People scratching their head about the composition of classes will benefit from reading Erik Olin Wright. The working class is huge and complex. Some elements of it have contradictory/mixed class interests. Who they align with is not foreordained, it’s a matter of politics

Here were some notes I jotted down when I was thinking about EOW’s class schemas earlier this year, might be illuminating to anyone who dares breach this wall of text

Belated thought: I think it's right to distinguish between business owners who employ zero, few, and many people, but I'd call them self-employed, petty capitalists, and big capitalists respectively. Otherwise the above chart is very useful for organizing our thinking about class

Increasingly the Democratic Party is orienting itself toward people inside these parameters

DSA mainly consists of people inside these parameters, and its primary challenge and chief task is to extend to the right

Here's how you get a Republican Party that unites Wall Street execs and beautiful boaters

See? Very helpful schema

The purple box has the ability to withhold labor, exerting leverage over the orange box by taking profit hostage. However the yellow box is the most numerous and has the purest interest in doing so because it's not paid what EOW calls skill and loyalty rent

Depending on political and economic conditions, the people in the yellow box may need to form coalitions with other elements of the working class to enhance their leverage. Their most natural allies will be people in the pink box, and beyond that people in the aqua box

Sometimes a fight will actually look like this, with the blue box aligned against the pink box — think how Medicare for All is shaping up. It's an expression of the hyper-dominance of the pink box and won't continue to look like that as power is wrested from the pink box