In an excellent diary on embracing your class I was surprised to discover that many kossacks seem to have a very poor understanding of what class, and working class in particular, is. This concept is so fundamentally important to all of our politics that, I think, it's worthwhile to provide a thumbnail sketch of how I understand this distinction. A failure to understand this distinction and the dynamics of class will, I believe, entail a set of very bad policy positions on the part of liberals.
The Standard American Conception of the Working Class
The predominant consensus seems to be that "working class" pertains to the kind of work you do and how much money you make. Someone who belongs to the working class would thus be a person who engages in physical labor and who probably makes between 15 and 40K a year. By contrast, someone would be "middle class" if they worked primarily with their minds, I suppose, and who made between 40K and 250K. While the upper class would consist in those who make above this amount. In my view, the amount of money one makes and the sort of work one does are largely irrelevant to what constitutes the working class. While it's certainly true that most people who make this amount of money and who do physical labor are working class, this isn't what makes the working class the working class.
What Classes Really Are
What, then, constitutes the working class? The deciding factor as to whether you are working or capitalist class has nothing to do with the sort of work you do or how much money you make, but rather pertains to how you make your money. A working class person is anyone who works for a paycheck. If you have an employer that pays you a paycheck, then you're working class. It as simple as that. It doesn't matter whether you're building bridges and highways, whether you're a cook in a restaurant, whether you're working in an office. All of these things are secondary. All that matters is that you sell your labor for a paycheck.
By contrast, anyone who employs others as their way of making money and anyone who predominantly-- your 401 or 403 probably doesn't qualify you as a member of the capitalist class because it is unlikely that it is your primary source of income --lives on money made from the investment of their money belongs to the capitalist class. Your doctor down the street is probably working class unless he has a private practice. The owners of Wal-Mart are capitalist class. Capitalists are people that either purchase the labor of others to make their money or that invest their money to make their money. They are the ones that own the business and the means by which products are produced.
Why is This Important?
This isn't a mere matter of terminological quibbling or semantic debate. How you understand class is going to make a profound difference in how you view politics and the world around you. If you see class as merely a matter of the type of work one does and how much money one makes, then you'll be unlikely to discern the systematic conflict between the working class and the capitalist class. If, by contrast, you understand class as I've outlined here, you'll see that there's a fundamental conflict between the interests of the capitalist class and the working class.
The aim of the capitalist class will always be to maximize profit. Sometimes I hear people around these parts suggest that capitalists are "greedy" and that this is what motivates them. While there's certainly a number of greedy capitalists, the features that govern capitalist actions are structural, not predominantly moral shortcomings. Not only are capitalists legally obligated to pursue profit, but also they have to do so in order to survive. If they don't, someone else will. If someone else does, they're business will disappear. Consequently, they necessarily have to pursue profit regardless of whether they need it simply to stay afloat. This is a structural feature of our system that has all sorts of unsavory consequences for most of us and for the environment.
At any rate, insofar as capitalists always seek to maximize their profit, it follows that it's always in the interests of capitalists to reduce the cost of production. And how do capitalists reduce the cost of production? They reduce the costs of production by decreasing wages, finding the cheapest labor available (e.g., outsourcing), minimizing benefits for workers, and minimizing tax burdens to the state and nation. These things will always be in the interests of capitalists. And they will be even more in the interests of capitalist in a global economy because companies can always move to other countries if a state enacts policy that doesn't allow them to minimize production costs in these ways.
By contrast, the interests of the working class will always be opposed to those of capitalists. The working class will always want to maximize their wages, will always want more and better benefits, will always want a reasonable work day, work week, and work year. These are things that people who work for a wage will always want.
It now becomes clear why the concept of class is so important to politics. If you have a confused conception of class it's likely that you will harbor some sort of fantasy about how the interests of capitalists are the same as the interests as workers. You will tell yourself that because capitalists create jobs and pay your wages, your interests are the same as those of capitalists. As a consequence of this you will be led to support a series of pro-capitalist policies that make it easier for capitalists to lower your wages, take away your jobs, take away your benefits, and make your working environment more grueling and horrible.. You will become your own inadvertent enemy, doing things that go against your own interests. This is what Blue Dog and Centrist/Pragmatist Democrats are. They are people that have bought the reigning theory of the capitalist whereby we're told that free markets are in the interests of everybody, that regulation is what destroys our jobs and wages, and that lowering taxes increases jobs. This last myth is particularly insidious as only take-home profit is taxes. Money that is used to maintain the costs of operation in a business is not taxed. Ergo, it's simply not true that lowering taxes for capitalists will lead to more investment in production creating more jobs. Why would a capitalist use their take-home money in that way if doing so would diminish their take-home profit and financial investment power?
The idea of the middle class is a thorough distortion of these dynamics. People believe that because they're "middle class" they somehow are immune to these dynamics. This leads republicans and, sadly and pathetically, many democrats to support a set of policies that directly assault both their very livelihood and the quality of their life. Yet the vast majority of the middle class are wage earners like nearly everyone else. As such, they are working class and their interests are fundamentally different than capitalists. Being a capitalist doesn't make you a mean or nasty person. There are plenty of "nice" and good hearted capitalists. But that doesn't change the fact that their interests are structurally different than the rest of their interests and that they're structurally compelled, not by greed, to pursue a particular set of practices that are contrary to the interests of working class folk. We really need to overcome the idea that what's good for capitalists is good for the rest of us. To be sure, we need the jobs that they provide and there's no current alternative to selling our labor to survive. But noting this is entirely different than believing that's what good for these employers is good for us. There really is no compromise here. It's a fundamental difference of interests.