I’ve been having trouble explaining to liberal co-workers that there isn’t really an “Upper” or “Lower” working class. They insist that class as a relation to means of production is outdated and it makes more sense to measure it by income. What’s the most effective way to explain to them why this doesn’t work?
Look at how we use classification for literally everything else.
We classify animals (colloquially, not scientifically) by their distinguishing features because that’s the most useful information. Birds can fly. Fish can swim and live in the water. We name them (i.e. classify them) by how they relate to the environment.
We do also distinguish by size, for example a whale and a minnow. But we don’t do that at the expense of other forms of classification.
An Ostritch and a Great White are both large animals, but we don’t call them just ‘big animal’. It helps to know the difference. It helps a lot. (If you have ‘big feathery land animal’ and ‘big watery bitey animal’ you’re effectively listing variables and classification is just naming these combinations)
That thing about Inuit having a load of different words for snow. They classify different types of snow because it’s extremely useful to them. We* don’t. Very few humans can tell poisonous mushrooms apart from edible ones anymore. We’d relearn that knowledge very quickly again if we needed to.
All this to say: yeah, wealth bracket is actually useful for understanding the material conditions of your society. So is relation to the means of production. They’re not mutually exclusive. We shouldn’t be conflating them but rather examining why they so often correlate. People who insist on mutual exclusivity or conflation either have a vested interest in us being ignorant of relation to means of production, or they’re ignorant of its importance.
Know your mushrooms.
*:sorry kind of assumed no Inuit are reading here