Middle class didn’t mean a big McMansion or desirable area. It meant a modest house in a small lot in a boring suburb of someplace like Detroit where you’d work for Ford or something.

Our ideas of what kind of house we should have is really distorted. It’s like pickup trucks. What was considered an everyday pickup 40 years ago was 1/3rd the size of the behemoths available today, and of course today’s trucks cost $80,000 compared to the $6,500 of something like a ‘85 Toyota Pickup ($20k in today dollars).

Yeah. The problem is that the goalposts keep getting pushed away faster than income is keeping up. Someone might have what is considered a good paying job, but the buying power for major purchases like cars and homes keeps taking hits. On top of that the bills get steeper and steeper. Six figures should be a fortune.

If you can't quit your job and live off your investments and previous earnings, you are firmly in the proletariat.

Lumping in those who day trade on T212 with those buying into investment schemes at the clubhouse isn't helpful. "It's a big fucking club" and it's pretty obvious whether you're in it or not.

I think the definition of working class is still pretty simple regardless of modern financial complexities. If you rely on a paycheck to make a living you are proletariat. If you own enough capital that you don’t have to work, congrats, now you are petit bourgeois.

Just want people to think a bit further than mid-19th century definions and analysis which I think no longer hold.

Yeah, one of the things that really shaped my views on fairness in wealth distribution was studying corporate law (and the legal cases that shaped what Delaware corporate law is today). That history adds a lot of complexity to figuring out who is the "owner" class and who is the "labor" class. Highly compensated executives often have their shareholders over a barrel, and the legal system is designed to protect management from shareholders, so long as the corporation makes some minimal token gestures towards shareholder value. In practice, shareholders have very limited means of controlling a corporation (mainly by electing directors, who tend to be officers/managers of other companies and sympathize with managers and give quite a bit of leeway when only part time supervising the officers they often play golf with).

And we can see this play out in the modern era. We have a bunch of wannabe finance bros, hopeful future millionaires, talking about financial topics and cheerleading their heroes (CEOs and founders), often being willing marks in financial investment scams. They believe that holding capital will help them survive further divergence between the haves and the have nots, but history shows that when push comes to shove, only power matters. No amount of accumulated wealth can protect against power, and those with power can always use that power to enrich themselves.

So I don't find it particularly useful to draw bright lines on who is or isn't the enemy based on their financial situation. We should recognize the power structures themselves, and how power is exercised (politically, financially, legally, culturally, and the old standby, violently), and work to influence things through those levers (including the power to change the levers themselves).

"living off of your property" is shorthand (and so maybe we should be more explicit) for "living off of the production and labor of other people who need access to your property to do that labor".

So yea, i think it is exploitative to restrict access your property to someone who would use it to reproduce themselves each day (a home) or would use it to produce other valuable goods and services (a job) and to require that person to pay you for access (that home again) or you'll pay them wages less than what they produce (that job).

And i think exploitative is inherently bad.

Living off of owning property isn't inherently bad? Whatttttt

under that definition small business owners are the enemy

The absolute worst employers I ever had were small business owners: micromanaging, exploitative zero-sum-minded swine. There was a reason their businesses stayed small.

Yep, CA Dept of Housing considers an individual making less than $109k in San Francisco "low-income" - that's about what you'd need to qualify for a 1br apartment there.

This isn't a video game. Long lasting ideologies are flexible, practical, unifying, and care deeply about the means of achieving their goals. Short lasting ideologies are rigid, idealist to a fault, seek to divide and exclude, and care more about the ends than the means.