Funny you should mention it -- my doctor [who earns something like $600k annually] and I discussed this very topic recently; I was talking about "working class" people in a context that obviously excluded individuals like him, and he was like "whoa there buddy, I work my butt off for a living! Just because my productivity is higher than most folks' doesn't mean my perspective as a working-class man should be disregarded."
At first I was incredulous, but then when I reflected on the fact my own [modest, developer] earnings likely seem to [for example] folks working in retail as disproportionately large as my doc's seem to me, and then considered the huge difference in lifeways between my doc and some of my other friends who live entirely on the interest / dividends from financial instruments [i.e., they don't have to go in to work in the morning] , I understood his perspective and now mainly agree with it.
Working class usually implies little to no savings beyond, perhaps, equity in your house. Losing your job means you're several weeks away from couch surfing or living on the street.
In terms of emotional stress this is worlds away from the toil of the middle class, especially someone making $100,000/year or more.
I grew up poor--like, food stamps and having your furniture thrown out on the street during an eviction poor. Being upper middle class as an adult, one thing I do to relieve the stress is keep my "plan B" in mind. I have more than enough savings that if I had to I could buy a double-wide trailer in the sticks, send the kids to public school, buy a bait shop, and get by just fine. That makes a world of difference, but it's not an option available to the working class. If you're working class your only choices are poverty and the status quo.
A software engineer like myself, or a doctor making $600k/year thinking of themselves as working class, kinda blows my mind. It's not like the working class believe that they're the only ones who work hard.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if this doctor fits working class. In fact I know of poor people who fit that definition of working class even less than some doctors I know.
It is about spending, and a lot of doctors - despite their high incomes - are in debt with no savings - and equity in the house is 5% as anytime it gets more than that they take out a home equity loan for the difference.
Which is why doctors can feel like they are barely making it: with their spending habits it is a good thing their job is in demand.
But a doctor always has options--many, many options. Even a doctor who loses his license has options. Part of being working class is being stuck in wage labor--not absolutely, but nonetheless quite predictably. There's even a special term for doctors, professional class, which describes their prospects independent of their present economic situation.
No matter how much money or wealth one has, one almost always feels like they're stuck in their situation. That's part of the human condition. And expenses rising to meet income is also typical, at least in the U.S. But different classes of people have objectively different sets of options available to them, regardless of whether they appreciate those options or not.
Also, $600k/year is a ton of money. I make half that and carry a mortgage, apartment lease (temporarily, hopefully), partial second apartment lease (mother), and office lease all in San Francisco, in addition to paying down $130k in law school debt, as well as typical family expenses (two young children). To blow through $600k/year this doctor must have some serious issues. I can only assume the doctor's home is several million dollars, so even at 5% equity a double-wide trailer and bait shop should be well within his reach. But, again, regardless, this doctor has unfathomably more options than a typical working class family. (As do I, for that matter.) To compare the situations is borderline obscene.
Few doctors make 600k, remove malpractice insurance and ~150-300k is fairly common depending on area etc. Remove student loans and a surprising number of doctors are making less than 100k.
https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/how-much-do-doctors-make-14779617 https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/how-much-do-docto...
Sure that doesn't account for malpractice insurance, etc -- area of specialty also has a large influence on doc earnings potential --
edit : my example is one particular real-world doctor, not necessarily representative of any particular statistical cohort
"Class consciousness" is a framework for thinking about society. It is used by those who think they know how the world should be structured to make others see things their way - by "others", I mean those who don't think that way, based on their own lived experience. "Identify with these people that you don't feel any identity with, and join them in attacking these other people that you wouldn't otherwise want to attack."
Which, when you look at it, is just another set of people trying to manipulate you into behaving the way they think you should. They say it's for your own good? So does everyone else trying to manipulate you.
Now, back in the day, the difference between working and managing was twofold: managers got paid more, and they were allowed (and expected) to think as part of their job. The workers were just robots made of flesh, but the managers were supposed to be able to think. Well, for all we (most of us) still have to work, we're more in the managing class, in that we get paid well and have to think. So trying to tell us that we should have "working class consciousness"... yeah, there's a reason why it doesn't feel to us like it fits.
I disagree on your characterisation of 'class consciousness', which from the point of view of a proponent of the theory reflects the general lack of knowledge of a class about its objective position in society. As Lukacs wrote, "It is the objective result of the economic set-up, and is neither arbitrary, subjective nor psychological". It is, from this standpoint, no different from ignorance of technology or other objective factors that shape society and control distribution and production.
>we're more in the managing class, in that we get paid well and have to think
The distinction which proponents of "class consciousness" talk about was never between thinking and doing, but between those who (loosely speaking) have nothing to sell but their labour power, and those who posses capital. The reluctance to view highly paid wage labour as a form of wage labour rests on misconstrued notions of what "working class" means in political theory (i.e blue collar workers, people who work with machines, etc.), notions drawn from romantic Soviet depictions of the worker (the strong, brave man with a hammer and sickle) and the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire".
There's been a lot of work since the 60s into trying to figure out why this notion is so prevalent. Perhaps it can be best summed up by Marcuse:
"If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population."
There is absolutely a difference between middle and working class people. To suggest there isn't is a complete lack of understanding with regards to what it means to be working class.
By definition middle class people work, it's in the middle between people who have to work to survive and the independently wealthy. However, the middle class has the capability to build wealth, own a home, retire someday, leave a little over for their kids to get their lives started. Working class people are often life long renters, would go bankrupt if they got cancer or any other serious medical illness, would be in significant financial strain if their car broke down, they very likely do not have the means to save up 6 months worth of expenses as a safety net.
Yes, these terms are rather antiquated, but with each and every passing year, there is an increasing distinction between the professional & managerial class (often referred to as the middle and upper middle class), and the precariat class (the working class). Also note that the former makes up ~34% of the population, and the later makes up 45% of the population, with the 1% on the upper end and the truly poor on the other end.
Your so-called "middle class" is merely a subgroup of the working class. Trying to differentiate between an upper working class and lower working class is simply snobbery.
Whose definition of class are you using? There’s a bunch of epistemologies you could be referring to. Many conceptions of class don’t have a middle at all.
I don't think working/managing/ruling is a good class breakdown.
There's labor.
There's capital.
There's a class that has substantial dependence on both labor and capital, with neither clearly dominating their interests.
The first two, sure, match working and ruling roughly (many managers, though, in labor, and some, particularly at the executive level, in nearly pure capital.)
But the group in between pure labor and pure capital—the traditional “middle class” in capitalism—isn't really “managing” as a class, though it includes lots of managers. Also lots of white-collar professionals that aren't managers as such. And even a fair number of independent small business owners that aren't white collar professionals.
The middle class is a distinct class from the working class, but management isn't what distinguishes it. And it's not really a natural class ally of capital any more than of labor, and those on the labor side who attack it (either in its proper identity or as “management”) that way are acting in a self-defeating manner.
We live in a culture that idolizes the working class, and indulges fantasies of the contented blue collar worker--who for at least a brief period in the 20th century could be securely middle class, not merely fleetingly so as in recent history. And as the middle class hollows out, and victim culture internalized across the political spectrum, we're seemingly forced to choose between identifying as those who work (the good guys) or the wealthy (the bad guys).
It's not surprising that relatively wealthy people self-identify as the good guys. But that doesn't mean we should indulge or lend credence to destructive equivocations that put working and wealth in opposition. We already have a catch-all, no-hurt-feelings, ambiguously safe category--middle class.
Anyhow, FWIW, I've been upvoting both of you because I [feel like I] appreciate what you're saying. I'm mostly objecting to the doctor's sentiments, and the notion that we should sympathize with them. The sentiments are self-serving and socially destructive. That doesn't make him a bad person, but I feel like the sentiments should be called out for what they are.
This is the problem with the check-your-privilege movement. If disempowered groups think they can shame the empowered into giving up power, they're seriously deluded. What will happen--what is happening--is that the wealthy and powerful will self-identify as the disempowered. So I'm not saying that this doctor should "check his privilege", so to speak, but neither should he be doing the exact opposite by willfully denying his privileges. And that's why I say such sentiments are destructive. With privilege comes responsibility; if you can deny the privilege you can shirk the responsibility, such as a civic mindedness that emphasizes constructive cooperation across all groups, and particularly the financial and political participation of those with financial means. If everybody thinks they're not wealthy enough, that it's only the other guy that should pay more taxes, etc, well then we know exactly where that road leads. We shouldn't vilify or shame the privileged (the notion that we can shame people into civility is preposterous), but neither should we condone the privileged pretending that they're not. Those are two sides of the same coin.