Karl Marx struck out on a lot of his confident predictions about the future of capitalism but none more so than this: “The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, … and [this equalization] nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.”¹ Marx accurately traced the dynamics that led in this direction, but many other factors, including organized worker resistance, intervened to cause a different and happier result.

The dynamic of downward equalizations was there, however, and still is. Though it was greatly restrained and even undermined for nearly half a century around the Glorious Thirty, it has more recently reasserted itself in large parts of the workforce, resulting in what some scholars call a “precariat.” In one industry or economic sector after another, whether meatpacking, warehousing, trucking, retail work, computer coding, or home health care, you can see this equalizing down of wages and conditions. Likewise, you can see it within many professions, for example, health maintenance organization general practitioners and the dependence of universities on contingent faculty. But when you look at the workforce as a whole, there is a great range of incomes and conditions, none greater than the differences between managerial and professional workers and the rest of the workforce. This is what I have been calling “the professional middle class” and “the working class.”

Still, almost everybody in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ breakdown of the workforce—whether middle or working class—is what Marx called free wage labor, a form of work and of sustenance that was just beginning to become predominant in his time.² It’s important to realize that the vast majority of middle-class professionals today, including most managerial professionals, are what in Marx’s time would have been unambiguously seen as proletarians. Both “free” and “wage” had very specific meanings that differentiated them from earlier predominant forms.³ Wage workers were neither independent farmers producing for themselves as well as for the market, artisans selling the products of their labor (shoes or cloth, for example), nor independent professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Wage workers merely sell a portion of their time in return for a wage, and during that time they do what their employer tells them to do. At the end of their workday, they are free in the sense that they owe the employer nothing more and that the employer owes them nothing at all beyond the wage. This contrasted with feudal lords who had formally recognized moral and legal obligations to their vassals and to whom vassals had similar more strictly enforced obligations. Likewise, it was the opposite of the slaveholder who needed to feed, clothe, and shelter slaves in order to protect his investment in human property. Being free, neither vassal nor slave, was a double-edged sword. The indifference of the wage employer outside of the workplace freed the worker from being controlled in all aspects of life. But it also meant that the worker was entirely dependent on having a job and one with a decent wage. With such a job, a worker had some free time for what you will. But without one, wage workers had nothing to sustain themselves, no means by which to exercise their wills other than to seek employment. They were “wage slaves,” bound by necessity to having a job.

Class struggle over the last two hundred years has established a web of economic safety nets and social wages to partially protect wage workers from unlimited subjection to finding and keeping a job. As productivity and therefore wealth systematically increased in advanced forms of capitalism, workers also won increased wages and reduced hours, weeks, and years of work. But despite the wide range of incomes and conditions, despite the wages-and-hours distinction between salaried and wage workers, almost all of us in twenty-first-century America are proletarians, dependent on wages from employment to sustain ourselves. The wide range among our incomes and our wealth makes us more or less dependent on that wage, but anyone who could not sustain themselves without working for a wage is free wage labor, whether manager or janitor, professor or administrative assistant. Today a prime-age worker in the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution could get by without a paycheck for from six days to six months, and the majority of the top 20 percent could not last more than a year.⁴ By this measure, the person who could last a year without a job lives in a different world than someone who could last only a week, but both are still wage slaves dependent on having a job to sustain themselves or their families.

As proletarians all, though we have conflicting interests, we have an overriding common interest in protecting wage work in general from unrestricted vulnerability to the vicissitudes of the market. The variability of wages and conditions, rather than a downward equalization, strengthens capitalism by creating a hierarchy of life conditions, life chances, and life prospects that divide us in a way Marx could never have anticipated, and each of the various steps in that hierarchy is well worth fighting to maintain or achieve. Today most occupations that pay well and offer a decent level of job and life security are professional jobs, including management, that operate within a professional ethos cultivated through various kinds of higher education.

It is important to see our shared class interests, our unity as free wage labor, because together the professional and working classes are the vast majority, and coalitions among us are vital for representative democracy to positively transform the current and developing system. But it’s also important to see the differences in life circumstances that tend to produce different class cultures. These different cultures often, even usually, cause us to misunderstand each other because we fail to meet each other’s expectations. These misinterpretations of each other, in turn, are part of what keeps us from seeing our common interest and effectively working to reconcile our conflicting interests.

In chapter 5, I show that much in professional middle-class culture encourages professionals to ignore or deny the existence of any other class culture. Middle-class culture has a distinct tendency to see itself as the one right way, as the one and only worthwhile culture that other cultures should be measured against and that all people should aspire to achieve. Given our cultural power to shape public frames, agendas, and discourse, this hegemonic tendency creates additional distances and conflicts between us and the working class. Chapter 6 will then present a systematic portrayal of what I see as the categorical differences in the cultures that lead to common misinterpretations while also arguing that the cultures can and often do complement each other at both societal and individual levels.

In this discussion, however, it is important to remember that though I am ignoring it, there is a ruling class, whether you call it the capitalist or owning class or the 1 percent (which may actually be the top 2 or 3 percent). Through their economic power, both in the workplace and in the ways they mobilize their wealth, this class rules a lot of our lives directly—on the ground, so to speak—though not necessarily in a unified, coordinated way. In addition, through their ownership of most means of communication and their increasingly important role in funding higher education, not to mention their enormous power in bankrolling politicians, they exercise substantial cultural power as well. But most of this power is exercised indirectly through us middle-class professionals; by shaping our basic economic and political parameters, they influence our sense of realism on what can be productively thought and done. Still, though this is now deteriorating, as waged professionals we have a historically huge degree of freedom of thought and action. Within that realm, my argument is that we can both better protect ourselves as a class and advance the common good by opening a more nuanced and equal dialogue with working-class people and their cultures.