By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
For a movement that is obsessed with class distinctions
and interclass conflict, the Democratic Socialists of America don’t seem to
have an uncontested definition of what makes someone a member of the “working
class.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently took a stab
at it, though not to the satisfaction of his interlocutor, the New York
Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro:
Mamdani’s confusion is not his alone. He and his fellow
Democratic Socialists are apt to craft definitions so expansive
that they include well-compensated professionals — from programmers to doctors
who are “making $400,000-plus,” according to New York City DSA co-chair Grace Mausser — only so that they can include themselves
among the proletariat.
For those of us who can recognize Hasan Piker’s costumed reenactments of the Cultural Revolution for the
teeth-shatteringly cringe-inducing spectacles they are, there’s a lot of humor
in this. But there is a long Marxist tradition in which the well-heeled and
overeducated assume a working-class identity so as to appropriate its assumed
authenticity. Marx himself agonized over how to define class without casting himself
and his fellow discontented wastrels as irredeemably bourgeois.
Where does the proletariat end and the managerial class
begin? Does it end with what Marx called the “labor aristocracy” — wage
earners, to be sure, but also trade unionists co-opted by and in league with
the upper classes? Does it include the “lumpenproletariat,” whom Marx derided
as criminals and degenerates that nevertheless make up a significant portion of
the disaffected masses?
The most enduring Marxian definition settled on “a class
of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so
long as their labor increases capital.” That could describe just about anyone
who “sells” labor in the marketplace. And eventually it did. Marx and, later,
Friedrich Engels identified a phenomenon in which even highly paid
professionals can be “proletarianized.”
In the end, all that makes someone reliably a member of
the “working class” in the Marxist conception of the word is the extent to
which they experience “class struggle.” But the struggle they envision is only
ever against the forces unleashed by capitalism, not those imposed on American
workers by the imperious state.
As the DSA’s Gustavo Gordillo ill-advisedly admitted on
national television, workers’ rights take a back seat to socialist power grabs.
“If one publicly owned store is enough to put someone out of business,”
Gordillo said of the struggling grocers with whom Mamdani’s
state-owned outlets will now compete, “then maybe they shouldn’t have been in
that business in the first place.”
Of course, the malleable definition of what constitutes
the working class papers over this conflict. With this solipsistic device, the
upstart bodega owner who operates on the thinnest of margins becomes an
aristocratic elite, while his tormentors, who have only ever known the rarified
redoubts of academia and advocacy, somehow cast themselves as the
weather-beaten avatars of the great unwashed.
It’s a neat trick, but an old one. What’s most impressive
about it is that it still works.
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