It starts by looking at large-scale social processes, and finds the basis of social classes in the relations of production in the economy. In Marxist analysis, the understanding of “class” is very different. Racial identification matters too whites are far more likely to define themselves as middle class than are African Americans with similar incomes. If being middle class were just a matter of self-perception, almost all Americans would be in the middle class, according to one 2015 survey, which found that well over 85% call themselves middle class. Sociologists today define the middle class as an ever-changing assortment of different occupational groups in “a heterogeneous and historically shifting middle class rather than distinct entities.” 1 Others define middle class by levels of consumption, such as aspirations for home ownership, children’s education, health insurance and economic security, as in a 2010 Commerce Department document prepared for then Vice-President Joe Biden. Columbus Ohio building trade union activist Dorsey Hagar, for example, says that union jobs get workers “on that direct path to the middle class where they’re providing for themselves and their family.”īesides income, some people understand “middle class standing” as a social status, like occupational prestige and years of education. Sociologist Mary Pattillo, in her 2005 study of “Black Middle-Class Neighborhoods” in the Annual Review of Sociology, writes that defining the middle class is difficult and that her article might better be entitled “Black Non-Poor Neighborhoods.” Trade union discourse tends to rely on the term to describe the benefits of good union jobs. And as Pope Francis has said, trickle-down has failed us.” The middle class isn’t going to fix this. Some use the term “middle class” simply to distinguish it from those with the least income, who become known collectively as “the poor.” Reverend William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign, for example, criticized the Democratic Party’s sole focus on the middle class, which he contrasted with the interests of the poor, as he said about poverty at a recent online meeting: “Neoliberalism isn’t going to fix this. And, unlike a Marxist analysis, this view of class, with its more or less arbitrary boundaries, doesn’t recognize that classes are collectivities that have a social reality over and above their individual members, and that act more effectively for social change than any individual member could possibly act. The disadvantage is that it hides the impact of a host of other factors determining one’s relative position in the economy, like wealth and social status. The advantage of this technique is that it offers a specific measure that can be used to compare inequality across time and place, data which the Pew Research Center regularly reports. All those in-between are “middle income” or “middle class.” Then, people with incomes of less than two-thirds of the median are labeled “lower income.” “Upper income” are those with incomes twice the median or more. For example, the Pew Research Center arrays all income data points in a line, from lowest to highest. “middle class” today, and what are the political pressures that are bearing down on different segments of the economy?Įconomists, pollsters, and many policy researchers define class with reference simply to individuals’ or households’ annual income. Third, what are the material conditions and consciousness of the U.S. Second, Marxist analysis offers a much different conception of class, one that brings to light social dynamics hidden in the bourgeois perspective. The way “class” is defined and used has the effect of rendering some social processes invisible.

This article’s first focus is on the concept of middle class, especially the way people understand it and use it, from the perspectives of those who answer survey questions to the analysts who study social inequality. Who, or what, is the “middle class”? Most people identify themselves as middle class, but what does that mean, and what difference does it make?

Middle class fancy