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.