The most successful propaganda operation in American history was convincing American workers that they were middle class. Not working class. Not employees. Not people whose survival depends on selling their labor to people who own capital. Middle class. The word does enormous work. It places the speaker in the center: not at the bottom, not at the top, but in the reasonable, stable, neither-extreme middle. It produces identification with the system rather than critique of it, because middle-class people are not dispossessed. They are participants. It severs solidarity with the people below, because if you are middle class, you are not working class, and the interests of working-class people are not automatically your interests. And it produces aspiration upward rather than organization horizontally. The middle-class person is always potentially on their way to wealth, never actually on their way to collective power. The word "middle class" dissolved the American labor movement more effectively than the Pinkertons ever did. And people use it about themselves voluntarily. Without any prompting. That is how you know it worked.