The squeezed middle

The middle class is a lie.

Every election, we are told, is decided by "middle New Zealand". And depending on your outlet, this either means those who consider themself 'middle class', or the even worse, "centrists".

Today I want to talk about the middle class. What I'm about to say is not a new idea, in fact it's a significant tenet of Marxism, but under the nomenclature "Petite bourgeoisie".

There is no such thing as a middle class. It's made up. It's hard to pinpoint where, when, and by whom the term was coined, but it doesn't matter.

Do you know who is best served by the perceived existence of the middle class? The capital owning classes.

Previously we knew these people as the monarchy, the nobility, etc. It's the oligarchs. Bezos, Gates, Musk. But it's way more than that. It's the mega wealthy who don't 'earn' their money in the sense that it's not what they are personally doing or creating that's bringing in their wealth. It's the labour and wealth of others. Landlords fit under this category.

In reality, only two classes of people receive 'pay': those who work for their money and sell their labour, and those who get money from others' labour.

This is all to say that you are either working class or in the capital owning class.

And I'm 90% sure if you're reading this you're a worker.

I am a business owner, but I am still a worker (yes I have had staff in the past where the business has made money from their labour, but we're back down to the two co-owners). However, I have been tricked into thinking I am "middle class" because "working class" is such a loaded term. It's a tradie or someone in a role the middle class sees as 'below' them. We are the professional class who look down our noses at the workers.

The outcome is that instead of an overwhelming critical mass of working-class people versus capital owners, we have been divided.

This is how the perception of the leftist elite has been able to take such a firm hold. Because so many of us on the left don't want to be seen as being the grubby working classes, so we sit above them, tut tutting at the poor life they must be leading, while treating their existence as an intellectual exercise where decisions must be doled out for them.

We are the unwitting servants of the capital owning classes. Causing those who are comfortable being working class to hate us rather than both of us hating the capital owners.

We fucked up fam. We need to stop and think about what sort of world we want. Many people are comfortable where they are in the middle class, so they don't want to rock the boat to jeopardise that. If we genuinely started agitating, we fear we'd lose the trappings of our middle classness and slide down the scale to joining the working class—ewww yuck.

But fuck that. As people often say, you are far closer to being homeless than you are a billionaire, so stop supporting these fucking people as though they care about you. Or as though you're going to end up one of them. Bezos has just said that the once vaunted Washington Post will only print right-wing opinion pieces. A new major shareholder of NZME is a Canadian guy alleged to have previously funded Chantelle Baker. This is not going to help anyone but the capital owning classes.

After Luigi Mangione gunned down the insurance CEO in the US, right wing dickhead Ben Shapiro did a video criticising Luigi for it. Many of Ben's fans, MAGA folk, wrote that Ben was wrong on this one. That Luigi was not the villain in this story. One guy said "this is not a left-right issue Ben, it's a top-bottom issue". And look, aside from the queer undertones of that, it's the best distillation I've heard—some folk on the left need to grab that and run with it hard. It looked like real class consciousness might erupt in the US for a moment, but that seems to have fallen apart.

So all of this is to say that if we leftists want actual shit to change, we need to stop pretending that we know better than the "working class". We are the fucking working class. By continuing this charade of an imaginary middle class, we perpetuate a system that fucks over everyone except the capital owners. It's what helps them stay conquerors. Because after all, words matter.