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A lot of the discourse around class is pretty ill-informed. Working class does not mean "manual labour" and it's not just a collection of aesthetic signifiers like "drives truck". The thing that matters in discussion of class is your relationship to the means of production.
If you have to sell your LABOUR in order to survive, then you are working class whether you work in a factory, or you are a domestic worker, or you work in an office. If you control the means of production (own the factory, own the office), you are not working class.
People who own capital or the means of production branded as "working class," be it the duck dynasty guys or guys who own trucks but also own their own businesses where they employ others, are not working class. Sure there is cultural capital, and some signifiers map onto class
fairly neatly (yeah probably people who are really into like equestrian sports are going to tend to not be working class) but the bottom line is that you are working class, proletariat, The Masses, if you are selling your labour to put food on the table.
Heres a real life example from my own experience: I was working at a vegetable company cutting and cleaning veg with a guy who seemed rough around the edges working class everyday joe, whatever. Then it turns out hes related by marriage to the boss. And he owns rental properties.
Is that guy working class? No, he could live off his rental property profits, he just liked working with family chopping veg for some extra cash. It doesnt matter that he swore a lot or wore overalls and didnt seem Professional and clean cut. Owns capital, not working class
I work with my hands every day. Am I working class? Questionable. I work for my dad (I'm his only employee lol). He runs a small landscaping business. He works with his hands every day. Is he working class? No. He is petty bourgeois.
The petty/petite bourgeois class have *some* capital (own a small business, artisans who work for themselves etc) but still have to labour to survive. My dad is able to employ myself (and others in the past) but he has to dig dirt alongside me and plant trees etc.
And here's a lesson from Marx (thanks to @Red_Menace_Pod for reminding me about this in their most recent episode): in times of economic crisis, the high bourgeois, multi-millionaire own-a-Big-company types, are able to continue accumulating wealth.
Everyone else gets crushed. The petite bourgeoisie suddenly find themselves making less money, and having to labour more for what they make (what's happening to my dad right now, who thought he'd be retiring at this point in his life)
The working class, the proletariat, again, people who have nothing but their labour to sell to survive, work harder for less. Wealth becomes concentrated, inequality worsened. We are seeing this, we've been seeing this, it's not news. But we need to understand why it happens.
Why it happens and to whom.
Understanding class struggle is CRUCIAL for understanding our entire political and economic reality. And in order to understand this conflict, a basic starting point needs to be accurate definitions of class itself
Understanding class struggle is CRUCIAL for understanding our entire political and economic reality. And in order to understand this conflict, a basic starting point needs to be accurate definitions of class itself
We all need to understand that under capitalism there are fundamentally two classes and there is an antagonism between them. The owner of the business and the employee do not have the same goals. And you know it already, but it's time to think about the bigger picture
