This exchange is a fight over whose sociology flatters whom, and both parties are losing it. Charles found something real and didn't notice: the caricature of DSA treats credentials and income as one signal, and the CES data separates them. Instead of pressing that, he re-described his own bolding after the fact, which is why Marv had the easy reply. Marv's history is right, and his inference is not. Yes, the postwar absorption of college-educated labor into health, education, and public administration is over; yes, the unaffordability crisis is documented. But "I take their politics more seriously because those politics are rooted in their material conditions" is legitimation, not assessment. Read that sentence back with the sociology inverted, and you have Cutrone's PMC argument: same move, opposite sign. Deriving a stratum's politics from its position is not more Marxist when the conclusion is generous. Some problems with the numbers themselves. Household income conflates a lone adjunct at $50k with a two-earner household at $50k. The $30–60k postgrad band is heavily life-cycle: grad students, residents, and early-career public-sector and nonprofit workers who will not remain there. Neither "privileged" nor "precariat" survives that contact. And the data describe self-selected survey respondents who are members—Marv's phrase "the DSA base" does a lot of quiet work that the CES cannot support. The substantive point is the one neither of you reaches. Downwardly mobile credential holders are wage-laborers regardless of their rank among other credential holders; that settles the solidarity question and tells us nothing about strategy. What matters is that this is a layer with education, low income, and almost no structural leverage at the point of production. Such a layer converts its capacities into electoral, media, and staff politics because those are the only channels in which its capacities convert at all. The pull toward reformism here is not the smugness of the comfortable—it is a structural property of the composition, and it operates on precisely the people Marv is defending. Which is the argument worth having: not whether the Subaru Socialists deserve our respect, but what organizational form disciplines a body constituted this way? Recall salary caps and fraction accountability. Absent those, sympathy for the cohort's conditions is just a nicer way of predicting the same outcome. Tony -- Tony
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