The Illusory Middle Class and the Working Class Struggle: Solidarity, not Nativism
Jonathan Locke-Vincent
5/25/2025
In our consumption-based economies, particularly those in the high-income West, we blindly disregard the complex aspects of the global supply chain that we are at the end of. We are at the end of the global conveyor belt of labor that begins with workers extracting raw materials from the earth and ends with workers in warehouses shipping out manufactured goods around the world. In the middle are those who transform raw materials into products to be directly sold or used in service-based industries. Included in this economy, there are also those who support all of this, who keep people alive, healthy, and educated enough to labor. These are our teachers, our doctors, domestic workers, and many more, in what we call the “care economy,” historically dominated by women, and often unpaid, or underpaid compared to other types of labor. The vast majority of this supply chain is invisible to the high-income West, either abroad or hidden away in regions that even many working class consumers never venture. We often live in separate worlds, even in our own country, leaving us blind to our interconnectedness.
Being working class consumers, forever buying new gadgets or products, quite often full of propaganda of our own choosing, whether through self selected media, or based on algorithms that tell us what to watch, we are regularly fooled into thinking we are of another class, an illusory pseudo-middle class, separate from our fellow workers. The North American working class owns technology never dreamed of by the working classes in our towns and neighborhoods a mere century ago, all while we’re riddled with debt and poor health, unable to access affordable housing or healthcare. We feel these technologies make us rich and make us prosperous, but they blind us from our true struggles, and distract us from our true needs: ownership of our labor, good and affordable healthcare, affordable and safe housing, accessible and affordable healthy food, affordable and good education, at all ages, and safe communities where we can live life joyously together. We additionally need a truly representative government, a non-militarized state, and a public sphere not bent on violence towards our diverse communities in the U.S.—Black and brown folks, immigrants and refugees, the incarcerated and homeless, and our LGBTQ+ communities, especially trans folks.
With this illusion of being a part of the middle class, and social media reinforcing this fight to climb the ladder to consume further, we isolate ourselves from our working class siblings. We create this illusion of separation even from our neighbors amongst us, the migrants in the Global North picking our (and their own) food, the often immigrant laborers working in hospitals, hotels, meat-packing plants, factories, and warehouses, and those driving us to-and-from work as Uber and Lyft drivers. Those of us with air-conditioned desk jobs believe that surely we can’t be working class, our work is somehow different, though we also cannot pay our bills, our rent, and our healthcare just the same, though we go on maybe only half-a-vacation more than our neighbors in the warehouse.
Additionally, and more specifically, the white working class, a large portion of the United States working class, is consistently fed nationalist and fascist propaganda, attractive because Americans have been primed, since a young age, to view the country as superior, somehow unique in the world in the ideology and ethics enshrined upon us by the Founders. When we are fed notions about our history that are untrue, or half-true, while ignoring or whitewashing our historic cruelties, we create a false, nationalistic image of our nation. When a white working class person looks backwards, with the help of this propagandized history, they see a better life, with the life of their parents and grandparents sometimes easier than their own, without the conscious reflection about the segregation and red lining that may have lifted them up, nor the more positive labor history and activism that was stronger in the past. When the two mainstream parties offer their answer to why life was often easier for white working class people in the past, we get nationalism, racism, and fascism on one hand, and a collective “shrug” on the other. Who does the white working class follow but those offering an answer to their struggles? If you don’t have a legitimate alternative, the choices are either the Republican far-right or apathy, disillusionment, and nihilism. We have to offer an alternative, one that doesn’t include malice and cruelty towards our neighbors, one that helps us to lift up ourselves and other working class people, and one that helps shed the propaganda we’ve been fed while still offering hope for a better future.
This illusion of this separation between the white working class, the non-white American working class, and the global working class must be broken, especially as more of our working class siblings are harassed, detained, and deported. Apolitical migrants are being detained while simply working and living both documented, and undocumented, and many are being deported in sweeps of alleged gang members, such as illegally deported Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego García, now ordered by the Supreme Court to be returned to the United States from the El Salvador mega prison him and many other immigrant men have been sent to. Politically involved immigrants and international students have one of the largest targets on their backs, with the present detention of Palestinian Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil and previous detention of Palestinian Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi, and the previous detention of Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk. Other detained students include labor and immigrant rights organizers and activists Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez and Jeanette Vizguerra, among many others. This is creating a new cast of political prisoners and exiles through McCarthyist laws, with threats every day moving towards potential actions aimed at United States citizens.
We need to break these barriers between us and our national and international neighbors and siblings. When it is most dangerous for them to use their voice, us native born citizens need to use ours, and we need to find ways to pull these communities into political movements on the left in ways that are both safe and inclusive, given the current dynamic under the Trump administration. We need to continue to educate ourselves and others about our place within the global working class, and to further build a global understanding connected within our regional context.