From my experience talking to my lib but left-sympathetic friends, it seems like people misidentify the middle class with the working class because they literally "work".
I think they see the "lower class" as critically poor, jobless, homeless people and so on.
tbf the "upper," "middle," and "lower class" naming convention is maybe-deliberately obfuscatory. Much better to describe things in terms of relation to production.
, it seems like people misidentify the middle class with the working class because they literally "work".
As I understand it "working class" encompasses anyone whose income comes from working regardless of how well off they are, as distinct from people whose income comes from owning shit (stocks or other rent seeking). Am I off base here?
Kind of yeah. It's why marxists use more specific terms like proletariat, peasant, petit bourgeois, labor aristocrat, comprador, PMC etc to convey extra nuance.
When a Marxist is trying to avoid saying "proletariat", that is the definition they will use, but that is absolutely not the common American definition.