Yeah that's absolutely important, and donations like that have been important for keeping strikes going. But unfortunately we're not at that point yet.
But we never will be because the professional/middle class is a buffer between labor and capital right? That's the beauty of divisive class politics that pits the middle class against the working class - we're discouraged from identifying with working class problems so that we don't support them in their fight.
The whole upper/middle/... arrangement is confusing the issue. IMO, we should rather be talking about the worker class and the rentier class, defined solely by the proportion of their earned vs unearned income. Basically, if you can lose a job and still pay your living expenses, then you're in the rentier class. If you have to sell your labor to pay your bills, you're a worker - even if you sell it for a lot of money.
> If you have to sell your labor to pay your bills, you're a worker - even if you sell it for a lot of money.
There are useful distinctions even between this though. What Piketty refers to as the "patrimonial middle class" has significant assets during and at the end of their life, but still needs to sell their labor to pay their bills. This distinction aligns more closely with the traditional lower/upper/middle arrangement (they'd be upper-middle class). This article[1] (unfortunately paywalled if you don't have an Economist subscription) covers it pretty well, but it's pretty well-trod ground at this point: there's a substantial chunk of the population that isn't rentier/leisure class, but often aligns with them politically, and your proposal's elision of this group means it's missing an important dynamic in class politics.
Eh, I'm not so sure. Early retirement is in reach for much of this group, as long as it's accompanied by an adjustment in living standards; that's practically what defines them.
If the rentier/laborer divide is the _only_ important distinction, why is it so relatively easy for this group to skip across the line?
The interesting thing about capitalism is how it is driven forward by its own internal logic and motion of ever-expanding profits, which in the long run doesn't allow the middle class to comfortably exist without chipping away at their standard of living. We're slowly getting towards a vibrant class politics even in the US.
I am less optimistic than you. Early 20th was vibrant class consciousness. I don't see anything like that now. What I do see is simply the fall out from 100 years of neoliberalism.
Arguably Trump voters in many ways are very class conscious and his working class voters are well aware of their working class status. They have voted for Trump because he promised things to them that Obama and people before him failed to deliver.
I don't buy that argument. I think it's basically the elite's attempt to impose some rationality on Trump's slice of the electorate, when it's pretty clear that his popularity has visceral/emotional/anti-intellectual roots. If it was about his promises, they wouldn't vote for him again because he hasn't delivered on them. The border wall he made the centerpiece of his campaign is nowhere, and most of his other plans have failed. But his people still think he's wonderful and will turn out in droves to vote for him.
I don't think the core of what I said is about _fulfilling_ said promises -- they're obviously nonsense -- so much as Trump's deliberate marketing to the working class.
He's selling one thing, but delivering another. His first public appearance as president elect was to walk into a $$$ steak restaurant in Manhattan where he walked around letting every wealthy person in there know he was "going to lower your taxes." A couple weeks after running basically anti-semitic ads attacking the global elite and wealthy bankers and George Soros and what not.
Trump's voters are the opposite of class conscious since they fail to see (are discouraged from seeing) their commonality with other poor disenfranchised people (who happen to be black, Hispanic, etc). I also don't know Obama failed to deliver something since he inherited Bush's recession and managed to turn it around.
