I’ve heard that the middle class doesn’t exist, but I’ve also heard that the rising middle class was necessary for capitalism. Is there a principled definition, because China seems concerned about growing their middle class.
What does it mean to you, I guess?
First of all, historically the middle classes referred to the bourgeoisie who were in the middle compared to the landed aristocracy. Nowadays it means the petite bourgeoisie, e.g. small business owners, learned professionals, middle managers, who are in the middle compared to the bourgeoisie.
The idea that “the middle class doesn’t exist” is, as far as I know, a misunderstanding of Marxist class analysis. Marxist class analysis isn’t really about defining a label for each individual, and classes are often reabstracted, re-split from society, differently depending on the specific goal of the analysis. It is correct to say that “modern society consists of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (no middle class)” when it is appropriate for understanding some phenomenon, but incorrect to claim someone’s analysis is wrong because they used the concept of the middle class, or any class for that matter.
Second query:
With respect to class relations and productive assets, does middle class exist in a Marxist sense in the US via home/stock ownership?
Home ownership in the US is not simply ownership, it is a financial instrument to be leveraged toward retirement. Home ownership is tied to the rube Goldberg machine of high finance. High paid labor aristocracy don’t “own the means of production”, but they do “buy into the system” via stock ownership and the financialization of homes. They don’t go to board meetings or make decisions, but their class interests do often align with bourgeoisie because of their “wealth” of vague financial investments.
Does this not make them a “middle class” between bourgeoisie proper and poor proletariat?
In Marxist dialectics, it is important to tolerate a sort of fuzzy middle ground between opposites (in this case the proletariat and the middle class). Here, the extreme ends of stock/home ownership land people solidly in either class, it would be ridiculous to claim that owning any stock at all makes you middle class, or that someone making most of their money from stocks is proletarian, but the middle is more unclear.
For most purposes an exact line does not need to be drawn because the object of study is not an individual, and doing that would introduce a seed of idealism. Around what part of the spectrum our vague idea of a line is located depends on our reason for doing the analysis.
For example, if we look at the evolution of American ideology, it would be fair to claim that owning significant assets makes people more receptive to middle-class and bourgeois ideas, and owning more probably makes you more receptive. Here it would likely be useful to call people owning significant assets middle class. On the other hand, if a party has a quota of a proportion of members who must be proletarian, it does not make sense to reject people based on the value of their home, so the same people who might have earlier been middle class are now, for this different purpose, considered proletarian.
Interesting, I was neglecting dialectics in my class analysis. I’ve never read Hegel proper.
I think this is the sort of thing I was looking for. Yes there are two great classes, but they do exist on a spectrum and the individual differences matter less than the general trends. Thus it’s okay for the middle class to not have a specific, single definition.