"Working class" is not an indicator of income, education, manual labor, ideology, etc. You can financially comfortable or unemployed, teach at universities or work in a mine. You are working class *if you have to sell your labor in order to survive*

A landlord, whose income is from renting property instead of renting their mind and body, is not working class. Same for a business owner. They may do work, but they get to keep the full value of that labor. Employees only ever get a fraction, the rest goes to the boss.

Not working and receiving unemployment, disability, or other government or financial assistance does not mean you aren't working class either. *You still don't have anything other than yourself to sell for an income*

If you are a freelance or gig artist, editor, coder, driver, laborer, etc., you are still working class unless you're doing that on the side while a bunch of property you own accrues rental income or something, lol. If you sell your labor you're working class  ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

To clarify, a business owner who is just a freelancer doing all their own work is not the same as a business owner who employs other people and has them using infrastructure owned by the boss to make the boss money.

A lot of people don't like this definition of working class because it doesn't necessarily capture the way people feel about themselves, and it lumps together people who may be desperately poor with those who may be pretty comfortable.

Those are real issues, and they beg the question of *why* we need to define the working and owning classes in the first place.

We need a definition of the working class to understand power and guide our organizing toward a system that works for all of us. In our political and economic system a person who owns money making property is far more powerful than someone who is just well paid for their work.

The person who owns money making property may be socially liberal or whatever, but they will fight like hell against shifting to a system that makes them politically equal with a nurse or cashier.

We've seen that working class isn't a particularly useful metric for electoral polling. "Working class," even by the silliest uneducated/manual-labor definitions, doesn't tell us how folks will actually vote.