There Is No Middle Class

This Sunday, the Clarion published “40% of Connecticut families have less income than required for a basic ‘survival budget’” by P. D. Goselin. That article begins

“We’re not poor, we’re middle class.”

Beginning in the years following World War 2, this became the stock answer for tens of millions of US parents when their kids asked “Are we poor?”

This is still the reality for millions of people living in the United States. The fact of the matter is simply that no one is middle class.

Well, why not? The media talks all the time about the middle class. The politicians are constantly appealing to the middle class. What is the middle class they’re talking about? It depends on the politician. For Nixon, it was the “silent majority.” Since the late 1970s, they’ve all been talking about the “hollowing out of the middle class” — by which, it appears, the politicians mean the loss of middle-income manufacturing jobs to automation and outsourcing to countries with less labor laws or that have had their standard of living destroyed by the good ol’ U.S. army.

To the pundits and politicians, middle class means “middle income.” That is, anyone who isn’t the working poor and anyone who doesn’t own a factory or have billions invested in the financial markets. There doesn’t seem to be any hard-and-fast definition, and that’s precisely the way they like it. Anyone can be middle class! You there, do you own a small restaurant? Middle class! Or you, do you work at a car dealership as a salesperson? Also middle class! Low-level investment banker? Lawyer? Doctor? Well, hey there, you’re middle class too! How about you, sir or madam or other, are you a shop clerk? You, too, are middle class!

This is a trick, of course. It’s a way to confuse everyone’s interests. The small restaurateur and his staff aren’t both part of the same class. The 7-11 franchisee and the clerks at 7-11 aren’t part of the same class. Bank clerks aren’t in the same class as investment bankers, nor is every lawyer in the same class. This is a shorthand that smears differences and makes everyone homogeneous. And what do we all want? Well, the return of the middle class, of course.

This is a similar trick that history books apply to nationality. By repeatedly calling everyone living within the borders of the U.S. the “Nation of America,” they’re implying that we all share the same interests. God Bless America, all rise for the flag, One Nation Under God, Indivisible. They — the pet politicians and pundits of the wealthy billionaires — do this trick with the “nation” to get us to buy war bonds, worship the red-white-and-blue, kneel down in prayer in front of a cop or soldier, and gear up to go fight the Big Enemy of the day. The trick with class is only slightly different. The people who own this country want us to believe we’re not only all part of one nation so we’ll go abroad and fight together. They want us to believe we’re all part of one class, so that we’ll all stay at home and be peaceable, quiet, pliable, and friendly.

But in order to understand why the middle class isn’t a real class, we have to talk about what classes are.

If we only understand class as “a cohort of people who share something in common,” then we aren’t using it in a way that helps us make sense of the world. We need to be more specific:

Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labor of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.

A Great Beginning, Lenin, 1919

A class, then, is a large section of society that has coinciding material interests. It’s a part of the population that has important things in common, such that they generally, as a statistical whole, benefit from the same types of policy, changes in circumstance, and so forth.

In modern capitalist societies there are three broad classes and many smaller groupings (which we generally call class-fractions). These are:

• the bourgeoisie (a french word meaning “town-dweller,” from the German burgher), who own commercial (i.e. “productive”) property and who don’t support themselves by work. This includes investment bankers, financiers, industrialists — anyone who lives by “owning” things;
• the petit-bourgeoisie (the “little” bourgeoisie), who own productive property and who support themselves at least partially through their own labor. This includes small business owners, small-time restaurateurs and even professionals like doctors and lawyers;
• and the proletariat (from the Roman, meaning the class that merely reproduces society and does not own property), who do not own productive property, and who support themselves by selling their labor-power — that is, by working — for a wage

Other class groupings in the U.S. include:

• The landlords, who own the land and the buildings housed on it, and who charge a rent — whether that rent is charged to the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, or to the workers.
• The smallholders, who are agriculturalists owning their own farms, land, and equipment. These are a petit-bourgeois strata (class or class-fraction). Some own all of their means of production (the land, the machinery, and so forth), while some are semi-owners and others are impoverished. Smallholding has played a very important part in the U.S. settler-empire, from its roots as a settler-republic, serving as the foot soldiers of capital in the breakup of the Indigenous peoples.
• The artisans, who make a living by working with archaic hand tools and small scale production. Although this class has been all but eliminated by the advent of industrial capitalism (most of the old handicrafts were either been absorbed into the petit-bourgeoisie or proletarianized into wage workers a long time ago), there are those who continue to make a living through handicrafts.
• The slaves, who work in the slave-relation – that is, they are treated as property, a mere instrument of production, and purchased outright. Employers do not extract surplus value from slaves, but rather appropriate everything slaves produce. The particular form of slavery in the U.S. was racialized chattel slavery, developed after the genocide of the Taino people in Hispaniola by the importation of enslaved Black African workers. Slavery persists today within the U.S. prison system.
• The police, who, although they are employed and sell their labor-power, produce a very special non-productive service: control and terror. The suppression of Black and Indigenous communities, the breaking of strikes, the sweeping up of homeless people, and so on — such is typical of their special commodity. Unlike members of the armed forces, the police do not have or return to “civilian life” unless they quit their jobs or leave their positions. Members of the U.S. intelligence services are also part of this special class-fraction.
• The state intelligentsia, who produce state ideology for the mental domination of the ruled by the ruling classes. These include petit-bourgeois and semi-proletarian positions; for instance, the petit-bourgeois professors at major universities or the semi-proletarian adjuncts and primary school teachers.
• The subproletariat, which includes all those who do not own any productive property, but, for one reason or another, is simultaneously unable to subsist by selling their labor-power.
• The precariat, who are those proletarians that are subject to various legal relations that make them even easier to fire or remove – for instance, “illegal” (undocumented) immigrant workers who can be deported en masse if they threaten to unionize.

According to the bourgeoisie, most of the above classes are simply “the middle class,” but we can see by looking at this non-exhaustive list, and the differences between the listed classes, that this is a falsehood. What the talking heads call the middle class is a combination of laborers (proletarians), the entire petit-bourgeoisie (professionals, small shop owners, and so on), and certain bourgeoisie (the lower end of the capitalist or owning class).

While laborers and professionals may have some interests in common (we are, together, after all, the “working classes”), those interests aren’t always aligned. Professionals also have interests in common with the capitalists. Laborers don’t. The capitalists benefit from the misery of the laborer. There is no common material interest shared between the producer, the person who works and makes the things that compose our society, and the owner, the person who skims off the fat and drinks the cream from the produce.

They want class peace, so they can continue to exploit us.

The only way to stop them is to recognize that there can be no peace between us. We don’t want to secure a lasting class peace — we must win the class war! That’s why Marxists don’t use the term middle class. It’s a ruse, a canard, a deception. There is no middle class!

For more on the subject, we recommend Wage Labour & Capital and Value Price and Profit by Karl Marx. Further reading can be done in the form of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friederich Engels.