The category of middle class functions as a denial of all other class identities

Evidence

One major cultural development over the last three decades is that the only permissible mention of “class” in the economic sense has been the utterly superfluous habit of treating oneself and others as solidly “middle class.” … The suppression of the obvious point that every “middle” needs two substantial extremes to be legitimate is an artifact of the neoliberal doctrine that there is no such thing as social class, and most decidedly, “economic” classes (working class, upper class, proletariat) do not exist. The only class in which one can safely profess membership is the “middle class,” or the class of no class. But this all-inclusive category is nervously duplicitous, because it really consists of the denial of all personal categories. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 333

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘immodesty’ article’s theme of class/identity political signaling — the middle-class label as a class-based identity marker that erases class. — connects to: Conflating class-State with regulated society is a reactionary middle-class error; A class’s identity is defined by its opposite class
• SEED: Angle: how ‘middle class’ became a linguistic technology of depoliticization — a category that denies the existence of the very categories it presupposes.

Broader Connections

• Conflating class-State with regulated society is a reactionary middle-class error #expands (0.78)
• A class’s identity is defined by its opposite class #exemplifies (0.75)