In classical Marxist terms, class is defined by one's relationship to the means of production, not by income, education, or lifestyle. The proletariat are those who have to sell their work power for a wage since they do not own or control capital, land, or the implements of production and so have surplus value extracted from their labor by an employer. Under that definition, the American working class is enormous and includes many more than factory workers: retail and service workers, nurses, truck drivers, adjunct professors, software engineers without equity, warehouse workers, and most white-collar wage earners without real control over hiring, firing, or the direction of the enterprise.
Membership is not a cultural construct but a structural one. The key tests Marxists typically apply are these: Does this person own productive property or just their labor power? Do they buy other people's labor power (employ people) for profit or sell their own, and do they have real control over the labor process, including the power to direct or discipline other workers? An independent plumber who runs a tiny company with no workers has an unclear “petty bourgeois” status. A shift supervisor with some disciplinary power over lower-paid workers but no ownership stake and no control over broader firm strategy occupies what Erik Olin Wright called a "contradictory class" location—structurally working class in terms of exploitation but wielding limited managerial power. Enter the PMC, or professional-managerial class. The term first appeared with Barbara and John Ehrenreich, who in a 1977 essay argued that 20th-century capitalism created a separate stratum of salaried professionals, managers, engineers, and technical/cultural workers; doctors; lawyers; professors; administrators; and journalists. Their role is not to produce surplus value directly or to own capital themselves, but rather to reproduce capitalist social relations and to manage the working class. Their argument was that the PMC has a fuzzy, sometimes antagonistic relationship to the traditional proletariat: like workers, they depend on wages, but they also exercise authority, credentialing power, or ideological/managerial functions that put their interests at odds with the working class in the workplace (middle management and HR) and often in cultural and political life (setting norms and controlling nonprofits, universities, media, and parts of the state bureaucracy). Contemporary Marxist and socialist writers dispute how sharp this barrier is. Some, following the Ehrenreichs, consider the PMC to be a class in itself, sitting between capital and labor, trading professional-managerial reform politics (credentialism, technocracy, diversity-and-inclusion frameworks in elite institutions) for material redistribution or working-class organizing. Others, more in line with the approach of Erik Olin Wright or Vivek Chibber, argue that the PMC label lumps together too many genuinely different positions (a hospital administrator and a public defender are not doing the same thing) and that most so-called PMC members remain wage-dependent and exploitable, meaning the deeper split with the working class is overstated. There is also a live debate about whether PMC framing is used mainly to explain the disconnect between elite liberal/progressive institutions and working-class politics in the US. Critics on the left worry that it can slide into resentment-driven anti-intellectualism rather than rigorous class analysis. Worth noting: this whole framework is one interpretive lens among many that economists and sociologists use to analyze stratification, and even within Marxism there are serious disagreements about where to draw these lines, especially considering how much of the modern US workforce is credentialed, salaried, and formally “professional” while still lacking ownership or real workplace power. In that context, DSA’s own data shows a membership that is firmly inside what the Ehrenreichs called the PMC, not the conventional proletariat. The 2021 DSA member survey found that members are overwhelmingly college-educated (over 80%, with 35% with a master's or professional degree, more than double the national rate) and clustered in “cushy” white-collar jobs, with 56% in academia, tech, the nonprofit/public sector, health care, or general white-collar jobs. Blue-collar workers make up only 4%, with another 6% working in retail or food service. 28% say their household income is over $100,000. Members are disproportionately urban (57% urban, 8% rural) and skew youthful (median age 33) and white (85% white in the 2021 survey; however, a more recent 2026 statistic claimed 66% white). Most members are still technically wage-dependent rather than owners of capital, but their profile is close to a textbook PMC profile: salaried, credentialed, employed in institutions that administer, educate, or manage rather than produce, and materially comfortable relative to the median wage worker. This composition provides the empirical basis for a lively internal debate inside and surrounding DSA. Critics, often associated with DSA’s “class-struggle” or labor-oriented caucuses, argue that the organization’s platform and culture are more reflective of PMC priorities (credentialist, discourse-heavy, and professional-nonprofit norms) than the material concerns of a Black or Latino warehouse worker or a rural service employee and that DSA is “not yet a working-class organization” in the structural sense that Marx would have defined it, something more like a socialist organization of professionals speaking on behalf of the working class than one grounded in it. This debate is part of the motivation for DSA’s “rank-and-file strategy,” which actively encourages members to get blue-collar and service-sector jobs and organize unions from the inside, an attempt to bridge the gap between the real class composition of the organization and its professed working-class ideals. Others push back that the PMC/working-class split is overdrawn, that most DSA members are still exploited wage labor without real workplace authority, and that focusing on members’ credentials risks obscuring the more important question of what political program and strategy the organization pursues. ** Sources: * 2021 DSA Member Survey Report ( https://democraticleft.dsausa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2021_member_survey_gdc_report.pdf ) * Who is DSA: a 2021 Member Survey Report ( https://www.dsausa.org/calendar/who-is-dsa-a-2021-member-survey-report/ ) * Close to one-third of Democratic Socialists of America... ( https://www.aol.com/articles/close-one-third-democratic-socialists-094818562.html ) * Can DSA Really Win Red America? (Les Leopold) ( https://lesleopold.substack.com/p/can-dsa-really-win-red-america ) * Defining Democratic Socialists – Against the Current ( https://againstthecurrent.org/atc242/defining-democratic-socialists/ ) -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42401): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42401 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120177484/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
