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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34914 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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The Devil in the Definitions:

We talk about class a fair bit, but it's hard to define many of them. Most of these terms are relative, and the exceptions numerous. I've been thinking about what the "working class" is, and how to distinguish it from the middle classes. It can't just be money, a successful plumber might make four times what a librarian or a teacher makes, but he is working class and they are some sort of middle class. An artist might be much poorer than most working class, but they are not working class.

My current formulation is something like this: In the west, the Working Class are those workers whose jobs do not require any college, and which do not raise their social status among the educated middle classes.

What do you think separates the classes? Am I off base here?

No, it's just money.

Anything else is simply identity politics.

It doesn't matter how much money I have, I will never be middle class to born middle class people who know where I have come from, class wise, depsite all my credentials, accent, career, education, and extemely large personal library.

I will never be upper class and neither will any future children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, or great great grandchildren. Those who come after that might be able to sneak into the upper class by marriage if they are very very lucky and every single generation between me and them rises in status and wealth.

I live in England.

Born to doleys (benefits dependant), alcoholics, cripples, and drug addicts who themselves are the failed products of feeding in farm and factory labourers into the engine of liberalisation and corruption that was the 20th century.

Someone born middle class is higher class than my birth, and it has been made clear to me, over and over again in my life that no matter how high I rise and how far they fall, I will always be lesser than them. The only way to be seen as an equal is to make sure they never find out where I am from.

Class is about birth, it has nothing to do with money.

I was talking about the US - the UK is a weird country where mllionaires are considered upper middle class because their great-great-great-great grandmother didn't marry the right rich guy.

I don't think they are two different things. I think they're the same thing. Identity politics is distributed class warfare.

I think one of the more useful distinctions is the one laid out by John Michael Greer in this article of his https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/

Here’s a relevant example. It so happens that you can determine a huge amount about the economic and social prospects of people in America today by asking one remarkably simple question: how do they get most of their income? Broadly speaking—there are exceptions, which I’ll get to in a moment—it’s from one of four sources: returns on investment, a monthly salary, an hourly wage, or a government welfare check. People who get most of their income from one of those four things have a great many interests in common, so much so that it’s meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investment class, a salary class, a wage class, and a welfare class.

It’s probably necessary to point out explicitly here that these classes aren’t identical to the divisions that Americans like to talk about. That is, there are plenty of people with light-colored skin in the welfare class, and plenty of people with darker skin in the wage class. Things tend to become a good deal more lily-white in the two wealthier classes, though even there you do find people of color. In the same way, women, gay people, disabled people, and so on are found in all four classes, and how they’re treated depends a great deal on which of these classes they’re in. If you’re a disabled person, for example, your chances of getting meaningful accommodations to help you deal with your disability are by and large considerably higher if you bring home a salary than they are if you work for a wage.

As noted above, there are people who don’t fall into those divisions. I’m one of them; as a writer, I get most of my income from royalties on book sales, which means that a dollar or so from every book of mine that sells via most channels, and rather less than that if it’s sold by Amazon—those big discounts come straight out of your favorite authors’ pockets—gets mailed to me twice a year. There are so few people who make their living this way that the royalty classlet isn’t a significant factor in American society. The same is true of most of the other ways of making a living in the US today. Even the once-mighty profit class, the people who get their income from the profit they make on their own business activities, is small enough these days that it lacks a significant collective presence.

Once again, everyone is focusing on the money, and while that is a part of it, I think it is not determinative.

Where people get their income is one facet, but there's a lot of overlap. The lower ranks of the working class are likely to be getting some form of assistance, even if it's Medicare. Social Security Disability is a common end for working class guys (both legitimate and as a con). On the other end, a bookshop employee might get paid hourly, but they are in a different intellectual, social and political milieu.

I might be getting to granular, but doesn’t this need to extend beyond just occupation? One of my very good friends is a very financially successful tradesman with only a high school degree and hailing from a very poor neighborhood, who is a member of the same private club as my wife and I, and lives in a very nice home in our posh neighborhood that he restored, himself. His daughters attend a good private school, etc.

That is very much the point, yes. Economics is part of the story, but certainly not the whole one.

A theory that I've been kicking around in my own head is that at least part of the divide seems to be between people who primarily manipulate objects, and people who primarily manipulate symbols. Comments about "the PMC" or "laptop class" often get poo-pooed here but I think that one of the major inferential gaps between the classes (especially since 2020) comes from attitudes towards "remote" work. There seems to be this background radiation of "look at these idiots, if they were smart/educated they would have a job that could be conducted via email/zoom". See the kerfuffle on twitter around "learn to code", and the derision Ron DeSantis got for showing up to hurricane wrecked areas in a hard-hat and white Dunlops.

and the derision Ron DeSantis got for showing up to hurricane wrecked areas in a hard-hat and white Dunlops

Off-topic, but, while I don't know about the Dunlops(?), isn't it common for politicians and other government officials to show up to disaster areas wearing hard hats, in, say, Japan? Additionally, I imagine that part of whatever negativity cast onto DeSantis's name in relation to this has less to do with class perception and more to do with the fact of him being a Republican governor of a Gulf Coast state (see also Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz).

Probably one of those items whose name varies by region. Dunlops are oversize rubber boots with a non-stick coating. The idea being that they keep your regular shoes and pants clean and can be effectively washed off with a hose. IE the sort of thing one might wear if they expect to find themselves having to wade through a bunch of mud or sewage.

And you're right about politicians in (for example) Japan. Which IMO only emphasized the class/knowledge divide because you had a all these celebrities on twitter making fun of him for "cosplaying as a construction worker" and his "Nancy Sinatra go-go boots" with CNN covering the celebrity tweets as news, clearly trying to turn it into a Dukakis on the tank moment, but the message much of the gulf coast and republican electorate took from it was that the governor had shown up and was doing his job, leading to very silly articles in places like Slate and the Atlantic with titles like "DeSantis Approval Surges Despite Hurricane Response and Poor Fashion Sense". Despite? try "because of".

Annoyingly, in Australia when you are doing some manual labour and your boss tells you to bring some dunlops, he doesn't mean gumboots (which is what dunlops are called), he means these, the cheapest rubber soled shoes you can get your hands on. I was backpacking down the east coast and got a job helping build a greenhouse, and the only requirements were "some dunlops and a good attitude", paying quite a bit more than fruit picking (the Aussie itinerant's primary occupation). So I got me a pair of boots and rocked up, only to discover I was supposed to be running around the frame of this greenhouse, 5.5 metres off the ground hammering in plastic sheeting. So yeah, giant inflexible rubber boots weren't a great choice.

Ah, thanks, I associate the Dunlop name with tires and tennis rackets (and Arizona), so I figured it was shoes, but I was thinking like tennis shoes.

They make tires too ;-)

I've been trying to categorize the difference between Blue Collar and White Collar jobs for a while. The closest I've got is that Blue Collar jobs are clock-based while White Collar jobs are task-based.

With blue collar jobs, the work is never actually done. For example, a worker in a widget factory will never finish making widgets. No matter how fast or efficient he works, he's not leaving the factory a second before the whistle goes off, and he'll never stay extra to finish up the last couple widgets (of course overtime is a possibility, but it is just an extension of the same work he's doing, and he'll still have to be at his next shift. It's also not decided by him, but by his supervisor). This is part of the reason the going to the DMV is such a terrible experiences. The workers are just working a factory where you're the product. There is no incentive to be helpful or efficient, because the worker gains nothing out of it.

With White Collar Jobs, work is done until the task is done. A lawyer has to prep for a case, and if that means long hours and all-nighters, that's what he'll do. On the other hand, there will be days when he has less to do, and will leave early, or just lounge around the office.

This distinction fails in some cases. A plumber, for example, works by the task, but nobody would consider him a white collar worker. With your categorization, I think it all falls into place. A white collar working is someone whose task-based job involves primarily manipulating symbols. A job which does not meet both those criteria, is a blue collar job. So a plumber may be task-based, but it primarily involves manipulating objects, so it is blue collar.

I think this still fails in the case of a surgeon. Based on my categorization, a surgeon should be considered blue collar, because it is a task-based job that primarily involves manipulating objects. Perhaps one could argue that the surgeon is mainly using the knowledge he learned in medical school, and the physical surgery is just a physical manipulation of that knowledge.

The JM Greer breakdown is by source of primary income

-lower class= social assistance payments, food stamps, charity etc

-working class= hourly wages

-middle class= salary (including self-employment income)

-upper class= investment & inheritan e

Seems like 'blue collar' is a pretty good match for 'hourly wage earner' and 'white collar' to 'salaried worker', even though some skilled wage warners may make significantly more than low-status salaried employees.

I would say the difference between a knowledge worker and a skilled laborer is that a knowledge worker can physically execute an idea (i.e.- type it into the computer) as fast as they can think of it, while a skilled laborer can think of an idea and then take several hours to execute just a single idea. A skilled laborer can queue up ideas in his mind well in advance and have long periods of absent-mindedness (zuhandenheit) between the execution of one idea and the initiation of the next. A knowledge worker does not have this luxury because once they think of an idea, the execution is immediate, and now they must think of the next idea, or take a break from work.

So does that make the surgeon a skilled laborer?

What makes a surgeon not count as "manipulating objects" is not some technicality about using medical school knowledge--rather it's the fact that the physical effort and physical discomfort in manipulating the objects is a relatively small part of the job. A keyboard is an object, but using one doesn't count as "manipulating objects", for the same reason. A nurse who moves patients and changes bedpans would be blue collar.

Maybe non-administrative/dirty medical jobs could be called "teal-collar" (I know medical scrubs probably aren't commonly teal-colored, but bear with me), it still requires more knowledge and certification than some blue-collar jobs (since the costs of an accident or error are so much higher), but it is still fundamentally mechanistic to some degree.

I've heard some journalists use the term "pink collar" for the (mostly female) jobs like nursing and childcare that are primarily about bodies, rather than symbols or objects. They can require an associates or even a bachelors, and sometimes that translates to real skills they need (nurses need to have some idea if the medication they're giving out is plausible and not a typo or something), but is more a test of conscientiousness and conformity.

This isn't true. I've worked menial jobs and currently do a physical labor job, and there have been plenty of shifts that end when the work is done - whether that's closing the bar, loading the truck, or completing some other list of tasks. I probably only work 70% of the hours I get paid for.

Closing the bar and loading the truck are tasks, but they're tasks whose length is well known and/or predictable, and they are relatively more common and shorter than white collar tasks-they're tasks in the same way that making each individual widget in the factory is a task.

It's unlikely that closing the bar takes an hour today but five hours tomorrow. It's even more unlikely that closing the bar may not turn up at all for a few days, then it finally turns up, and you have to spend a week doing it.

It's unlikely that closing the bar takes an hour today but five hours tomorrow

I wouldn't say it's a certainty - but no, that wouldn't be unusual.

I think this still fails in the case of a surgeon. Based on my categorization, a surgeon should be considered blue collar, because it is a task-based job that primarily involves manipulating objects.

Perhaps, though ironically the stereotype of surgeons within the medical community is that they are a bunch of "dumb jocks" so you might still be onto something.

Perhaps one could argue that the surgeon is mainly using the knowledge he learned in medical school, and the physical surgery is just a physical manipulation of that knowledge.

The blacksmith is also mainly using the knowledge he learned from his master, and the physical smithing is just a physical manipulation of that knowledge.

Muscle memory? The surgeon also requires a lot of hands-on practice.

Physical strength? The worker assembling iPhones doesn't need more strength than the surgeon.

I don't think that this categorization works. For example, working at the DMV would generally be considered a white collar job, not a blue collar job. And furthermore, many white collar jobs aren't like you describe. I have worked in the IT field my entire career (a white collar job if ever there was one), and very few people stay until all the work is done. Because the reality is, no matter what the job: there's always more work. Even if you finish the task you're working on, there are more where that came from. Sure, you get the occasional doormat in a white collar job who insists that he has to stay until (current task) is done, no matter the hours. But most people recognize that there's no point, and tomorrow will be just fine.

I've long harbored the conspiracy theory that one of the reasons the middle class is so obsessed with safety (other than their natural neuroticism) is that it gives them the opportunity to adopt sumptuary laws that force the working class to publicly mark themselves, often with yellow vests or work uniforms.

Uniforms, hard hats, steel toed boots, work gloves, and yellow vests are safety precautions that originated within the working classes themselves and which were fought for by the working class through unions. They’re definitely not a sumptuary law imposition by the upper middle class.

hard hats, steel toed boots, work gloves,

Yes. The vests and uniforms? Not so much.

I would say you could mark the point at which unions were co-opted by the adoption of the yellow vest.

Not a complete theory on class by any means but I think there is a distinction to be made between the 'working' class and the 'sitting' class, for lack of better terms.

Listening to talk radio and hearing some of the 'sitting class' people blabber about how 'fifty is the new thirty' made me think that there is a sort of quality of life difference between those who do any form of manual labour and those who primarily just sit inside doing wrist work. I've worked with guys whose bodies are done and they were just in their mid thirties.

I don't know if there is some clean break or boundary there but if you are 'sacrificing' your body, be it your back through lifting things or lungs through breathing in dust, or skin and comfort by working outside in all conditions, and you are not making significantly more than some guy answering the phone and transferring numbers into a spreadsheet... I think most people intuitively understand that one person is better off than the other.

There is definitely this aspect, though I suspect lots of exceptions. It is the case that almost all of the very dangerous/physically difficult professions are working class.

The classic definitions that matter is that the lower classes work for someone else, the middle classes work for themselves, and the upper classes don't work.

Such a definition describes political power rather than anything else, it is hard to run for office when your boss can fire you, and it is easy when you answer to passive income only.

I've not any other definitions that really describe how the differences matter other than cultural.

This is undercut by the fact that in modern society, a lot of working class people work for themselves, most middle class people don't (doctors in hospitals, lawyers in firms etc.), and the top classes of income most definitely work. Whatever your moral or political view of Bezons, Musk, Gates, Soros etc., they aren't lounging by the pool on their yacht (all that much).

Who is more powerful though?

An activist that lives off of 24k per year passive income, or a doctor working 80hr weeks up to his eyes in debt?

Income doesn't really factor in.

Depends radically on who the "activist" is.

https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/linwood-kaine-arrest/

Some activists are underclass, some are working class, many are middle class, and half are upper class. Odds are, if someone's actual profession is "activist", they have access to power and connections, even if they make relatively little money.

Now that "activism" is the path to political power, we can expect the ambitious children of the rich and powerful to be ever more involved in "activism".

That activist, by himself, isn't powerful at all. Maybe the movement he's is powerful, but its goals are set by the people at the top - who don't live off $24k a year. In fact, if the activist wants to remain in the movement, he has to make sure his opinions change when those of the leaders do.

The doctor is likely more powerful, albeit just a little, because he has more money to spend.

I think this has some explanatory power, but I disagree that it's the best way to see things.

I see a much looser collection of molehills, rather than a single pyramid. Or perhaps a mountain, with countless outcroppings, cliffs and crags. It might be the general structure of a pyramid, but it's furry and messy and non-directional.

This is because there is no unitary source of status. In terms of income, your pyramid works just fine. In terms of class society as a whole, I think it lacks nuance.

That said, this is a really good description of many parts, and I particularly like your conclusion. The function of class over time is perhaps the real class war, over exactly how porous those class divisions are, and how many generations it takes to move. ADD note: Chris Rock's recent special had an extended bit about this, talking about how his daughters fence.

Fencing is cheap though, what fencing indicates isn't high class, it's that you're not part of the the lower working class or underclass and live in a decently sized metropolitan area. The cost is similar to playing basketball.

I think you dismiss it too quickly. Think more deeply about what specific class(es) might learn fencing.

There aren't pickup games of fencing. Nobody but nobody is doing this for any reason other than scholarships, medaling in an obscure sport, or status in the group of people that would care about fencing. It's an athletic endeavor that is socially pointless, completely useless but references the nobility of olden tymes. Like dressage or opera.

This is for the aspirational middle class, or for someone like Rock, trying to shelve his kids into that upper-middle-class slot. They're auditioning for the upper class. If you medal in fencing, perhaps your children will be considered suitable matches for a fourth-cousin Kennedy. And Rock is famous and rich. That's how many generations it takes, when one talented, lucky guy can jump about six classes in one lifetime.

I would contest the assertion that fencing is "useless", though perhaps I am biased having grown up amongst reenactors, but I agree with everything else you've said here.

As a practical martial art, I think it is. Dressage evolved from cavalry charges, fencing from renaissance duelling. Both these skills are long past military or practical usefulness. See also: Kung Fu, karate etc. They've been stylized and gamified into irrelevance, plus martial technology and tactics have changed wildly.

Rapier, sure -- but skill with a sabre or epee is still a plausibly useful self-defense mechanism if you wanted to walk around with a cavalry sword or something. (proves your point I guess, but the picture is amusing -- surely it's indisputable that the 2A would apply to actual 18th century weapons?)

if you wanted to walk around with a cavalry sword or something

Oh man, if we can bring back wearing a sidearm and sword, I am so in. Come to think of it, aren't I authorized a couple of uniform swords?

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surely it's indisputable that the 2A would apply to actual 18th century weapons?

Yes it is very disputable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_legislation#Constitutional_protection

There is no NSKA (National Sword and Knife Association) and as a result, in many places where gun carry is fully legal even small knife can get you in trouble. As always, CYL before you get in knife fight ;-)

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It used to be clearer, and the American flattening of class structure makes it more difficult: everyone is middle-class now, from the plumbers to the President; see the difference between Bush Senior's patrician aura and Bush Junior's "aw shucks" persona, even though Barbara Bush had to do the traditional "what's your favourite recipe?" bit, as though she herself stood at the kitchen counter making biscuits with her own hands (a generation or two earlier it would have been "we have servants to do that") - Hillary was honest but like most things she does, did it in a brusque, impatient and dismissive way.

The Obamas were able to get away, without comment, that they got the White House chef (and not Michelle) to make Barack's favourites if he felt like a snack. But that's the idea - they may be rich and high-status but they're just folks. This fits in with the myth that America is a 'classless' society and Jack is as good as his master. Americans (so it is said) don't envy the rich or want to overthrow them because they believe they too can become 'one of those guys' with some luck/hard work/talent - America is the land of opportunity, after all, and doesn't have the same suppressive structures of class and hierarchy as the Old Countries that keep you locked into a rut.

Plumbers and skilled tradesmen would be lower middle-class (if they run their own business). You're right that it's not about money and that it is about education, but there's also the subtle Blue Tribe/Red Tribe division (not politics, but the way Scott originally defined it - you can have Democrat voters who are blue collar union workers). It's about culture and tastes and heritage, in other words; smart and talented members of the lower classes can climb the ladder and be accepted into the class above, but that generally means going to college and getting initiated into the customs of the upper-middle and upper classes. Learning how to fit in and be a 'good fit for the company culture'. That's what is behind a lot of the laments about "my kid went off to college and came back completely changed", and it's not just about political attitudes - you adapt and change now that you're on the path to the middle class, and if you don't, you'll never get the same opportunities even if you get the degree in the end, because you'll always stick out as 'not one of us'.

EDIT: See, for example, all the to-do about Trump not being a real billionaire, and this criticism wasn't confined to the simple charge of "he doesn't have that amount of money". All the nice Blue Tribe types who would claim to be against class on the grounds of it being systemic oppression, and that everyone is equal, and ordinary people are as good as anyone, and so forth to tedious length, wrote snobby little pieces about "ugh, he eats his steak well-done, that's not the proper way to eat steak, and goodness gracious me he wants ketchup? Ketchup? Could he be any more low-class?"

That kind of attitude then makes it harder to take you seriously that you love, adore, and want to represent and fight for the rights of the class of people who have a bottle of ketchup on the table as a condiment. That's a class judgement, and has nothing to do with "did you go to college, how much money have you?"

I think you’re conflating a whole bunch of different things here.

There isn’t really a flattened structure here. It’s more in flux than before, and it’s more possible for someone on the bottom with the right idea at the right time can move up quintiles of wealth rather quickly. However the differences in lifestyle and life expectations at different levels are widely different. On the bottom, people cannot afford regular medical care and can struggle to afford medications. They attend public schools and stay close to home. On the top, there’s concierge medical care, exclusive private schools, and international travel.

Second, there’s a distinction between social class and wealth. Just being rich doesn’t make you upper class, there are lots of unspoken rules of behavior, proper and improper interests, and proper and improper beliefs. Food especially is a big deal. You’re supposed to like to the subtle tastes of properly cooked food, preferably exotic and from places most people don’t go often (so not Mexican food or Chinese or Japanese), and strong sauces are to be avoided. You’re supposed to like international tv and movies. You’re supposed to be woke (more or less), liberal, and environmentalist. In fact you’re supposed to be highly anxious about those things.

This! But more!

Even what you describe is only one part, one subclass among many. The upper classes are as heterogenous as the middle and lower classes.

This is an aside, but I find that I really don't understand what a "McMansion" is supposed to be. I understand the general definition ("new money" house that is huge and expensive, but using a gaudy mis-match of different, usually faux-classical, styles and often cheap materials), and have a coherent image that pops into my head when I hear people use the term, but at least half the examples of "McMansions" I see people use just look like big houses to me. I don't see anything in that picture of Trump's childhood home that screams "McMansion." Is it literally any suburban mansion built after the Warren G. Harding administration? Or are my low-class tastes showing and the fact that I think it looks like a nice house is exactly what makes it a McMansion?

It has always been my thesis that the outsized reaction to Trump was class-based, not political or even ideological. Ideologically, Trump is the least consistent, least principled person to hold the office in quite some time. Politically, he wasn't even really on the right. Was there ever a less convincing* religious panderer than Trump? But he was a poor person's idea of a rich person. Plate everything gold, make up catchphrases, put your name on everything, marry a series of models, talk shit to everyone. Even the constant lying is no different from the more polished misinformation normal politicians use, it's just cruder. It's "Thirty-point buck" lying, not "Well, if you account for depreciation" lying.

*https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/the-time-trump-got-a-biblical-citation-very-wrong.html

Was there ever a less convincing* religious panderer than Trump?

I think this is true but inaccurate. Yes, Trump trying to sell the line "Hello, fellow Christians" would be ludicrous, for all the obvious reasons, but that wasn't what he was selling, or what the Christian base of the Republican Party was buying. He was selling "I will represent your interests," and the much-publicized examples of Trump's sometimes-awkward association with Christian ideas and symbology are better understood as costly signaling. Both Trump and his Christian supporters are aware that the Left hates them; Trump signaling support for Christianity makes it less likely that he'd be politically able to mend fences with the Left and betray his Christian supporters on the Right.

This isn't the usual dynamic. Most of the time, politicians actually are selling the argument "I won't betray our shared interests, because I am one of you, and your interests are my interests." Sometimes this argument is even honest! But most of the time, it's got some level of pandering to it. I'm saying that Trump didn't realisticly have this option at all, recognized the fact, made a different pitch to his Christian Republican audience, and was successful in doing so.

I'm not saying it didn't work, my family are hyper-christian and they knew he was bullshitting from the first word. It was a deal, and they took it. You know what my dad says? "Two Supreme Court Justices". They think the trade was more than fair, and they never bought a syllable of his "favorite bible verse".

Religious voters can be strategic too.

strategic

Isn't it practicality? The selection isn't amongst the best of all possible candidates, it's always one of a selection of very flawed candidates.

There's no single characteristic, but there's probably a cluster. For instance, working class is usually paid by the hour and middle classes salaried, but then you have consultants and lawyers (outside "Big Law", which would be upper class) and (some) accountants and such. The college distinction is probably (at least) a 4-year degree, since many jobs held by the working class require a certificate or associates degree. Physical work argues for working class, but a librarian (in a small library, anyway) does a lot of restocking of shelves.

I agree there's no single characteristic, but the single biggest indicator to me is any college degree, associates or otherwise. Having one doesn't make you middle class, but working in a job that requires one does, whether it's really necessary or not. Some exceptions obviously apply, but I think that college is the real fulcrum that this whole thing rests on. It's why university education has been so heavily propagandized and overused the last fifty years.

Working class: does skilled or semi-skilled work requiring non-college post secondary learning, whether that be on the job training or formal trade school. Butchers, auto mechanics, and hvac installers are about the middle here, while electricians and cops are at the top and painters and commercial cooks are at the bottom.

Middle class: does work requiring either a college degree or the ability to convincingly fake having one(like lots of sales jobs which don’t require a college degree per se but need someone who talks and acts like a college graduate). Secretaries, call center people, and claims adjusters seem like they define the bottom here while doctors, lawyers, and lower executives define the top. Teachers and accountants seem like they’re in the middle.

Substantially agree, but I think any definition of working class has to recognize unskilled labor as well. At least at the hiring phase, obviously everyone learns some things on the job.

There’s a distinction between working class(skilled or semi skilled labor) and the lower class(unskilled labor) that looks artificial to people on the outside of it, but is very very real to both types.

I agree, just as there is more than one middle class, there's more than one working class (and more than one underclass). The working class are doing all the things the middle and upper classes are doing. Ingroup signaling, coalition building, policing the upper and lower boundaries, enforcing social norms, etc. The issues and the politics change a bit, but the fundamental structure is the same.

I personally classify class by education then by income. A well paid tradesman would be upper working class, while a poorly paid researcher would be lower middle class. The middle classes broadly earn more than the working class, but there's enough income variation between them that incomes overlap.

Absolutely, the key to making more sense of class than we currently do is to recognize how many classes there are. It's not low-mid-high, there's education, race, ethnicity, social status from other places, even local fashion. Depending on how deep down the rabbit hole here you go, some to most people belong to more than one class.

This is why "class conflict" is so much less mechanistic than Marx et. al. are able to deal with. It's not a few classes, it's dozens, maybe hundreds, in constantly shifting coalition with each other, constantly trying to drive certain classes down the ladder and raise others up. Politics, in other words.

I think you’re %100 right on, but I also am currently living in the UK, and seemingly few here agree with this. A middle class programmer with a PhD who considers himself a worldly cosmopolitan will assure you they are working class. My theory is that the middle class is split down the middle by those who want to appear “posh” and those who want to look hip, which is what voting labour and identifying as working class is.

From hearing people familiar with both the US and UK, they often talk about how class works completely differently in the two places, with class mobility, as limited as it is in the US, is a lot easier in the US as class is a lot more closely tied to income/wealth in the US than it is elsewhere.

A middle class programmer with a PhD who considers himself a worldly cosmopolitan will assure you they are working class. My theory is that the middle class is split down the middle by those who want to appear “posh” and those who want to look hip, which is what voting labour and identifying as working class is.

See Pulp, Common People, 1995:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yuTMWgOduFM

There's nothing more upper class than aping the lower classes. In fact, it's a defining feature.

Scott's parable of the togas is relevant here. The working class is trying hard to distinguish itself both from the underclass and their economic peers who have college degrees. Someone aping working class speech, fashion or politics will stick out like a sore thumb to anyone who is actually from that subculture, just as a rich black kid trying to act 'hood will look like a tool.

Traditionally class is about wealth and not having to work. By European standards that programmer is quite correct. In Europe class is about wealth and status where the status comes from not needing to do labor. In the US we are far more concerned with income and having a high status profession where the status comes from the work's social importance or implied intellectual capability. So the two systems don't neatly map onto each other.

It seems to me from my limited time in Europe that most people recognize a spectrum of class much more than the US. Possibly because the top classes are not defined by monetary wealth, but by ancestry, titles etc. In Britain, there's constant jokes about how monetarily poor the aristocracy is. They own a county, live in a castle, and wear hand-me-downs from their great-grandparents (is the type of joke I hear from Brits). In the US, because we don't have that stuff officially (we do have an aristocratic upper class, but they play it down and don't flaunt titles), the public perception of class is primarily cash-based. It gets collapsed into "rich, poor, middle class".

It is that perception I am arguing against. I think money is correlated, but not the prime driver of class. Status, access to power, connections etc. are much more important than bank balance in my opinion.

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