Reninder for folks, your class position isn't determined by your income or wealth. It's determined by your relationship to the means of production. Or in non-jargon, class is determined by where your income comes from: wages, or investment.

If you work for wages in a building you don't own, using your boss's tools, making products your boss sells for his own profit, then you are working class. Doesn't matter if you are making $8/hr or $50/hr or a $200,000 salary. If your income comes from wages, you're a worker.

That said, waged workers who make exceptional amounts of money do exist, and many enjoy benefits, protections,and connections to the bourgeoisie that other workers don't, and they have the opportunity to move up the class ladder. These people are the Labor Aristocracy.

If a worker manages to acquire enough capital to start a small business, they may become Petit Bourgeois. They are bourgeois because they own the means of production, but their economic power is hemmed in by the more powerful capitap interests around them.

Many petit bourgeois people are economically precarious, and own less capital than might appear on the surface. They are often highly reliant on leases and loans, and are therefore under the thumb the landlords and banks who own their major assets.

A defining feature of the petit bourgeoisie is that they will still engage in labor, whether that be physical or management. They are actively involved in utilizing the means of production they own to generate profit, though they will likely make use of wage labor as they grow.

Someone becomes a member of the bourgeoisie when their own labor becomes unnecessary to generate profit -- when the capital they own, utilized by wage labor, generates income without intervention from the owner at all.

This capital could be a factory, restaurant, or store, or an apartment block or housing development (in which case they are leeching the wages workers made doing labor for someone else), or a piece of desirable intellectual property which can be held hostage and rented out.

This is the difference between workers and owners. Workers generate income by doing work. Owners generate income by generating things. It is possible to be a wealthy worker; it is possible to be a lower middle class owner.

The muddy area is the petit bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy, which overlap and intermix and form the economic base of the middle class.

It's also worth pointing out that the 401k system and investing for retirement as a whole is actually a clever mechanism to make workers complicit and beholden to the success of the bourgeoisie.

God so many typos in this