker could retire are drying up. The suburban homeowner lifestyle which formed the basis of the PMC has become practically unattainable for Millenials and Zoomers, and before we know it, there won't be a PMC at all.

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I tend to think of it like this: if you quit your job tomorrow can you live off other dividends (rent, capital, stock). If no, you're working class cause you need that wage. Btw. Very often when I argue with chuds about this stuff there is always the inevitable "but I own my own business, so I must be capitalist, checkmate commie". Nah, bitch, you're still down here with the rest of us. You're a capitalist when, when you go bankrupt the bank bails you out.

the marxist definition of people in the working class is those who have to sell their labor and do not own the means of producing profit. IE - you are a lyft driver, but you can't make money without signing onto Lyft. You are a retail clerk and cannot make money without a corporation employing you. You are a programmer who cannot make money without being contracted to a business.

There's an inbetween class who is called the Petite Bourgeoisie, who are not part of the capitalist ownership class. These are people who like, own their own business or practice. They still must work for their money, but they also own the means to do it. A Nanny who contracts but is basically self-employed and has their own tools is in this class as well, as well as artists (or youtubers). Same with small business owners who actually work. The issue with this class is since they can make money off the ruling class and proletarian class alike, they often do NOT align with proletarian interests.

There is also the added layer that white collar workers are now invested in Capital through the use of stonks as their retirement fund rather than pensions. So while they are technically proletarian workers, they act like they are petite bourgeoisie in nature. Their working class status hasn't changed, but their ideology prevents them from actually joining in any solidarity with proletarian interests. These are the PMC libs.

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