Economic function, not legal status, defines membership in the working class.

Evidence

It requires little imagination to envision the brisk trade in prison-made shoes, baked goods, and other staples carried on in the groggeries, brothels, and pawn shops down on the docks less than a mile away, as often as not by the guards. In fact the inmates of the jail were intimately connected with the life of the city around them and their labor was an integral part of the city’s economy. Their role in the economy made the inmates not merely prisoners, or convicted criminals, or unfortunate victims of society, but workers—in this case unfree workers. Along with slaves, apprentices, and child laborers, as well as the wage-laborers traditionally thought to comprise the working class, they made up part of the capital–labor relation of the time. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 156

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s category-reclassification comparison: class position derives from labor role, analogous to how Irish became white via economic positioning not color. — connects to: Class membership is defined by control over the means of production; The economy is not a machine but a set of exploitative social relations. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 38; Alienated labor is a class phenomenon, not a technical one. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 736 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Class membership is defined by control over the means of production #corroborates (0.90)
• Mainstream framing of class as income and status obscures the working class’s existence #corroborates (0.82) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 84
• Alienated labor is a class phenomenon, not a technical one. #corroborates (0.78) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 736
• The economy is not a machine but a set of exploitative social relations. #expands (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 38
• The mob is a by-product of bourgeois society, not the working class #corroborates (0.72) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 422