Economic and social classes are as real as any other human cultural distinction, and different from each other. That is, they have many unclear borders and major impact on life.
I grew up in Vermont so my anecdotes are out of date but: one of our neighbors ran an unlicensed trash dump in his front yard. He had appliances and salvage, even a couple of cars buried underneath the driveway. Some of his more direct neighbors complained about it, but nobody backed them up because he was also the snowplow operator for our neighborhood and hence untouchable. There was also some friction (in general) over hunting and private property. In grade school all the kids hung out regardless of what their parents did, but in high school things tended to partition between the kids whose parents went to college and expected their kids to do so too, and the kids who didn’t have that background. A few wannabe neo-Nazi kids showed up from a much more remote town; not sure if that was a class divide or just an asshole divide.
Seems like moving the goalposts. There are distinctions between income levels. Yes. Of course.
The Marxist distinction between proletariat and bourgeoisie was inherently a situation where the have-nots are preyed upon and exploited by the upper class. This seems to a fairly poor description of the socio-economic facts in Vermont.
It is true that the kind of class system Marx talked about doesn’t really fit well into modern contexts. One also sees people using ‘class’ as a synonym for ‘household income band’ which, while it’s fair to say is a contemporary usage, doesn’t really correspond to what is meant when the term is used in, for example, the Washington post.
