I think you're confusing the terms "Working Class" and "Proletarian" in basically the same way that I was pointing out in my post. And I want to make it clear, again, that I am not making the assertion that non-proletarian workers are lesser (or greater) in any way than Proletarians, just that they have a different experience of Capitalism that informs their political consciousness - which is why these terms exist to begin with.

The original distinction, of course, being the distinction between Proletarians, Peasants, and Slaves - all of whom are working class, but have their own relations to the means of production.

An Engineer is (typically) working-class, but is not a proletarian. Nor is an artist. This is why, even in their various insignia, Socialist states such as the GDR and DPRK have symbols for the Proletariat and Peasantry, yes, but also have separate symbols for Engineers and Artists.

Both groups - really, all groups - can become partially or even wholly Proletarianized. But such a state is not necessarily the default. Someone taking commissions to draw furry pornography is petty-bourgoise. Lenin himself excludes the Democrat-Bureaucrats from Proletarianism as a matter of course, despite most performing work for wages.

Many actors are partially Proletarianized, but fame should be considered a form of ephemeral Capital owned by the actor (in much the same way as a university degree) which alienates the celebrity from the general Proletarian class.

I think there is - not a scale, but a sort of spectrum - of class relations that every individual falls somewhere on. And there are pure expressions of those class relations, but also imperfect ones, and it's senseless to draw hard lines within the spectrum when the dialectical position is accepting the spectrum exists as it does (this is a bit of a non-sequitor, but I believe a very similar thing could be said of other dialectic contradictions, such as gender).

I often think of my father - I was not born into a wealthy family nor did I live a wealthy life growing up. My dad was self-employed as an auto-mechanic and was what I would call a "failed businessman". We lived in a modest (maybe around 300-400 sqft plus a basement and attic?) single-family home in a Midwestern city suburb. He was a co-founder of a natural gas automobile conversion company. He lost tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars on that and just bad stock market investments. Our family home (and only property) has a leaky roof, rusty pipes and constantly backs up with sewage, and we can't afford to get any of it fixed because the family is thousands of dollars in debt and behind on property taxes.

I say this just to say that he is not wealthy, but he is also not Working Class nor Proletarian. He is Petty-Bourgeois, in some ways maybe even Big-Bourgeois. This isn't reflected in our standard of living (and certainly won't be reflected in my inheritance when he kicks the bucket, which will be nothing or close to it), but it does inform his politics. He's not openly racist or homophobic or a conspiracy theorist or anything like that, he's not a QANON or MAGA guy, but he still won't shut the fuck up about Ross Perot, he likes all the Libertarian grifters, he wants fewer regulations and more subsidies and simpler taxes for business owners. He's afraid of "thugs" and their music, their culture, their neighborhoods; he simultaneously hates cops when they inconvenience him but is almost gleeful when they police others.

It's not about virtue or oppression but about studying how a person's relationship to Capital informs their politics.