i was reading this comment thread pretty pleased until i got to the bit where they say “in 20 years”. my friend the middle class is gone NOW. any illusion of a middle class is built entirely on credit card debt. in amerikkka you have people who are poor as fuck, slightly less poor, a bit less poor than that, and then the people earning 500k/yr+ who are wealthy yet call themselves “middle class” while being the literal statistical 1%, and then you have the obscenely wealthy. and then anyone under that 500k/yr mark is basically just buried under various amounts of debt. there is no “20 years from now”. there is no “if wages keep stagnating”. the shit they think will happen in 20yrs is the current condition and even people who almost get it still dont realize this
not posting to ‘dunk on’ or anything, its just kinda sad and frustrating really
AFAIK the tern originated to differentiate between peasants/serfs/slaves (lower class), nobility (upper class), and artisans/merchants/free men who don't own land/capitalists (middle class/bourgeois). When the American and French Revolutions took place, the middle class bourgeois overthrew the upper class nobility.
So of course the term ends up being arbitrary, its definition includes both rulers and citizens living in liberal republics where nobility and feudalism have been abolished.