I’ve been having trouble explaining to liberal co-workers that there isn’t really an “Upper” or “Lower” working class. They insist that class as a relation to means of production is outdated and it makes more sense to measure it by income. What’s the most effective way to explain to them why this doesn’t work?
The majority of the world’s proletariat do not work in service jobs. They are still involved in direct production of commodities for exchange. A small minority of the world’s workers do work in service, but they are not the source of surplus value in the modern day: super-exploited global south proletarians, producing commodities for exchange on the market, are.
A good introduction from John Smith on the GDP illusion, and three global commodities: coffee, tshirts, and smartphones.