The communist party consisted of workers. Working class is not a level of income, but a relation to ownership of the means of production and distribution. Further, the USSR saw incredibly high rates of democratic participation, both having some of the highest voting percentages and the actual highest rates of measures to vote on.

Wealth inequality in the USSR existed, but was nowhere even fathomably close to wealth inequality in modern Russia, let alone the US Empire.

The working class in the usa empire mostly lives in the colonies. Labor aristocrats always "conveniently forget" about their overseas plundering.