[SpaciousBox]

Hello Pofo Socialists and most probably Communists who also like to share this forum!

Whilst I myself am a Liberal, I have never disliked socialist in the same way I do other revolutionary ideologies, and have recently taken it upon myself to understand you all better. I've often assumed we agreed on values and morals, but just never the methodology to those ends. But well, most of my far-left education comes from the establishment of Russian Communism (or; the Dictatorship of the Proletariat that was going to one day become communism if allowed..) and so as a result I guess I don't really know much of the ideological conclusions that lead to the working class being the class of choice from a modern perspective. Now, from my understandings of Marx, I can see very clearly why the working class would be his preferred option historically - I would most certainly have been a Marxist in industrial-revolution-based-other-life. What I don't understand though, is why the working class are your class of choice in the present world, especially when the bounds of class no longer apply economically. Allow me to expand:

In my work, I work mostly with working class individuals, and in working class areas. Many of my clients and those I support come to me with very basic levels of literacy, and very basic understandings of the world. They quite literally exist in a different reality to the rest of us, yet I do my best to make them employable and grow their skills through community involvement (I work within the voluntary sector, but that's another story). Anyway! As a young middle class man I do very often feel heavily out of place there; it's not such a friendly environment, people care far less about each other, and no one seems to have the energy to improve their own lives or community even when given a free pass to do so on a stick made from recently mended hopes and dreams. This is a rather dreary comparison to my home town in the rural South where people inquire after your mothers health, and help mend each others cars, and are always happy to support new community ventures that will benefit the town. I'm not sure if you would constitute this as class consciousness, but it really has dawned on me how very different we are culturally. This is possibly the key point to my inquiry; cultural class. As far as my understanding of Marxism goes, "the workers" are those who's lives are controlled by capitalism. This must surely make the workers as a mixture of three cultural classes; the working class, the lower middle, and the middle middle. Allow me to expand once more:

If workers are crushed under the tyranny of capitalism, then I certainly am. I like to think I work fairly hard, I don't take home much as community work simply doesn't pay, but I give a large chunk of my cheque to the landlord and try to balance my books until next pay day. I'm certainly not struggling, but I have to watch what I eat and spend and certainly don't live in luxury. If we work under the assumption that the Upper-middle and Upper class are the classes of dominance, then surely all other classes are those being exploited. If that is the case, and we are in fact in open class warfare, I do think I would much rather live in a world where everyone is middle class, than one where everyone is working class. There is a strong chance that I am missing the brick here, but what exactly is your opposition to the middle class? Why do you support a cultural and economic working class, when you simply could advocate the middle class, and create a new aspiring class that would effectively end the cultural working class once and for all. If you are the sort of socialist who wants lower levels of equality, then you shouldn't have much issues with a single middle class that has a lower and higher wing. If you are in favour of equal economic outcomes, then the economic aspect of the working class has been removed and all we are left with is cultural class. In which case, why are the working class your class of choice, and not the classes who's cultural view points are more entwined with your own. Am I making sense here? - you are free to say no.

To summarise; I guess I'm asking why people are obsessed with advocating the working class, when it would appear your own values are actually more in tune with the modern middle class. I very much enjoyed reading about Marx and the foundation of Socialism, but I am very confused how they can still be applied to modern day, where the idea of "the toiling class" exists to a very small minority. You are free to reply to this post with literature I should educate myself on...

[Cartertonian]

Good question. I shall be interested to see the reply from our Marxist academics. It has always been my view that Marxism was a product of its time and, whilst it might arguably have had some legitimacy in the industrial age of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it has far less relevance to today.

[The American Lion]

I am a realitive newbie into Marxism and I don't have decades and years in full Marxist philosophy, but I got the basics. KurtFF8, Eauz, & The Immortal Goon would be the best experts here.

but what exactly is your opposition to the middle class? Why do you support a cultural and economic working class, when you simply could advocate the middle class

The middle class is also exploiting the other classes. How do you expect the rise of the middle class? I work at a big retail chain. The reason why I have low wages and crappy benefits is due too owners wanting more capital and also to get more people to buy things at very cheap prices. The middle class lives off of the sweatshops in Asia for their clothes and Chinese Foxcomm workers for their Ipods or their Wiis.

Also note that in the past decades. With the anti-Union regulations and expansion of free trade. We are seeing the middle class merging with the working class. Look at how Target and Wal-Mart has killed the mom & pop stores. The middle class is dieing so bourgeoisie can gain more capital.

and create a new aspiring class that would effectively end the cultural working class once and for all.

Yet I assume if we want to keep the Capitalist system. That new class would HAVE to exploit an lower class to gain an advantage.

In which case, why are the working class your class of choice, and not the classes who's cultural view points are more entwined with your own. Am I making sense here? - you are free to say no.

It is our class of choice because it was the class has been exploited out of the most.

You have to remember that it is CAPITALSIM requires exploitation of others to work. Also Capitalism may achieve some good achievements and highly adaptable. Should we or other be exploited for the gain of others? We just want a world without the exploitation where everyone works together for a common good.

[Malatant of Shadow]

Why is the working class "our choice"? Our choice for what, exactly?

[The Immortal Goon]

Something you have to consider is that the "middle class" isn't really a class in the Marxist sense of the word. A class is based upon your relationship to capital.

The proletariat (or working class) is, so Engels said, " that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital." It is often also said, they do not own the means of their production. Or, in other words still, it's people that get paid for labor. You don't own the business, you labor in exchange for money; someone else is benefitting from it.

The "middle class," in the sense you describe, doesn't really exist. People may say, "petite bourgeoisie," or small business owners; your publican, small book store owner and the like can be "middle class," but it doesn't have anywhere to go as a direction. The "big bourgeoisie" have pretty much rendered the petite bourgeoisie into historical limbo. The fourth paragraph, starting with the revival of trade, goes into that to some extent. But there's nothing they can do—support the system they're in, which is essentially a losing proposition—or support their workers...Which isn't going to do them any real favors either. Nobody's saying these people need to be violently opposed or anything, but they have no real way to try and resolve the conflicts in society that are developing and getting worse.

So why focus on class and define it in this way? Because it's how we understand the world.

When the British conquered the Celts in Ulster, the first thing they did was hand control of the land to the Ri that was in charge of the people. There were a few reasons for this, but one was because the Ri was then recognized as controlling and owning land—a concept that was completely foreign to 99% of the people until a certain level of organization and production was created. Now 99% of the people on the planet take the possibility of someone owning land for granted. The reason is because of the system behind such things.

In the same way, people that work for their wages have a different understanding of the world often as alien to their bosses as it is to themselves.* Though it's not exactly a perfect parallel, it may do some good to think of it in the same way the Irish Ri would have a different understanding of the world than that of the English baron. The interaction with the world is different for the worker and the person that owns property and labor.

So if I've pressed what the class is and how they are different, why not work together? Aside from the fact they're opposed to each other, the fact is also that human systems are not perfect. There is always something wrong in them, contradictions, that continue to be fickle and wreck things. Since the bourgeoisie are the leaders of human society, they have a system that is not necessarily working completely perfectly. One of their contradictions is surrendering a huge amount of control to their working population. Another one is that everybody now has far more productive power than the world has ever seen, and yet many people do not have basic needs. Further, basic needs no longer are enough for many laborers who now live in this world because the contradiction remains, the people doing the actual work get less than the people that abstractly own the means of utilizing that work. So eventually, since the system is not perfect, it will collapse; just as any star cannot sustain the pressure and contradiction between its gravity and power; society will collapse in the same way to the same pressure of opposing forces inherent within it. And these pressures can be reduced to the world the bourgeoisie understands, and the world the proletariat understands. The latter almost has to win on an infinite timeline.

I hope that helps instead of muddies things...

*To avoid the dreaded "wall of text" I'm trying to keep things simple, though maybe this will kind of give a taste for the philosophy behind the statement linked here:

Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, ||VII| are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, [For this reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and activities. – Note by Marx] it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man.

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital.

In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world. [On the category of “having”, see Hess in the Philosophy of the Deed].

The abolition [Aufhebung] of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, [In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself humanly to the human being. – Note by Marx] and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use.

In the same way, the senses and enjoyment of other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social organs develop in the form of society; thus, for instance, activity in direct association with others, etc., has become an organ for expressing my own life, and a mode of appropriating human life.

[The American Lion]

TIG, just showed me how much of a newb I am.

[Eauz]

Even if we are to assume that an actual middle-class exists, it is somewhat naive to assume that there is anything different from those who are seen as working-class. In terms of the middle-class, the majority of these people either own houses, businesses and/or other small property purchases. However, if we look deeper at the issue, we can see that most people who view themselves as middle-class, are doing so, through the assistance of the bourgeois class, through various forms of loans. The bourgeois class is a major influence in the development of the middle-class to allow this separation between what they actually are: working-class.

So, when you boil things down, the middle-class is in and of itself part of the working-class, but it is either unconscious or unwilling to accept this fact. They would prefer to look at themselves as a special star that is one step above the concept of working-class, through these various forms of loans and access to a higher cash flow. As we've seen in recent years, many of these people have seen there homes and businesses taken away and this is part of the reason we have seen irrational reaction to how the economy is managed. For many of them, it's like being that spoiled child where the parents (bourgeois class) pampered the child with many toys and benefits, but once the father lost his job or a large amount of money (gambling on the market), the parents cracked down on luxurious spending and the child is crying about the lack of toys and fun.

[KPres]

Something you have to consider is that the "middle class" isn't really a class in the Marxist sense of the word. A class is based upon your relationship to capital.

Here's a question I have...

Define capital.

Generally, people think of capital as goods or services employed in the creation of final products that get consumed, but are not immediately used up themselves, right? But isn't this a false distinction? Is a house capital or consumption? What about a car? Even something like food, which most would say is definitely consumption...don't I eat so that I can have energy to work the next day? In that light, even food is like capital.

So I don't see any real categorical distinction between the two, just a degree of duration.

[KPres]

Even if we are to assume that an actual middle-class exists, it is somewhat naive to assume that there is anything different from those who are seen as working-class. In terms of the middle-class, the majority of these people either own houses, businesses and/or other small property purchases. However, if we look deeper at the issue, we can see that most people who view themselves as middle-class, are doing so, through the assistance of the bourgeois class, through various forms of loans. The bourgeois class is a major influence in the development of the middle-class to allow this separation between what they actually are: working-class.

You're talking about two different class theories, it's not some conspiracy. "Middle-class" comes from Max Weber's theory, which he developed specifically to deal with the odd facts under Marx's approach, like, for example, corporate executive would be considered proles under Marx's theory, while a small business owner would be bourgeois. Kinda hard to maintain the "class consciousness" argument when Steve Jobs is in the same category as a Wal-Mart cashier, and Joe the Plummer is the evil monopolistic power oppressing the people.

So, when you boil things down, the middle-class is in and of itself part of the working-class, but it is either unconscious or unwilling to accept this fact. They would prefer to look at themselves as a special star that is one step above the concept of working-class, through these various forms of loans and access to a higher cash flow. As we've seen in recent years, many of these people have seen there homes and businesses taken away and this is part of the reason we have seen irrational reaction to how the economy is managed. For many of them, it's like being that spoiled child where the parents (bourgeois class) pampered the child with many toys and benefits, but once the father lost his job or a large amount of money (gambling on the market), the parents cracked down on luxurious spending and the child is crying about the lack of toys and fun.

What on earth? This has nothing to do with reality, this is just some fable you made up demonizing people for your own ideological reasons. I have never seen the reaction you're attributing to these people.

[Eauz]

You're talking about two different class theories, it's not some conspiracy. "Middle-class" comes from Max Weber's theory, which he developed specifically to deal with the odd facts under Marx's approach, like, for example, corporate executive would be considered proles under Marx's theory, while a small business owner would be bourgeois. Kinda hard to maintain the "class consciousness" argument when Steve Jobs is in the same category as a Wal-Mart cashier, and Joe the Plummer is the evil monopolistic power oppressing the people.

Did you just make an argument there or just some rambling about something unrelated to the topic?

If you had read my post, you would have noted that if we are to assume that such a class exists, if you strip the middle-class of these gains provided by the bourgeois, the middle-class is nothing more than another member of the working-class. As far as Marx's approach, I don't even know where you got that from. Could you point us to where Marx stated such a thing?

What on earth? This has nothing to do with reality, this is just some fable you made up demonizing people for your own ideological reasons. I have never seen the reaction you're attributing to these people.

You have not seen people crying about their houses being foreclosed or having lost their job and can't make payments on their house? What about those people who blame the inability to find work upon immigrants and not the corporate economic dictatorship? These are all signs of the lost middle-class dreams and hopes. They are in denial that they are actually a member of the working-class when you strip them of all the glitter.

[The Immortal Goon]

Here's a question I have...

Define capital.

Marx then investigates the processes by which money is transformed into capital, and finds, first, that the form in which money circulates as capital is the inversion of the form in which it circulates as the general equivalent of commodities. The simple owner of commodities sells in order to buy; he sells what he does not need, and with the money thus procured he buys what he does need. The incipient capitalist starts by buying what he does not need himself; he buys in order to sell, and to sell at a higher price, in order to get back the value of the money originally thrown into the transaction, augmented by an increment in money; and Marx calls this increment surplus-value.

...The increase in the value of money that is to be converted into capital cannot take place in the money itself, nor can it originate in the purchase, as here this money does no more than realise the price of the commodity, and this price, inasmuch as we took as our premise an exchange of equivalents, is not different from its value. For the same reason, the increase in value cannot originate in the sale of the commodity. The change must, therefore, take place in the commodity bought; not however in its value, as it is bought and sold at its value, but in its use-value as such, that is, the change of value must originate in the consumption of the commodity. “In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend, Moneybags, must be so lucky as to find ... in the market, a commodity, whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption, therefore, is itself an embodiment of labour, and, consequently, a creation of value. The possessor of money does find on the market such a special commodity in capacity for labour or labour-power.” Though, as we saw, labour as such can have no value, this is by no means the case with labour-power. This acquires a value from the moment that it becomes a commodity, as it is in fact at the present time, and this value is determined, “as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this special article“; that is to say, by the labour-time necessary for the production of the means of subsistence which the labourer requires for his maintenance in a fit state to work and for the perpetuation of his race. Let us assume that these means of subsistence represent six hours of labour-time daily. Our incipient capitalist, who buys labour-power for carrying on his business, i.e., hires a labourer, consequently pays this labourer the full value of his day's labour-power if he pays him a sum of money which also represents six hours of labour. And as soon as the labourer has worked six hours in the employment of the incipient capitalist, he has fully reimbursed the latter for his outlay, for the value of the day's labour-power which he had paid. But so far the money would not have been converted into capital, it would not have produced any surplus-value. And for this reason the buyer of labour-power has quite a different notion of the nature of the transaction he has carried out. The fact that only six hours’ labour is necessary to keep the labourer alive for twenty-four hours, does not in any way prevent him from working twelve hours out of the twenty-four. The value of the labour-power, and the value which that labour-power creates in the labour-process, are two different magnitudes. The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labour-power; his, therefore, is the use of it for a day — a whole day’s labour. The circumstance that the value which the use of it during one day creates is double its own value for a day is a piece of especially good luck for the buyer, but according to the laws of exchange of commodities by no means an injustice to the seller. On our assumption, therefore, the labourer each day costs the owner of money the value of the product of six hours’ labour, but he hands over to him each day the value of the product of twelve hours' labour. The difference in favour of the owner of the money is six hours of unpaid surplus-labour, a surplus-product for which he does not pay and in which six hours’ labour is embodied. The trick has been performed. Surplus-value has been produced; money has been converted into capital.

[KPres]

Did you just make an argument there or just some rambling about something unrelated to the topic?
If you had read my post, you would have noted that if we are to assume that such a class exists, if you strip the middle-class of these gains provided by the bourgeois, the middle-class is nothing more than another member of the working-class. As far as Marx's approach, I don't even know where you got that from. Could you point us to where Marx stated such a thing?
...
You have not seen people crying about their houses being foreclosed or having lost their job and can't make payments on their house? What about those people who blame the inability to find work upon immigrants and not the corporate economic dictatorship? These are all signs of the lost middle-class dreams and hopes. They are in denial that they are actually a member of the working-class when you strip them of all the glitter.

In general my point was that "middle class" and "working class" are concepts coming from incompatible class theories, so that if someone considers themselves "middle class", this doesn't represent denial of being "working class", as you claimed, it represents a rejection (as incoherent) of the class theory which contains a "working class". I expanded on this, using my own version Weber's criticisms of Marx, to show why somebody might reject that theory. In other words, I got the sense from you post that you were attributing some psychological avoidance to people who identify as middle class, and I responded that this is instead a rejection of the broader hypothesis behind the idea of the "working class".

This is why I said you "made up" these people in denial, because intellectual disagreement =/= psychological denial.

[KPres]

Quoting Engels.....

tl;dr

Actually, I tried, I really did. But I can't penetrate it. Very simply, here's how I define capital vs consumption...

consumption good - any product or service produced for immediate satisfaction
capital good - any product or service which is used in the production of consumption goods

How would Engels respond to these definitions? Would he agree with them, or would he find them flawed/incomplete, and if so, in what way?

[The Immortal Goon]

I don't know that there's a separation in the two. Any product has value, use value, and can be exchanged for value. Value itself comes from labor put into the object. Most things made have a function too, but that doesn't really tell you much of anything about the actual value in most cases.

Is that what you're looking for?

[Eauz]

because intellectual disagreement =/= psychological denial.

The point I'm making is that by developing a theory of a middle-class, we are suggesting that there is some sort of an actual difference between them and the working class and the middle-class. The bourgeois class owns the means of production and are able to generate enough surplus value to permit the accumulation of capital to be reinvested to production. This is not the case for most people in the middle-class, whom own a property, big purchases or run a small business. The closest option to the middle-class would be the Petite bourgeoisie, whom own means of production, but do not generate sufficient surplus value to permit the accumulation of capital and thus are unable to economically reproduce in scale of that of the bourgeois class. However, for most people who view themselves as middle-class, they are mostly placing themselves there out of an image that they own a house, car and can go on a couple of vacations per year (at least when talking to them). Outside of psychological reasons, there is no actual distinguishing feature between those who view themselves as middle-class and those who are working-class. The middle-class who own a house, car and go on vacations, find the money to fund their class status, from the bourgeois class, through loans and other financial transactions. Please note, I'm not suggesting that the working-class are unable to have a similar psychological denial.

[Decky]

The main problem is that you define class differently than Marxists do, this means that Marxist ideas sound a little bizarre to you.

You are defining class socially I take it? So it would depend on what school you went to, if you do a blue collar or white collar job etc?

Marxists define it economically. The bourgeoisie are the owners of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the Proletariat are the people who aren't (and thus have to sell their Labour to survive).

Many of the people who you would consider "middle class" are actually proletarian under a Marxist analysis and thus we actually do represent them.

Does that make sense? You are trying to solve a problem that does not exit, we have no problem at all with a lot of the people who are middle class under your (non Marxist) definition.

When we say we are against the bourgeois/ middle class we mean the owners of the aforementioned means of production, distribution and exchange. The fact we sometimes call them the middle class is a historical relic (when Marx was writing even the richest member of the bourgeoisie was bellow the aristocracy and thus in the middle).

[quetzalcoatl]

...The bourgeoisie are the owners of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the Proletariat are the people who aren't (and thus have to sell their Labour to survive). Many of the people who you would consider "middle class" are actually proletarian under a Marxist analysis and thus we actually do represent them. Does that make sense?...

This makes sense - it's a reasonably accurate description of the way things operate.

Capitalism in this sense cannot exist without debt. No one can amass a sufficient amount of capital (in a single lifetime) to opt out of labor-selling without the existence of leverage. Yet leverage is vital for the continuing progress of the human race.

For the working class, the future is bleak. The old labor-intensive industries are dying, and being replaced by capital intensive automated factories and/or cybernetic expert systems. There will not be enough jobs to go around, and the balance of humanity will become economically expendable.

We are creating a Randian future of producers who reap the exclusive benefits of their capital investments, and have a radically diminished need for a class of worker consumers. What they do need is a class to fund an income stream from interest payments. For this purpose, workers will be allowed a make-work job and encouraged (or required) to take on a large debt load.

[Davea8]

Spacious Box, I'm unsure what your question is. You seem to be requesting a defense of socialism, but then you also ask "why the working class" and confuse it with the middle class. Let me take a shot at what I believe could help untangle this. Let's start with classes...

If you prefer to discuss classes from the perspective that the ruling class hands us, it is a breakdown of "classes" they concoct mainly for the purpose of protecting themselves from sound class analysis. And so you would discuss the poor "class", the middle "class", the upper middle "class", and the rich "classes" which you could further break down just as arbitrarily as they did these other "classes".

But if you prefer to discuss classes from the perspective that is grounded in the fundamental relationship of how goods are produced to provide our very existence, then you would discuss the working class (which does not contain only workers but also their families, etc.) and the class which hires the workers for profit. There are only those two CLASSES. I didn't say there are only workers and profiters. I said there are only those two CLASSES.

Who is in the working class according to this two-class analysis? Well certainly workers, but also anyone who would, under any of their life circumstances, be limited to providing an income for themselves by working and converting their work into an income without profiting off anyone else's labor. In other words, not only are workers in the working class, but also the disabled who cannot work, the children of workers, people who won the lottery and neither work any longer nor employ anyone for profit. They are all in the working class along with the mangement people employed by businesses and corporations, police, and most professional people (doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc.).

So, you ask "why the working class?"

There is just one alternative, and you have not been invited to partake of that alternative.... the class that employs you for profit.

You cannot get out of the working class except by opening a business and hiring people to work for you for profit, and even that will barely take you out of the working class because you could easily fall back into the need to find a job and work for someone else at any time since you are not one of the billionaires who call the shots and determine your lot in life.

Now, --socialism. Originally socialism was associated with communist parties and communist rule, but that effort has failed. The only communist socialism left, --as far as it goes, --is in Cuba. But even Cuban communism has been modified as problems arose and adaptations had to be made. So modern socialism has had to disassociate itself from Mark and communism in order to survive, and in the process, Democratic Socialism evolved as we find in Europe today (France, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, etc.). And how Marxist are they? Last year a non-partisan international committee judged Finland (one of the more advanced Democratic Socialist nations) to have the most competitive business climate in the world. Competitive! Sound like a quality of capitalism? Yup. Democratic Socialism utilizes different degrees of private enterprise as the most efficient means of production, while regulating it carefully and never privatizing "the commons" like education, prisons, disaster relief, military, roads, postal services, etc.

Let me know whether this helps and if not, let's zero-in on the subject more.

[Vera Politica]

I guess I'm asking why people are obsessed with advocating the working class, when it would appear your own values are actually more in tune with the modern middle class.

I wonder about this since I do not think that my values are in tune with what many call the "modern middle class". In fact, I would say that I feel most estranged when in such settings and far more at home and closer to my own values when among what most people today call "the working class". This may be because I did not grow up "middle class" in the usual sense. My father was a class conscious factory worker turned foreman (with a longstanding bitter resentment for the "middle management" or what others call "middle class"). Unfortunately, I think he implicitly believes that there is something like the "middle class" but denies being a part of it. Interestingly enough my mother is a unionized, call centre worker with a false consciousness (she would say she is middle class, and I think this has more to do with the 'white collar' setting than anything else).

Ok, now that I've gone through the anecdotal biography here is what I would say: not all Marxists share the same values, many come from somewhat class conscious working class backgrounds and often resent the views being put forward from today's radical left. I am one of them. I despise environmentalism and feminism, for example, but I am curious to get a sense of what it is that you think are 'middle class' values and what are not (i.e. what are 'working class' values). I think it is also strange to treat the sociological middle class as some homogeneous group (especially when pretty much everyone self-identified as middle class).

[SE23]

Working class has been fragmented and ruined by big capitalists and new leftists, there used to be a community and pride in being working class, now there are neither. I suppose when absolute poverty was a reality in western nations, they needed to be left with something.
From personal experience working class people are more stronger, mentally, emotionally and physically than middle class people, i am more talking about young people here, of course there are plenty of exceptions, but a working class person who has their head screwed on is a force to be reckoned with.
This all begs the question though, which is what is class nowadays, i am talking in the u.k sense. The majority of the left in western europe, has seemed to abandon the notion that there are poor people worthy looking after unless they come from a "minority group" or a deviant sexual persuasion, or a woman, which is absurd and those who push this stupid ideology should be exiled to the most remote regions of siberia.