{"id":761,"date":"2026-07-20T10:06:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T10:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=761"},"modified":"2026-07-20T10:06:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T10:06:09","slug":"who-counts-as-working-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=761","title":{"rendered":"Who counts as \u201cworking class\u201d?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Democratic Socialists of America say they are fighting for \u201ca government by, for, and of the working class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more How to slow down time when life keeps speeding up<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet the organization\u2019s 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\u2019s income distribution), according to a . Among the group\u2019s most prominent politicians, meanwhile, is an Ivy League graduate student, a lawyer, and the well-educated son of a Hollywood director and famous academic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In recent weeks, as the DSA has racked up victories in Democratic primary elections, the apparent tension between the group\u2019s self-conception and demographics has attracted critical scrutiny.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the New York Times, Thomas Edsall argues that most of the DSA\u2019s members and supporters in the electorate are \u201cin no way working class.\u201d The libertarian commentator Robby Soave, right-wing pundit Batya Ungar-Sargon, and liberal economics writer Noah Smith have all voiced similar sentiments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There are many cogent ways for socialists to respond to such criticism. One would be to note that an organization doesn\u2019t need to have a uniformly working-class membership in order to fight for working-class interests. Another would be to observe that not all college graduates are well-heeled professionals, even as pundits often use educational attainment as a stand-in for class in political analysis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But some socialists prefer a simpler retort: The DSA\u2019s critics are simply mistaken; in reality, the group\u2019s membership is more or less entirely \u201cworking class\u201d \u2014 because that term describes everyone<\/em> who must sell their labor in order to meet their needs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This conception of the \u201cworking class\u201d has deep roots on the left. As Jacobin\u2019s Ben Burgis explains, orthodox socialists subscribe to a \u201ctwo-class map of capitalist society,\u201d in which \u201cSome people are capitalists who own their own \u2018means of production\u2019 (like factories, farms, offices, or grocery stores) and other people work for the capitalists.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Many contemporary socialists (including Burgis) find this dichotomy reductive, and endorse more nuanced portraits of America\u2019s class structure. But the orthodox, \u201ctwo-class\u201d model informs a great deal of the modern left\u2019s rhetoric, among both socialists and progressives. And the notion that lawyers and day laborers both belong to the \u201cworking class\u201d is widely held among anti-capitalists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There\u2019s something to be said for this idea. Educated professionals and manual workers surely do have some shared interests, due to their common status as laborers. For example, both benefit from the existence of a well-funded unemployment insurance system, in a way that the Elon Musks of the world do not.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For the most part though, orthodox socialism\u2019s \u201cmap\u201d is badly out of date. And its expansive conception of \u201cthe working class\u201d does less to illuminate modern America\u2019s economic divisions than to obscure them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The long afterlife of Marx\u2019s failed prophesies<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Karl Marx and Frederich Engels laid the foundations for the modern left\u2019s conception of class in The Communist Manifesto<\/em> of 1848.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In that book, the claim that there were just two important classes under capitalism \u2014 capitalists and workers \u2014 rested on a set of grim predictions about where industrialization was headed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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According to Marx\u2019s analysis, technological progress was in the process of obliterating \u201call distinctions\u201d between different strata of working people, as automation was driving virtually everyone\u2019s wages down to \u201cthe same low level.\u201d The middle class of small manufacturers and shopkeepers, meanwhile, was poised to \u201cdecay and finally disappear,\u201d as more productive, large-scale enterprises left them in the dust.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Society was therefore splitting into \u201ctwo great hostile camps\u201d \u2014 the capitalist and working classes, whose interests were impossible to reconcile.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Under these conditions, a binary conception of class makes perfect sense. If all workers will soon be condemned to low wages, then there\u2019s little point in dwelling on the (temporary) distinctions between them. Likewise, if shopkeepers and small-time capitalists have gone the way of the triceratops, one can more comfortably cast all business owners as members of the ruling elite.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You can\u2019t navigate modern capitalism with a 19th-century map<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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But we don\u2019t live in the future that Marx foresaw.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Rather than melting all workers into a uniform proletariat, capitalism cultivated a kaleidoscopically diverse laborforce \u2014 one segmented by countless fine-grained distinctions of pay and prestige. And instead of immiserating ordinary people, industrial development brought unprecedented mass prosperity (albeit, with the aid of many socialistic reforms).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As a result, old-school socialists\u2019 \u201ctwo-class map\u201d makes for a poor guide to modern capitalism\u2019s terrain. And anyone trying to impose Marx\u2019s cartography onto the landscape will encounter several problems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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 \u2014 that between laborers and capitalists \u2014 becomes unconvincing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s dominant class (since they live off business income), while the latter belong to its subordinate one (since they live off salaries). After all, the minimart owner and Musk do not have especially similar material interests. Nor, for that matter, do the impoverished farmworker and high-earning neurosurgeon (much less, the superstar athlete with a $40 million salary). Yet this is what orthodox socialism\u2019s binary would suggest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A second, related difficulty is that the border between labor and capital has grown fuzzier since Marx\u2019s time. Today, American workers often own both a home and some share of their nation\u2019s financial assets, like a 401(k) filled with stock from major corporations. Many billionaires, meanwhile, choose to work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Socialists are well aware of this reality, which is why they define a person\u2019s class status by their dependence<\/em> on labor: The typical white-collar worker may own a little stock, but not enough to quit her job and live off dividends. Unlike a billionaire CEO, such a professional must<\/em> work in order to meet her needs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This is a sound distinction. But it does not actually resolve the challenge of distinguishing the working class from the ruling one. This is because, in an advanced economy, whether someone \u201cneeds\u201d to work is partly subjective. Millions of Americans survive on less than $25,000 a year in market income. If upper-middle-class families were willing to accept a similarly austere living standard, many would be able to live entirely off their investments.<\/p>\n

Read more Hollywood\u2019s outsize influence on baby names<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Of course, Americans shouldn\u2019t be content to live in poverty. But it is harder to say precisely what standard of living qualifies as \u201cenough.\u201d In Marx\u2019s time, a relatively good life for a wage worker might have meant reliable access to food and shelter for one\u2019s family and a little time and money left for simple leisure. Today, the list includes high-quality education for one\u2019s children, access to advanced medical treatments, modern home appliances for cooking and cleaning, Internet-connected devices for entertainment, and often personal transportation, like a car \u2014 all of which are typically (and justifiably) treated as basic necessities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This raises the question: At what level of wealth does a person stop needing<\/em> to work \u2014 even if they must keep clocking in to achieve their desired<\/em> lifestyle? The socialist writer Matt Bruenig has proposed drawing the line at about $1.4 million (or roughly 20 times America\u2019s average wage): Once you\u2019ve accrued that much in housing and financial assets, your decision to sell your labor becomes voluntary and you cease to be working-class.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This is a reasonable cut-off. But it\u2019s still fairly arbitrary. Ask an American with a net worth of $1.4 million whether they need to work, and they\u2019re liable to say yes. And typically, they will be correct \u2014 at least, in the sense that they could not sustain their way of life without earning a paycheck. You could say that their present lifestyle is too lavish \u2014 and that $1.4 million in assets is all that\u2019s required to generate the amount of income one truly needs<\/em>. But it\u2019s not obvious why this threshold doesn\u2019t actually lie at $1.6 million, or $800,000, or $500,000.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As a result, the only way to draw the upper boundary on who \u201cneeds\u201d to work \u2014 without making arbitrary judgments about what standard of living is necessary \u2014 is to place it extremely far up the class hierarchy: The superrich generally don\u2019t need to choose between sustaining their lifestyles and abstaining from work. But once your definition of \u201cworking class\u201d becomes capacious enough to include low-end multimillionaires, it loses all plausibility.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ultimately, in a modern capitalist society, it makes a lot more sense to see class as a multidimensional continuum than as a binary. An individual\u2019s degree of economic freedom and power is determined by a host of factors \u2014 above all, their household incomes and net worths, but also the market value of their skills (which shapes their future earning prospects) and familial wealth and connections. Even one\u2019s eligibility for social welfare benefits can matter; after all, the largest group of Americans who don\u2019t need to work to meet their needs are Social Security recipients.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Precisely how we should weigh these different sources of advantage is a tricky question. And implicit disagreements over it shapes our discourse about \u201cthe working class.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Take Graham Platner, the former Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. To his champions, Platner was a working-class candidate, due to his lack of a college diploma, years of service in the military, and low-income, physically demanding job farming oysters (along with his gravelly voice and tattoos). To his detractors, meanwhile, Platner was a pseudo-proletarian due to his upper-middle-class childhood, prep school education, and receipt of steady financial help from his father and mother, a lawyer and entrepreneur. Meanwhile, Platner probably would not qualify as \u201cworking class\u201d under the orthodox socialist definition for multiple reasons: For one, he does not need to work in order to get by, thanks to his disability benefits and family support. For another, he is the owner of his oyster business, rather than a salaried worker who answers to a boss.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In any event, whichever factors one emphasizes, it\u2019s clear that a person\u2019s class privilege increases continuously as their income, net worth, familial wealth, and \u201chuman capital\u201d rises. There is no single point on any of these scales past which a person\u2019s class position is abruptly transformed. The gap between \u201cthe 99 percent\u201d and the billionaire class matters \u2014 but so does that between the top 15 percent and the working poor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Of course, in ordinary political discourse, we inevitably need to boil down reality\u2019s intricacies into rough categories. No politician will ever promise to fight for the \u201cbottom six deciles in combined SES score, nor will any labor activists ever chant, \u201cThe 30th to 60th percentiles in household income, united, will never be defeated.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But a taxonomy of classes with several subcategories (such as \u201cthe poor,\u201d \u201cthe working class,\u201d \u201cthe middle class,\u201d \u201cthe upper-middle class,\u201d \u201cthe rich,\u201d and \u201cthe superrich\u201d) will capture a bit more of reality than a taxonomy with only two.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWorking-class\u201d rhetoric can camouflage professional-class interests<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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All this said, even if orthodox socialism\u2019s \u201ctwo-class map\u201d is analytically flawed, it could still be politically beneficial. Perhaps, when affluent professionals decide that they belong to the same class as the working poor, they become more inclined to fight for the latter\u2019s interests.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Some of the DSA\u2019s own activities lend credence to this theory: Despite its largely white-collar membership, the organization advocates for many policies that would principally benefit America\u2019s most disadvantaged. More broadly, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, many college-educated millennials came to identify with \u201cthe 99 percent.\u201d And as this cohort has grown more influential in Blue America, the Democratic Party has embraced more ambitious anti-poverty policies, such as a guaranteed monthly income for working-class families.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And yet, socialists\u2019 expansive conception of \u201cthe working class\u201d can be put to more dubious uses. Specifically, it can help relatively well-off professionals disguise their class\u2019s particular interests as those of all working people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The left\u2019s push to cancel all<\/em> graduate student debt is arguably a case in point. During Joe Biden\u2019s presidency, the DSA criticized the White House for attempting to forgive only $10,000 of most borrowers\u2019 student loans (a plan that was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court). Instead, the socialists called on Biden to cancel all<\/em> student debt, including the balances accrued by the graduates of elite medical schools and MBA programs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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 \u201cthe working class.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The socialist framework is similarly unhelpful in the realm of tax policy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In recent years, as socialist and progressive politicians have grown more dependent on professional class support, they\u2019ve become more averse to endorsing broad-based tax increases.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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From Zohran Mamdani to Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic left tends to reserve its tax hike proposals for the superrich. And yet, the reason that America lacks a comprehensive welfare state is not that our billionaires pay unusually little in taxes; to the contrary, our top rates are comparable to those of some Scandinavian countries. The main fiscal barrier to American social democracy is that our middle class in general \u2014 and upper middle-class in particular \u2014 pays much lower taxes than their peers in Western Europe. Simply maintaining our existing programs, like Social Security, will likely require a major tax increase on higher-end salaried workers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In this context, binary conceptions of America\u2019s class structure \u2014 which pit an undifferentiated \u201cworking class\u201d against the capitalist elite, or the 99 percent against the 1 percent \u2014 can help educated professionals evade responsibility for bankrolling a more egalitarian economic system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Check your class privilege<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Ultimately, the DSA\u2019s ability to serve working-class interests hinges less on its own demographics than its policies and politics. When an organization mistakes the preferences of its most privileged members for those of all working people, however, its campaigning and policymaking is liable to suffer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Perhaps, before this century\u2019s end, AI will bring about the calamity that Marx prophesied \u2014 and Ivy League lawyers and delivery drivers will find their skills equally devalued by an all-powerful ownership class. Until the robot apocalypse, however, educated professionals and low-wage workers will live in very different circumstances \u2014 and harbor distinct economic interests. To safeguard the wellbeing of the disadvantaged, well-off egalitarians need to mind these gaps, not paper over them with obsolete class categories.<\/p>\n

Read more Welcome to America\u2019s post-World Cup hangover<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

See More:<\/span><\/p>\n
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  • Explainers<\/li>\n
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