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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34365 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?

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.

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