Pointing out the (grotesque) lengths to which both President Obama and Marco Rubio went to mention, placate, and pander to 'middle class' Americans, this Wall Street Journal article sets out to answer a poignant question: who is middle class?
Danti Chinni chooses to tackle this expansive question by looking at median income levels and middle 60% income ranges for different states and counties in the US. He arrives at the semi-useful conclusion that 'middle class' by income level varies tremendously from county to county, state to state, such that the phrase 'middle class' could describe annual income levels that vary by roughly 15,000-150,000 dollars. Being 'middle class' in Mississippi, then, may mean something very different from being 'middle class' in Fairfax County, Virginia or Manhattan, New York.
What I'm more interested in, however, is what these income variations actually *mean* for people's lives. It's one thing to look at an income figure, even another to compare it with other incomes and costs of living, yet another to take account of the psychological effects of income and wealth disparity, all to get some measure of how these factors affect one's lifestyle and quality of life. Still, each of these is merely a proxy for the evasive notions of happiness, quality, satisfaction, etc. What about the superstructural components of class in America?
By this I mean, what are the most important structural elements of class, and which have the greatest effect on how people actually live their lives.
Remember, the concept of the 'middle class' in the modern sense arose in the late-18th and 19th centuries alongside global capitalism and industrialization, when it became more broadly possible for people from outside of the aristocracy to accumulate wealth. What fundamentally distinguishes 'middle class' from 'working class' is the ability to accumulate wealth over a lifetime, with the promise of being able to exchange wealth for leisure (real human life) at certain points. The 'working class,' by contrast, is alienated from fundamental human necessities, like time to pursue one's own interests and self-maintenance, because low-skill, low-pay work for someone else requires nearly all the time and energy a worker has to give in a single workday. Despite the difference in nomenclature, the 'middle class' is also a working class, a group of people who, rather than owning what in Marxian terms are the 'means of production,' works for someone else's profit, under the direction of an owner or a boss (or a series of bosses) who have a direct stake in the profit. Those who have enough of a direct stake in the profit, or who can accumulate thereby enough wealth to purchase back what I call real human life--the ability to pursue things for oneself, or to direct the course of one's work when not enjoying time away from (or retirement from) work--are the upper class.
Crucially, then, whether a member of the American 'middle class' makes 37,000 or 65,000 dollars per year, this person is likely to be someone whose employer controls what they're allowed to do with their lives for at least 8 hours a day (and usually much more), who does low-skilled, alienating work (even, if not especially. white-collar work), who does that work for the profit of an owner of the means of production and without direct stake or say in the type of work, the direction of the employer's plan of action, or the profit the work generates, who has little or zero savings with which to invest, accumulate wealth, or otherwise purchase real human life, and, in fact, is usually indebted (negative savings) such that they live under the thumb of not only an owner-employer, but also a series of banks.
In short, the operative difference between a member of the American 'working class' and the American 'middle class' is little more than notional at this point: slightly bigger televisions, slightly larger mortgages, slightly better school districts all matter to varying degrees in the real lives of people; but these disparities are small indeed compared to the gulf between the provisions, wealth, leisure and self-directed time, control over work conditions, incomes, amenities, and access to governmental and legislative power enjoyed by the American upper classes.
This is to say that there is no such thing as the American 'middle class'; or if there were, it might be a very narrow segment of the population, comprised of high-skilled professionals (doctors, lawyers, senior academics) in transition to becoming upper class. There are only people who give up freedom and real human life to work for and be directed by someone else, and people who own and control both their own lives and the lives of their employees. In other words, a 'working' class of people, and an 'owning' class of people.
Politicians like Obama and Rubio may well know this, and favor the term 'middle class' because it sounds less revolutionary, less like an admission that we have transitioned from capitalism to hypercapitalism to a kind of neo-feudal state.
