What is "Middle class"?

[SocialismBeta]

So in most political debates/rhetoric in the United States, the "middle class" is the everyman. Everyone is meant to identify with the middle class. The bigger it is, the better. Politicians always talk about their "middle class" roots. Most often, it is defined by income.

But socialists don't define class by income, but by their function in society, right? So how do we look at the middle class? Well... the account I am most familiar with (I am not sure of its origins) suggests that the middle class is an amalgamation of the working class and capitalists, where most of the middle class do, in fact, have to work for wages, but many also own businesses. In a time of revolution, the middle class may swing to either the revolutionary or reactionary side of the conflict.

But I have a problem with this account: Why would there be a middle class if it was simply a combination of workers and capitalists? Would they not simply divide based on their class interests? Clearly there must be more to this story.

Does anyone have a perspective on this? Is the account I described above have any value to it? If so, how can it play a role in organizing workers?

[RedKobra]

I'm British and in Britain the terms mean different things.

In simple terms the social strata known as the middle class belongs to a bourgeois analysis and it describes everyone from the Labour aristocracy (well paid, secure workers who enjoy substantial perks) through to the peripheral rich.

Below the middle class is the working class who derive their entire subsistence from the wages they receive from their work, they enjoy low pay, job insecurity, few perks and , if they own anything, do so through credit. Interestingly we don't make a distinction between service workers, manual workers and office workers.

The middle class is further broken down in Britain: The lower middle class are generally public sector workers like teachers, nurses.etc who are better paid, usually better unionized and traditionally more secure in their job.

The middle (confusing, I know.), sometimes called the squeezed middle, who are generally professionals, university educated, management and middle management who at work are in direct conflict with the rest of the workers. They are generally generously paid and enjoy bonus' and perks.

At the top of the middle class is the upper-middle class; this group is generally privately educated (i.e - entirely self financed, elite level education) and enjoys extremely generous pay, perks and security. They often own property as investment and their income is a mixture of salary and returns on their investments.

In Britain we also have an upper-class (generally royals and hangers on) and the under-class which is a particularly ugly definition of the disenfranchised. Those with no job, little qualifications and no prospects.

In the US I believe that the strata known as the middle class refers to what Brits would know as the office based-working class, the lower and middle-middle. So everyone from secure workers up to professionals with investment portfolios. Beneath them is the US working class which is the equivalent of the British service sector, manual workers and elements of the under-class. As far as I'm aware American's have little notion of an upper-class and so would describe everyone from an elite professional to a multi-billionaire as upper-middle class.

Hope that is some help.

[RedKobra]

I should add in Marxist terminology everyone who gets all of their income from wage labour is proletarian, anyone who earns their living from a mixture of wage labour and capital gains on investments is petit-bourgeois and those who earn their living mostly or entirely through returns on capital investment are the bourgeoisie.

[swims with the fishes]

..

perfect analysis of the british class system. we do not fit neatly into the traditional marxist analysis.

[Guardia Rossa]

I think a more correct term would be "Middle Classes" but I'm a splitter so whatever.

The Middle Classes stand for a term that describes all classes not strictly bourgeois and not strictly proletarian, that is, that can be won over to the revolution but that are more usually won over by the bourgeois ideologues.

Petit-bourgeoisie, intelligentsia, self-employed/freelancers (Google Translate), labour bureaucracy, labour aristocracy, etc...

[motion denied]

"Middle class" derives from bourgeois sociology (sorry for the pleonasm) and therefore is a concept completely alien to Marx (or to anything useful really).

As you said, it usually puts in the same bag an upper strata of the working class, relatively stable and well-paid, and the petite-bourgeoisie.

[ComradeAllende]

But socialists don't define class by income, but by their function in society, right? So how do we look at the middle class? Well... the account I am most familiar with (I am not sure of its origins) suggests that the middle class is an amalgamation of the working class and capitalists, where most of the middle class do, in fact, have to work for wages, but many also own businesses. In a time of revolution, the middle class may swing to either the revolutionary or reactionary side of the conflict.

As far as I can tell, the "middle class" applies less to income and "social relations" than it does to economic security. In other words, "middle class" refers to the household earner(s) who can afford a medium-sized house, two or three cars of varying age, and a college education for their children. Obviously this status has suffered a significant decline in recent years, given the stagnation of wages and the popping of the housing bubble (not to mention increasing costs for education). Based on the history of the middle class in the US, I would argue that it would shift its allegiance depending on the circumstances leading up to a certain "social catastrophe": labor militancy in the early 20th century fostered the rise of "Progressive" reformers and muckrakers, while in the South and Midwest racial tensions and nativism fueled the KKK and white ethno-nationalism; in the 1960s, prosperity and the Vietnam War gave us the civil rights and antiwar movements; in the late 20th and early 21st century, globalization and immigration from Latin America has brought us Donald Trump and the Tea Party.


But I have a problem with this account: Why would there be a middle class if it was simply a combination of workers and capitalists? Would they not simply divide based on their class interests? Clearly there must be more to this story.

The modern usage of "middle class" is different from previous usages, since it relies on "economic security" as its basis, as opposed to income or role in production. Most of the "middle class" would belong to the "proletariat" or the labor aristocracy, whereas the rest (white-collar professionals like lawyers, managers, supervisors, etc.) would belong (in one way or another) to the capitalist class. It cannot divide based on "class interests" because the "middle class" has formed its own "class mentality"; an aversion to overly-conspicuous consumption and high taxes alongside a philanthropic-like concern for the poor and other "indigents" of society. Sometimes it swings leftward to fight against child labor, sweatshops, environmental degradation, etc; and sometimes it swings to the right in favor of mass incarceration, white supremacy, nativism, and neoliberalism. It all depends on its self-perception: if its in decline, it swings rightward towards reactionary populism and fascism; if affluence is in the air, it lends its help and "respectability" to left-wing causes.

[tuwix]

But I have a problem with this account: Why would there be a middle class if it was simply a combination of workers and capitalists? Would they not simply divide based on their class interests? Clearly there must be more to this story.


The middle class term is invented to describe a group who has mixed behavior due to mixed interests. For example, manager of middle level theoretically is wage worker =, but in fact is in conflict with workers below him. Self-employed is both worker and bourgeoisie. And they really behave differently than workers on bottom and great bourgeoisie.

The problem with them is that they differ from each other. There is no common interest of whole middle class. The CEO although he's still wage worker will represent more perspective of bourgeoisie than the lowest supervisor. As we can surely determine what proletariat and bourgeoisie wants, as we can't determine what middle class really wants.

And another case is that due to bourgeois reasons everyone who works is by media include into middle class. It's rather natural that almost everyone aspire to be in higher class than s/he actually is. This is the way why emerged a phenomenon of inteligentsia, fore example. But bourgeois media using this to make working class easier to manage. In short way it can be described: Do you aspire to be middle class? Then you must admit middle class values: no unions, low taxes, etc...

[Armchair Partisan]

In my view, the term "middle class" serves to do nothing but to mystify the role of actual, well-defined classes in class society. It is useless to talk about "middle class interests", for example, because this "middle class" do not have common interests at all. In my secondary education, we were encouraged to see modern Western society as 'diamond-shaped', with a huge middle class, and a tiny smidgen of extremely rich and extremely poor.

I think that the main appeal behind this is that aside from the richest of the haute-bourgeoisie, everyone can be made to identify with the middle class. Workers would see themselves as part of this middle class, identifying in opposition to even poorer workers (whose fate they would wish to avoid) and together with small businesses and the less rich layer of capitalists (whom they aspire to be, despite having opposite class interests). It is a capitalist ideological perversion of class analysis, pure and simple. I think that as socialists, we should consistently avoid the use of this vague term and speak of the actual classes that can be distinguished between based on class interests (workers, capitalists, labor aristocracy, petit-bourgeoisie), or subsets of these when necessary.

[SocialismBeta]

Thanks to everyone for their contribution!

I do agree with you, Armchair Partisan, that socialists should strive to avoid using the term (unless, of course, we are describing theoretical positions different to our own).

[Tjis]

It seems the majority of replies tries to fit the 'middle class' concept into marxist mold, concluding that they're really a mix of various marxist classes and therefore not a 'real' class.
While this is true, it completely ignores that the middle class does in fact often behave as if it is a cohesive whole, separate from both those below them and those above them.

Modern capitalism has stratified society on income. Where you live, where you work, what you do in your free time, who your friends are, all those are largely determined by the size of your income. It is not determined by how you gained that income. A white-collar professional might earn just as much as a shop owner, and as a result buy a house similar to the house of the shop owner, and visit the kind of restaurants the shop owner also visits. The white collar professional is not very likely though to interact on a daily basis with, say, factory workers, even though both the factory worker and the white collar professional derive their income from selling their labor-power. Similarly, the shop owner is not very likely to interact on a daily basis with bankers, even though both bankers and shop owners derive their income from property. Bankers go to way classier (and more expensive) restaurants.

So culturally, the middle class does exist. People within the middle class are more likely to interact with other people in the middle class, regardless of the source of their income. They're more likely to share ideas, political opinions, and models of how the world works with eachother than with people outside of the middle class.
Since social unrest among workers tends to happen among the more desperate, disenfranchised workers, the middle class as a whole (including the workers among them) is able to look at it as something happening to other people. They are able to discuss it as if it happens in a faraway place. When a protest turns ugly and the police beat up protesters, they are able to blame the victims, because they know none of them. In fact, they might feel much more instinctive outrage about something like property taxes, which is far more likely to affect them or people close to them.

It is important to recognize this. Middle class workers aren't automatically allies. Working class solidarity (in the marxist sense) is no instinctive reaction. A lot of education needs to be done for the middle class worker to see themselves in some abstract sense as similar to the worker in a lower strata. However, only when workers from all strata are organized as a cohesive whole can this abstract solidarity turn into an instinctive one.

[Blake's Baby]

Beware assuming that the current usage holds good for previous periods though: at one point, the bourgeoisie was the 'middle class' between the aristocracy (upper class) and workers.

[Strannik]

Beware assuming that the current usage holds good for previous periods though: at one point, the bourgeoisie was the 'middle class' between the aristocracy (upper class) and workers.

I'd say this is the historical reason why US bourgeoise likes to identify itself as "middle class".

I'd like to make the point that since information has become so centrally important in production, today many experts and professionals who on the first sight appear to be workers, could be classfied as "petty bourgeois" instead - their property being the expert knowledge they have appropriated by deliberately codifying it and making it "arcane". Expert knowledge can be used as property for exploiting the labour of others either directly or indirectly while putting in very little actual work yourself.

This is also the central vision of Silicon Valley bourgeoise - a society where anyone can become petty bourgeois through appropriation of information: ie "intellectual property"

[Comrade #138672]

I'd say this is the historical reason why US bourgeoise likes to identify itself as "middle class".

I'd like to make the point that since information has become so centrally important in production, today many experts and professionals who on the first sight appear to be workers, could be classfied as "petty bourgeois" instead - their property being the expert knowledge they have appropriated by deliberately codifying it and making it "arcane". Expert knowledge can be used as property for exploiting the labour of others either directly or indirectly while putting in very little actual work yourself.

This is also the central vision of Silicon Valley bourgeoise - a society where anyone can become petty bourgeois through appropriation of information: ie "intellectual property"Could you give some examples of this?

[Heilmann]

"Middle class" derives from bourgeois sociology (sorry for the pleonasm) and therefore is a concept completely alien to Marx (or to anything useful really).

I don't think this necessarily is true, nor is it necessarily useful to collapse the middle classes completely into either the proletariat or the petit-bourgeoisie. For example, I think it's fair to claim the role of, say, a teacher - both in "sociological" and strategic terms - is different to that of the "mass worker".

[Comrade #138672]

Teachers in public schools are very much like other workers, though. Teachers are paid wages like other workers and strike just like other workers. Their class should be obvious.

[RedKobra]

We have to be careful not to equate the general political consciousness of a profession with their class status, i.e - just because the vast majority of teachers in the UK are, if not explicitly left wing then, at the very least strongly unionized, strongly militant and emphatically in opposition to the incursion of market forces and managerialism.

That said, and I can only speak for the UK, teachers have become more and more proletarianised over the last 35 years. They used to be very much a privileged strata but that has completely changed. The effects of the proletarianisation of both teaching and nursing is demonstrated by the increasing insecurity and temporary nature of those professions. Recruitment and retention are the two biggest dilemmas facing both. This casualizing effect is what undermined the industrial trades in the 1970's and in so doing broke the back of their militant unions. The only real remaining bastions of union militancy these days is the teachers and the nurses, and (possibly the fire service.) and its quite easy to see them joining the history books alongside the dockers and the miners.

[reviscom1]

I would define Middle Class as: Not an aristocrat but does not make a living from Manual Labour.

[Antibiotic]

If you don't want to be a snob, nor get down and dirty, you're middle class. Nowadays, it's the way to live more effectively. Modern technologies, brought to notion negative aspects of other classes. Spending life struggling for position, within a pyramid, or a pub, looks silly. Middle class has no strictness to it, so it's more appealing, as well.

[Blake's Baby]

Sorry, that's an awful definition.

Class relationships are relationships to the means of production. 'not wanting to get your hands dirty' is not a relationship to the means of production.

[Hit The North]

perfect analysis of the british class system. we do not fit neatly into the traditional marxist analysis.

Erm, the British class system was the one Marx and Engels used to analyse the class system under nineteenth century capitalism.

It is worth noting that the class structure is not an unchanging web of relations, but is shaped by the ongoing processes of capitalist accumulation and class struggle.

....

[Luís Henrique]

Teachers in public schools are very much like other workers, though. Teachers are paid wages like other workers and strike just like other workers. Their class should be obvious.

I have absolutely no doubt that teachers are workers; they sell their labour power for a wage, and have to live out of this.

But their labour is still similar to that of the artisan; they, and not capital, control the conditions of their labour. The pace, the rhytm, even to some extent the content of their work is infinitely more free than those of the welder or the seamstress. That gives them an outdated petty-bourgeois perception of labour and life in general. They are more likely than most workers to see their own work as "noble", "rewarding", "decent", etc, in a word, to be "proud to be workers".

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

"Middle class" derives from bourgeois sociology (sorry for the pleonasm) and therefore is a concept completely alien to Marx (or to anything useful really).

And yet Marx used the concept quite often:

https://www.google.com.br/search?btnG=Google+Search!&as_sitesearch=www.marxists.org/archive/marx/&hl=en&ie=8859-1&oe=8859-1&as_epq=middle+class&as_q=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=all&gws_rd=cr,ssl&ei=yIJ8VoacIsqNmQHYzrKwCQ

Luís Henrique

[GLF]

I will use a factory as an analogy of how I see it.

The bourgeoisie own the capital - the factory and all the machinery.

The petty bourgeoisie are those who run things for the bourgeoisie - the university educated management. They run the operation. These are the ones who relate to the workers the demands of the bourgeoisie. They earn several times that of the worker.

The proles are the ones who do the work.

A slave plantation works the same way (slave owner and family, house slaves, field slaves). This is not a coincidence.

[Hermes]

I think that in several ways, the concept of a middle class is more interesting/useful from a cultural standpoint, with an understanding that in many ways culture is driven by the economic base.

What does a person, or group of people, have to do in order to be seen as middle class by society? How does this perception change based on how the underlying economic conditions for certain groups of people/states change? Based on other political/social/cultural shifts, etc.

[Luís Henrique]

I will use a factory as an analogy of how I see it.

The bourgeoisie own the capital - the factory and all the machinery.

The petty bourgeoisie are those who run things for the bourgeoisie - the university educated management. They run the operation. These are the ones who relate to the workers the demands of the bourgeoisie. They earn several times that of the worker.

The proles are the ones who do the work.

A slave plantation works the same way (slave owner and family, house slaves, field slaves). This is not a coincidence.

I would say the slave plantation, as you describe it, is very different from the factory as you describe (and that both are very different from society).

House slaves, in any way, are not the equivalent for management; the proper analogy would be foremen. But foremen don't earn several times the wage of slaves; either they earn wages, which the slaves do not, or they are slaves themselves, and their privileged position vis-a-vis common slaves is not predicated on earnings, but in something else.

The petty-bourgeoisie, strictu sensu, are not management people, but owners of petty means of production that don't qualify as capital. Latu sensu, they may or may not include management (which could be seen as an upper layer of the working class), but I would say that the difference is elsewhere, in the reduced ability of capital to quantify, and consequently mechanise, intellectual labour, as compared to manual labour.

And, of course, any society is very different from its productive units. It includes the relations between productive units, for starters, which the productive units, by definition, don't.

Luís Henrique

[cyu]

One of the easiest ways to rule, is for rulers to divide up the ruled into different antagonistic groups - so that they fight one another, instead of fighting the rulers.

As far as I'm concerned, the working class is "everyman" - the middle class is an artificial creation in order to try to divide the ruled into differing interests - and they have largely succeeded - small business owners far too often consider themselves to have different interests from union members, but the ruling class will piss on all of them.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

The obvious conclusion one should draw from this thread: People use "middle class" in a variety of ways. People draw felt from a variety of contradictory theoretical frameworks when defining "middle class". Posters on RevLeft are sho obsessed with being right, that they can't accept possibility that their use of a slippery, and dubiously useful, conceptual term might be neither more nor less correct than another.

Perhaps rather than asking "What/who is middle class?" we could ask when we've found it a useful concept in organizing our theorizing.

[AdrianO]

From the Capitalist perspective, the middle class is the engine that drives their profit making mechanisms. And like engines, they consume and produce energy. In short, the capitalists use the middle class as a politically correct term instead of consumers.
Believe it or not, it is in the best interest of capitalism to convert more people into engines, with spending power enough to consume the surplus produced.
This is where the whole benevolent capitalist argument comes in.
But I assure you, it's far from benevolent.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

From the Capitalist perspective, the middle class is the engine that drives their profit making mechanisms. And like engines, they consume and produce energy. In short, the capitalists use the middle class as a politically correct term instead of consumers.
Believe it or not, it is in the best interest of capitalism to convert more people into engines, with spending power enough to consume the surplus produced.
This is where the whole benevolent capitalist argument comes in.
But I assure you, it's far from benevolent.

I think that's an interesting analysis . . . but I also feel like it corresponds to an idea of the market that doesn't really grapple with financialization. At this point at least, it seems less a matter of actual purchasing power than of stability. Or, like, case in point, austerity tends to errode the "middle class" while massively dialing up profits. Which, y'know, also begins to lay bare the role of capitalist states in the market.

[Mialectical Daterialism]

Communist manifestio chapter 1 page 1 folks:

"The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative."

The middle classes, no matter how precarious and "petty", are the bourgeoisie, meaning they own the means of production and have a vested interest in maintaining capitalism because they are net benefiters from the oppression of the proletariat through the exploitation of labour due to controlling the means of production. And therefor marxism-leninism violently rejects any form of co-operation with the middle class along with their allies the ghost of the feudal upper class as the antithesis to the revolutionary proletariat and instead understands that the proletariat must seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie (including the middle-classes) and in the process destry all concept of class in order to synthesis to a higher stage: communism. hth.