"Who Counts As Working Class?"

Vox writer Eric Levitz asks the perennial question: "Who counts as 'working class'"? He gets things partly right:

This conception of the “working class” has deep roots on the left. As Jacobin’s Ben Burgis explains, orthodox socialists subscribe to a “two-class map of capitalist society,” in which “Some people are capitalists who own their own ‘means of production’ (like factories, farms, offices, or grocery stores) and other people work for the capitalists.”

Many contemporary socialists (including Burgis) find this dichotomy reductive, and endorse more nuanced portraits of America’s class structure. But the orthodox, “two-class” model informs a great deal of the modern left’s rhetoric, among both socialists and progressives. And the notion that lawyers and day laborers both belong to the “working class” is widely held among anti-capitalists.

There’s 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.

For the most part though, orthodox socialism’s “map” is badly out of date. And its expansive conception of “the working class” does less to illuminate modern America’s economic divisions than to obscure them.

But then he wanders into irrelevance:

In any event, whichever factors one emphasizes, it’s clear that a person’s class privilege increases continuously as their income, net worth, familial wealth, and “human capital” rises. There is no single point on any of these scales past which a person’s class position is abruptly transformed. The gap between “the 99 percent” and the billionaire class matters — but so does that between the top 15 percent and the working poor.

. . . But a taxonomy of classes with several subcategories (such as “the poor,” “the working class,” “the middle class,” “the upper-middle class,” “the rich,” and “the superrich”) will capture a bit more of reality than a taxonomy with only two.

He spends a lot of time trying to parse out whether a $600,000 a year surgeon is "working class", but he ignores the most obvious and easy-to-answer question about "the poor": which ones are "the working poor", and which ones are Marx's and Engels's Lumpenproletariat?

Engels’s 1850 The Peasant War in Germany distinguishes different classes, and after the implicit theory identifying the interests of each class and its political behavior, evaluates the potential strength of the alliance sought. Analyzing the “plebeian opposition … of a mixed nature” to the urban patricians at the end of the Middle Ages, he distinguishes déclassé bourgeoisie and day-laboring journeymen without civic rights from the “lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all the big cities” and the embryonic elements of bourgeois society, of which the “proletarian elements have not yet developed.”  Engels specifies that the lumpenproletariat comes out of “the decay of feudalism” following the decline of traditional professional protections, enlarging the mass of urban vagabonds, beggars, and day laborers working in misery in the gaps left by the corporations.  This is why, in the 1874 preface, he warns the German socialists:

The lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. It is an absolutely venal, an absolutely brazen crew. Every leader of the workers who utilizes these gutter proletarians as guards or supports, proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement.

The Lumpenproletariat are the urban underclass, which Marx and Engels feel is imperfectly separate from the working class, defined as of the mid-19th century as "urban vagabonds, beggars, and day laborers". But as of the early 21st century, this class has vastly increased in numbers and importance, augmented especially by migrants, addicts, and the deinstitutionalized mentally ill. This is a critical distinction Levitz misses:

Some of the DSA’s own activities lend credence to this theory: Despite its largely white-collar membership, the organization advocates for many policies that would principally benefit America’s most disadvantaged. More broadly, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, many college-educated millennials came to identify with “the 99 percent.” 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.

But when we looked at the official DSA agenda in this post on Tuesday, we saw that two of its seven agenda items are amnesty for immigrants and ending deportations, which are aimed at this enormous new component of tbe Lumpenproletariat. These are not "anti-poverty policies". They're policies aimed at expanding the urban underclass by importing new members from third-world countries. They don't "benefit the disadvantaged", they increase their number.

In the quote above, Engels warns the proletariat that the Lumpenproletariat are unreliable allies; they're venal and brazen, out to grab what they can. As soon as they see an opportunity, they'll turn against the working class. If we look at one of the key features in the de facto architecture of the 21st century urban economy, it's the dual use of public transit, on one hand a means of transportation for the working poor to get to their jobs, but on the other a shelter for addicts and vagabonds and a close-quarters venue for robbery and violence against the workers traveling to work.

In other words, the social benefits promoted by the upper-class DSA turn out to be a way to facilitate the victimization of the working class by the criminal underclass. The unspoken political alliance of our time is betqween the bourgeoisie and the Lumpenproletariat against the working class. Levitz grasps this only vaguely:

And yet, socialists’ expansive conception of “the working class” can be put to more dubious uses. Specifically, it can help relatively well-off professionals disguise their class’s particular interests as those of all working people.

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

In contrast, the murder of the productive immigrant Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte, NC tram, which she was forced to ride in close quarters with a deranged member of the Lumpenproletariat. resonates as an example of the war between the Lumpenproletariat and the real working class, which plays out every day on urban transit systems across the developed world.

The DSA is a major promoter of a war between the urban underclass, allied with the bourgeoisie, broadly defined, and the working class, broadly defined. I think socialists tend to miss this simply because Marx and Engels didn't represent the Lumpenproletariat as a separate class from the working class, even though they insisted that the working class should absolutely never trust them.