It's not about income, power or prestige for me. That's all smokescreen to obscure what does define classes -- relationship to the means of production, and relations to other classes.

Income is never the issue. A CEO that receives $1 in salary -- or no salary, symbolically -- is no less a manager than s/he was when they made $6.7 million. An autoworker with 20 years in and making $45,000 a year is still selling his or her ability to work on the market -- and having only that to sell on the market -- the same way that a new hire making half that amount is. A manager making relatively the same as his or her employees still has more in common with a manager making 10 times as much because they both occupy the same social position and have the same social being.

And in terms of alignments, there is the matter of social being determining consciousness. From the moment each of us is born, we are "tracked" based on our class background (social being). The schools we go to and education we receive, the stores, restaurants and shops we patronize, our friends, our neighbors, our authority figures, etc., are determined by where we stand. And our experiences with each of those elements, in turn, influence and shape how we see the world, how we understand it and, more importantly, what we want and expect from it.

I've learned over the years that there is no such thing as cross-class common interest. Common interests, when you get beyond abstractions, mean different things to different classes. "Democracy" for a worker means something fundamentally different, when you get past the abstract elements, than it does for someone who is a manager or business owner. And not only is there no universal common interests among classes, but the "common interests" on one class generally conflict with the "common interests" of others.

If working people align themselves with "middle class" managers/professionals/officials or with business owners, they are usually doing so over and against their own common interests as workers (and also usually as a result of a lifetime of propaganda being shoved down their throats). And, in my experience, when elements from the "middle class" or owning class go slumming and claim to be aligning themselves with the interests of the working class, it's because they are seeking to profit or otherwise gain some advantage from it. I have never met someone from one of these classes who called me friend and didn't have his or her hand in my pocket.

I know you want to get some of these "middle class" elements to see things from the perspective of the poor and working class. Sadly, that simply cannot happen unless they ditch their current social being and actually join the working class. Barring that, the best they can do is engage in a sappy feel-good adventure that only gets insulting for those of us who are subjected to it. The worst is use us as pawns for their own emotional (and material) gain.

This is why I'm a hardened classist, and make no apologies for it.

I am working class. What they know I can learn ... and what I know they can never learn.