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).
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.
