It only is viewed this way in American discourse. When you talk to people from the UK in my experience they use the correct definitions of these terms.
Middle class is someone who both works for a living and benefits from returns on property ownership.
That makes more sense. In the US, the majority of people consider themselves “middle class” despite a huge and undefined range of income and material conditions. It’s pretty much a way to flatten the idea of class to avoid the need of class struggle. It also has its own built in caste hierarchy (upper lower middle class, lower upper middle class, etc...) That way we’re simultaneously “on the same team” but still have distinction to make us feel better than whoever’s on the rung below you.
So the whole thing is complicated because in some areas people making 50k a year can move into the ownership class at least by the metrics required to be considered middle class. In others that amount is far higher than that. Lower middle class makes sense as a comment on that some people own their homes but outside of that would just be poor.
This said though, what we call upper middle class in American parlance is literally just what being middle class is in other parts of the world.
Yeah it's true that in the UK there's far more of a cultural conception of class than as being something purely financial, but by those metrics there really doesn't exist an upper class in the US in the same way where you have people who are poor but have some weird patronage title.
But yeah, the cultural middle class of PMC is not the entirety of the middle class as a whole. The sorts of middle class people that are like a regional manager for a bunch of gas stations are going to be different culturally.
That's true of a lot of actually middle class people in the US too, the problem is that they often use it to justify the existence of capitalism for themselves.
It only is viewed this way in American discourse. When you talk to people from the UK in my experience they use the correct definitions of these terms.
Middle class is someone who both works for a living and benefits from returns on property ownership.
That makes more sense. In the US, the majority of people consider themselves “middle class” despite a huge and undefined range of income and material conditions. It’s pretty much a way to flatten the idea of class to avoid the need of class struggle. It also has its own built in caste hierarchy (upper lower middle class, lower upper middle class, etc...) That way we’re simultaneously “on the same team” but still have distinction to make us feel better than whoever’s on the rung below you.
So the whole thing is complicated because in some areas people making 50k a year can move into the ownership class at least by the metrics required to be considered middle class. In others that amount is far higher than that. Lower middle class makes sense as a comment on that some people own their homes but outside of that would just be poor.
This said though, what we call upper middle class in American parlance is literally just what being middle class is in other parts of the world.
deleted by creator
Yeah it's true that in the UK there's far more of a cultural conception of class than as being something purely financial, but by those metrics there really doesn't exist an upper class in the US in the same way where you have people who are poor but have some weird patronage title.
But yeah, the cultural middle class of PMC is not the entirety of the middle class as a whole. The sorts of middle class people that are like a regional manager for a bunch of gas stations are going to be different culturally.
deleted by creator
That's true of a lot of actually middle class people in the US too, the problem is that they often use it to justify the existence of capitalism for themselves.