UNLOCKED 🔓Why Liberals Can’t Define “Working Class”

The distinction between capital and labor doesn’t fit their worldview. No wonder a coherent definition escapes them.

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In Solidarity — Joe

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There is a never-ending Discourse™️ about what it means to be working class in America. Pundits and pontificators squabble over what defines “working class,” who is in it, and which political groups can claim to champion working class interests. The last part is the most relevant. While socialists, progressives, and labor activists define “working class” to analyze and improve political reality, the media defines the term “working class” to argue that the socialists, progressives, and labor activists are Fake working class and should be ignored by the Real working class. The purpose of such discussions is to pull workers away from the left and back into the liberal worldview that says capitalists, managers, and workers are all one big happy American family, so there’s no need for you to sign that union card because, as you were already told, we’re all one big happy family (but the family will fire you if you sign that union card).

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Writing in Vox, Eric Levitz uses the Fake Working Class angle to criticize the Democratic Socialists of America. Levitz’s article perfectly captures the mix of bad faith and lack of understanding that many media members have about DSA. He simultaneously argues that we DSAers are both dogmatic Marxists clinging to disproven theory and also deceitful opportunists misconstruing socialist theory for upper-class interests.

“The Democratic Socialists of America say they are fighting for ‘a government by, for, and of the working class.’ Yet the organization’s membership and candidates consist largely of educated professionals. As of 2021, 80 percent of DSA members over 25 were college-educated, while 28 percent earned more than $100,000 a year (putting them in roughly the top 15 percent of America’s income distribution), according to a DSA internal survey. Among the group’s most prominent politicians, meanwhile, is an Ivy League graduate student, a lawyer, and the well-educated son of a Hollywood director and famous academic.”

This is a bizarre introduction, because nothing Levitz says after “yet” contradicts the mission of building working class political power. Education, income, and background aren’t what determine if someone is “working class.” That is determined by your relationship to your workplace. If you sell your labor to survive, you are working class. If your income comes from stock, investments, or a business you own, then you are not in the working class. Whether or not you’re college-educated, come from a wealthy family, or have a cool mom is irrelevant to determining your class status. A simple thought experiment proves this.

Imagine Sara and Darnell work next to each other on an assembly line. Sara grew up in poverty and was the first in her family to graduate from high school. Now, she makes auto parts in exchange for $46,520 a year, the typical salary of an average American manufacturing worker. Every day, Sara works next to her production partner, Darnell. Like Sara, Darnell does the same job for the same salary. Unlike Sara, Darnell came from privilege. His mother was a big-time stock trader, which gave the family enough money to send Darnell to the Ivey League. Darnell planned to live off his familial wealth and pursue an acting career. But then the stock market crashed, and his family lost everything. Now, Darnell must work for $46,520 a year to afford food, rent, medical care, and transportation. Sara and Darnell have vastly different backgrounds. Yet, they’re both doing the same job, for the same pay, so they can survive. Which one is working class? If Levitz’s analysis were correct, then Sara would be working class, but Darnell would not, because he comes from privilege. Obviously, Levitz is wrong. Both Darnell and Sara are working class, because “working class” is not a badge of sullen honor for the poor and downtrodden. It is a specific term to identify a person’s relationship to their workplace (the means of production) and recognize that the majority of their conscious hours will be spent in an undemocratic fiefdom that prohibits the conventional norms of democracy, liberty, and personal rights.

Levitz and many other liberal and conservative thinkers reject this definition because “working class” doesn’t completely convey a person’s well-being and opportunities in America. As he puts it, “You can’t navigate modern capitalism with a 19th-century map.” This is true. Marxism is a science, not a religion. It must always be adapted to modern conditions. But Marx’s basic theory of working-class exploitation still holds. Eric Levitz believes it doesn’t, but that’s because he clearly didn’t understand it. He writes:

“Karl Marx and Frederich Engels laid the foundations for the modern left’s conception of class in The Communist Manifesto of 1848. In that book, the claim that there were just two important classes under capitalism — capitalists and workers — rested on a set of grim predictions about where industrialization was headed.”

FYI, Marks and Engels were commissioned to write the Manifesto by the Communist League, a German workers’ organization. It is a party pamphlet, something you’d be handed walking off the factory floor in 1847, not a “foundation” for the modern left. It’s common for non-socialists to claim the Manifesto is the basis of Marxism, as it lets them off the hook from reading the extensive scholarly texts such as Capital. (Levitz isn’t alone here. Weirdo Jordan Peterson built a career off preaching anti-Marxism, then admitted during a debate he’d never read any Marx besides the Manifesto.) I’m not sure if Levitz is building a strawman or doesn’t understand what he read, because Marx never said anything close to his summation that “all workers would be melted into a uniform proletariat.” The proletariat is the industrial working class, not the entire working class. This point is lost on Levitz, which explains his confusion about why socialists use the term “working class.” He writes:

“Anyone trying to impose Marx’s cartography onto the landscape will encounter several problems. For one, in a world where some workers earn as much in a year as others do in a lifetime, the idea that there is only one fundamental class division — that between laborers and capitalists — becomes unconvincing. In the United States, some convenience store owners make $70,000 a year, while many surgeons earn upward of $600,000. It would be odd to say that the former are members of society’s dominant class (since they live off business income), while the latter belong to its subordinate one (since they live off salaries).”

It would have helped Levitz to actually read the Manifesto because Marx and Engels make this exact point about small-business owners, whom they refer to as the petty bourgeoisie.

Like Levitz, the pair identified the unique class position of small business owners. The petty bourgeoisie are capitalists in the literal sense, but they don’t control society in the way industrialists do. Instead, they walk a dangerous edge, always at risk of being forced back into the working class — one bad year, and a convenience store owner making $70,000 would likely have to close his store and get a job to feed his family. As Marx theorized, the petty bourgeoisie frequently align with the big capitalists, but are actually much closer to the working class when it comes to power and quality of life. Levitz says it is “odd” for Marxists to say low-income convenience store owners are the “society’s dominant class.” He’s correct. That would be odd. Which is why no serious Marxist has ever said this.

Levitz’s confusion appears to come from the false belief that socialists think “working class” is the be-all, end-all of American politics. It’s not. Relationship to your workplace doesn’t perfectly map to how Americans vote, their income, views on religion, or cultural values. To get answers to these questions, which more often than not are used to signify whether the Democrat or Republican is winning the working class vote, you need to ask those questions. Many political behaviors are more accurately determined by race, income, religion, or other characteristics. Which is why Levitz’s assertion that the left believes there is “only one fundamental class division” is not true.

Most importantly, the label “working class” is not used to differentiate between those who live in clean comfort and those who live in impoverished hardship. A warehouse worker making minimum wage has a lower quality of life than a software engineer making six figures. This is undeniable. Still, both the warehouse worker and the software engineer are in the working class because the reason there’s no air conditioning in the warehouse is the same reason the engineer has to move across the country to return to the office — the boss said so, and the workers have no democratic say otherwise.

This is lost on liberals like Levitz because they see society and politics as one of income, background, and perceived privilege. This varies from the socialist view, which sees society as the product of competing class forces: the serfs vs. the Tsar, peasants vs. the king, workers vs. capitalists. Levitz is correct in one regard, but not in how he thinks. There is no coherent working class in America. It is divided by many other factors, such as nationalism, religion, personal background, and income. When socialists speak of the working class, we’re not saying every worker has the same politics or interests — we’re trying to get them to realize their interests are linked. Levitz’s critique of the left is that our analysis of who is working class and who is a capitalist isn’t the defining feature of American politics. Yeah, we know! The American working class is not class-conscious. They don’t know they’re in the working class, because the liberal worldview that dictates American politics ignores class distinctions in favor of everything Levitz talks about: income, background, education, etc. That is why socialists aim to instill the working class with class consciousness. We want the high-paid engineer and low-paid warehouse worker to see themselves as part of a coherent group with connected interests.

Levitz and other liberals are hostile to this view, which is why he cannot offer a coherent definition of “working class” throughout his entire article. Unable to understand why DSA figures champion the working class, Levitz can only project his misunderstandings on socialists and conclude they are trying to “trick” who he believes is the Real Working Class (steam shovel drivers, white men with beards and lunchpails, and guys with trucks) into supporting the efforts of the Fake Working Class (DSA, anyone who works on a computer, people with a college degree). Levitz’s naivety leads to a hilariously incorrect assumption that DSA’s push for Biden to cancel student debt is evidence that we are using “working class” language to help out rich people:

“Socialists’ expansive conception of “the working class” can be put to more dubious uses. Specifically, it can help relatively well-off professionals disguise their class’s particular interests as those of all working people.

The left’s push to cancel all graduate student debt is arguably a case in point. During Joe Biden’s presidency, the DSA criticized the White House for attempting to forgive only $10,000 of most borrowers’ student loans (a plan that was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court). Instead, the socialists called on Biden to cancel all student debt, including the balances accrued by the graduates of elite medical schools and MBA programs.

On its face, the idea that the US government should transfer tens of thousands of dollars to young doctors and Harvard MBAs would seem wildly regressive. The median US physician can expect to earn more than $6.5 million over the course of their lifetime, while the median graduate of a top-five business school can expect to earn more than $8 million. Virtually all Americans have worse prospects than this. And in the inflationary conditions of the Biden era, increasing young professionals’ disposable income was liable to push up prices for everyone else. In other words, blanket student debt forgiveness would have likely transferred purchasing power from low-income workers to early-career physicians and management consultants.

Many socialists would struggle to defend such a policy, were it presented in these terms. But by eliding the class distinctions between low- and high-income borrowers, the DSA was able to convince itself (if not the public) that across-the-board forgiveness was in the interest of “the working class.”

Levitz could not be more wrong. Student loan debt foregiveness was, and still is, in the interests of the working class. While Levitz claims student debt forgiveness would have “increased young professionals’ disposable income,” it actually would have helped older Americans the most. The age group with the most federal student loan debt is 50 to 61-year-olds, who average $48,203 in outstanding individual payments. This is three times the amount held by “young professionals” ($14,242), one reason why the 50 to 61 age group is more likely to be delinquent. While student loan debt is relatively constant across income levels, lower-income borrowers have a significantly harder time repaying. According to the Federal Reserve:

“Falling behind on payments was closely tied to one's income. Less than half of low-income borrowers with an income under $50,000 per year paid the required amount, compared with 92 percent of borrowers with an income of $100,000 or more who did so.”

The Reserve also notes “Black and female borrowers were also less likely to have made the full payment.” While borrowing levels are consistent across income, Black Americans, Hispanics, and women are the most-likely borrowers. So student loan forgiveness brings a gender and racial component as well.

Specific relief aside, DSA fights for student loan relief not because we prioritize students, but because we believe education, among other social goods, should not be limited to those who can afford it. From DSA’s statement that Levitz criticized:

“As socialists, we demand better: We demand that all student debt — and medical debt, and carceral debt — be canceled and forgiven immediately. We demand public education from pre-K to college that is truly free for all to attend.”

This is why liberal and conservative commentators drive themselves crazy trying to define "working class.” They do not understand what the term is used to convey, or what it is used to identify. They cannot fathom a political vision that sees working people as united, because they don’t see the world that way. Not intellectually curious enough to learn why socialists prioritize the distinction between capital and labor, the oh-so-smart commentariat makes fools of themselves by attributing dubious motives to socialists for engaging in a political realm they’re too blind to see.

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In Solidarity — Joe

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