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AnarchoSpook wrote

Reply to comment by existential1 in What makes someone middle class? by cycles

Sure, but doesn't it also imply property relations? If you are middle class, you're likely to feel more protected by cops since they are also guarding your property and the bureaucratic system which you—to some degree—have stakes in.

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GlangSnorrisson wrote

I think the idea is that it does imply it but doesn’t quantify anything. Thus you can adapt it to any context you want.

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existential1 wrote

Yeah, it's broad enough to be widely applicable and understandable but not so specific it can't be contextualized to edge cases.

For example, I lived a lot of my life working-poor and would probably hit the conception of "middle class" by some metrics a few years ago, but my other perceived identities prevent simple things like owning a house from making me comfortable with police...or a hell of a lot of other state-entities.

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GlangSnorrisson wrote

Absolutely. I think that to frame middle-class as a strictly material thing is too reductive to be all that useful to an anarchist.

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AnarchoSpook wrote (edited )

Ah yes, I agree with the point. Maybe "middle class" is not a very helpful conceptualization after all. Especially now with neoliberalism rebooting capitalism to its default mode (after the anomalous 1950-1970) and society finds itself in early 1900s in terms of inequality. This will I suppose be even more the case in covid times with so much of the middle class being indebted and forced into precarious jobs.

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