Middle class is and always was just a third-class aristocracy that preside over the stolen labour of the imperial periphery.

Petite Bourgeois. Professional Managerial Class. Mercantile Class. Yeomen/Freeholder. The Third Estate. There's a bunch of different names for it, depending on which socio-economic system you operate under.

We’re all culpable.

To be culpable, you need a certain level of agency. I'm reluctant to hang blame on a cog in the machine, even if that cog gets a marginally nicer standard of living than their peers. That way lays liberalist self-flagellation, rather than proletarian unity. The House Slave has no more say in the running of the plantation than the Field Slave, even if the clothing is nicer and the living quarters less drafty.

I’d even go as far as to say there is no true proletariat in the imperial core because of how pervasively the spoils of exploitation is distributed here.

sound of J. Sakai's Settlers hitting the desk

If you're looking for a "real" proletarian underclass, look no farther than all the prison labor camps our country has perpetuated. You've got homeless folks and debtors picked up by the modern day Press Gangs to do piecework for subsistence wages.

But climb up a rung or two to the modern-day service sector, what's left of blue collar industry, the vocational trades, and the third-string office jobs. You're still going to find debt peonage and a carceral state. People showing up to work with ankle monitors because they're still on probation. People perpetually underwater on the car they need or the college debt they need or the housing note they need to stay out of bankruptcy and homelessness.

The domestic infrastructure is much nicer. When we need health care, there are doctors in the neighborhood who can provide treatment (which we maybe can afford) and schools that provide some professionalized education (which will maybe result in a sustainable employment) and highways/railways to get us where we need to go, and even parks and theaters and other amusement centers for a degree of recreational relief.

But any Roman will tell you that walking distance from the Colosseum didn't make you more or less of a slave. Proletarianization isn't about whether or not you hate your life. It's about whether or not you own your labor.