There are only two classes: Working Class, and Ruling Class.
Unless you have the kind of money that allows you to influence politics and get legislation passed that is favorable to you/your "industry", you are working class.
You take the side of the capitalists because you've acquired a level of economic comfort that the average citizen can only dream about, and that has lulled you into a false sense of security. To you, you're at least middle class, if not upper-middle class - but there's no such thing. Not really. You see yourself as "one of them", even if your money doesn't buy politicians, but you're not one of them. You're one of us, and you're just working for them like a good little boot-licker. You're fooling yourself if you think they won't eventually come for you too.
You applaud, or at the very least "look the other way" as they bulldoze the lowest earners into insecure housing, homelessness, and when they get desperate and hopeless enough, into prisons. You think that will never be you, but it is you. It's you, right now. Your prisons are fancier than those scary ones with bars on the windows. You rake yourself over the coals to afford to buy your way into your fancy prison, and tether yourself to a lifetime of indentured servitude to pay off mortgages and loans and car payments. You welcome the push towards a cash-free society because the all-encompassing they will never use your dependence on digital money to cut off your access (such child-like naivete). They've been cutting access to resources slowly but surely for everyone else, but they'll never come for you, right? Why not? What could possibly stop them from shoveling you into the new "slave class" when the time comes and when there are none of us left to fight for you?
You welcome a world where you can buy your groceries from home, and never speak to your neighbours, never stopping to wonder why we're being driven further and further towards becoming a society of islands. Individualized, isolated, insulated... Community is the greatest power of the people and we're getting to a point where "community" will cease to exist in any kind of meaningful way. Too tired to put the effort in to organize. Stretched too thin to make time for social and/or community engagement. Too insulated and suspicious of everyone else to be able to trust that anyone out there could possibly actually be honest. You're told in a thousand different ways every day that everyone else wants what you have, and that they'll take it in any way they can, so you have to protect it. Keep everyone else out.
The day will come when they do come for everything you have, but it won't be the people you've been taught to suspect and avoid. It'll be the ones whose asses you've spent your life kissing in hopes of some day joining them at their table. There was never a place for you there, and there never will be.
Some of you know it, already. Deep down in your gut, you're starting to realize it. You've felt it. The "pinch" that people in your "social class" were never supposed to have to experience. Grocery anxiety was reserved for "the poors" before, but here you are, worried about the cost of meat, and cheese, and fucking lettuce. You were comfortable, and now you have to tighten your belt a bit... and maybe you're telling yourself that it's not so bad, or that it'll get better, or whatever you need tell yourself in order to keep believing that social classes are not just false constructs designed to keep the Working Class from organizing against the Ruling Class. You're so desperate to keep believing that you're of a certain class that you're just going to lay down and suck it up and keep taking the pinch. It's just a pinch, right? Yeah. It's a pinch that's going to tighten more and more and more. Capitalism is relentless. It cannot thrive without infinite growth, and infinite growth is not possible without infinite shrinkage on the other end. That's you, now. The shrinkage has reached you, and it'll keep squeezing you until it reaches everyone.
And those who aren't feeling it yet? They will. Unless they have the kind of wealth that buys space ships and 100-year fallout bunkers and political influence, they're gonna feel it too... And when the wealthiest of the Working Class finally feel the pinch, it'll be too late for all of us.
