Livre d'Or

My (very simplistic) understanding of class-according-to-Marxists (and their successors) is that there are two major classes: those who sell their labor for a wage, and those who own things and thereby extract value from those who need to use those things. If someone sells their labor for a wage, they are a worker. If someone owns things and makes money through rents, usury, or by extracting profits through not paying their laborers what their labor is actually worth, they are a capitalist, and class struggle is the workers versus the capitalists, a struggle the workers need to win.

In practice, it probably is more complicated than that. Here in the States, the capitalists (and the media) forever dangle the prospect that if a worker aligns themselves with the capitalists and champions their interests, at some point they might be able to change from being a worker to a capitalist themselves. (This happens at the same rate of any other statistically unlikely event, and even cursory investigations into how "self-made" wealthy people obtained their wealth often turn up that they already had wealth enough to keep failing until something succeeded.)

When combined with other messaging about how anyone other than a cis white man doing any sort of work is "stealing" that job from the cis white man and that anyone other than a cis white man using any form of public assistance is "stealing" that white man's money or is "undeserving" of that money, and you get the much more hyped clash of the (white) "working class man", who is supposed to represent the true soul and opinions of the country because he is ignorant but for what capitalists, churches, and conservative-leaning media tell him, versus the "educated liberal", who has been "indoctrinated" by hostile forces in the academy into (sometimes only very) occasionally questioning the messages of capitalism, church, and media.

Class warfare, as such, seems to simplify in the direction of "capitalists telling one group of workers that another group of workers are Different and Wrong, and they are preventing you from becoming capitalists like us. Take what you deserve from them, and pay no attention to what we are taking from all of you." And from that basic premise, all sorts of bigotry is condoned and put into being to try and divide people on issues that aren't "workers need to fight capitalists".

So when someone asks about "working class," they're asking about a whole bunch of different things and should really clarify what they mean, because there's a good chance when they say "working class," what they mean is "the interests of capitalists and their allies."