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 They insist that class as a relation to means of production is outdated and it makes more sense to measure it by income.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?
Ask them what would happen if they are laid off from their job? What if their industry moves overseas, like the automobile industry and petty electronics industry in the US? What if all of their potential employers decide the new “market wage” for their job is halved? The uncertainty that runs with being a wage earner is kinda the big deal, you can only react to the moves the owning class makes.
Like I said earlier the highest paid laborers do make income levels similar to the petty bougies, but they don’t have property to extract surplus value or rent. They have to engage with the stock market and crypto (which, let’s be real, is only available to workers and petties so the high bougies can slurp their money up), or speculate suburban land. Rarely do they actually start a business to extract surplus value. Their reliance on Capital investments means their property will be taken if they don’t meet the returns expected by the Finance Capitalist who invested in them.
None, I repeat, none of this is different from when Marx was writing. Lenin brought to light the concept of Imperialism and labor aristocracy, which holds true. Sure you can buy a home and rent seek it, but we only have so much land, and we know that suburban development is accelerating climate collapse. Sure you can buy stocks, but when the market crashes you lose everything and the richest buy all of your “wealth” for a fraction of the pre crash value. Sure you can invest in crypto and NFTs, lol.
I’m a high income worker in the US. From first hand experience I know what “investments” my peers are making. Our culture speaks more truth to this. Gone are the days of entrepreneurship meaning starting a factory and making new products. Now through TV, YouTube, TikTok, entrepreneurship means land lording, day trading, jumping on the next crypto, buying off of AliExpress and selling on Facebook marketplace and eBay. Now that we have social media, we are hearing from the actual people who transitioned from high earning workers to “bourgeoisie” and look at all they can offer to us as advice.
The concept of the Professional Managerial Class as a distinction from the rest of the so-called Middle Class (the petite bourgeoisie), is telling us even in Liberal terms that they are different, and they are workers. Is a slave that manages the activities of other slaves not still a slave?