What's working class?

If someone pays you a wage—if you sell your time for money—you're working class.

Applications, in terms of my taxonomy of peeves:

• The idea of "elites" as "people who live on the coast and have college degrees." That is the word "elite" doing some work to describe assorted socioeconomic resentments. If you have a four-year degree and a boss, you are still working class. 
• The idea that the Republican Party "understands the working class." That is the phrase "working class" being used to describe a particular demographic within the working class, and poorly at that. What the Republican Party understands is the resentments and fears of that particular sub-demographic of the working class. It exploits those resentments and fears to serve capital. 
• The people described in the first bullet—college educated "elites"—who don't think they are working class, or who talk down about the working class, because they've bought into the Republican Party idea that "the working class" is something white, non-college-educated men are, but not really anybody else. This is a contributing factor in the creation of anti-union liberals, despite a robust history of non-white labor activism and unionism. 

Useful resources and ideas to help rethink these ruinous beliefs people have that keep them from working toward solidarity with other working class people:

• The professional managerial "class" (PMC): Barbara Ehrenreich did a magnificent job of defining these people in her 1989 Fear of Falling. In a nutshell, someone had to do something to mediate the bloody differences between labor and capital in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and a socio-economic "class" was born. These people still earn a wage and are still working class to the extent they do not earn their wealth from controlling capital, but by being capital's handmaidens. They thoroughly conflate their interests with capital's interests. 
• Thomas Franks' Listen Liberal!, which does a great job of recapitulating the anti-New Deal, anti-labor, and ultimately neoliberal turn of the Democratic Party in the '70s and '80s. I recommend this one because it is very hard to get through peoples' reflexive distrust of any message suggesting the Democratic Party has been anything less than "good on labor," and Thomas Franks is recognizable to good liberals as the author, also, of What's the Matter with Kansas? He's a lefty populist. He's on your side. Give him a read. 
• Catherine Liu's The Virtue Hoarders, which I would stay away from if you're sensitive to mildly scurrilous social commentary. If Ehrenreich said "there are these working class people who routinely align their interests with capital over labor and they're sort of a class (in the less Marxist sense) with their own cultural tics and norms," and if Thomas Frank says "yeah, and here's how they went on to capture the Democratic Party and steer it fully toward the interests of the financier class and global capital," then Catherine Liu is here to describe their mores. It's a useful thing to read, because you can start seeing the ways in which some of the things PMC people care about are ephemeral and deeply aligned with what capital wants.

If you mistrust capital, capitalists, and capitalism, you should probably  mistrust the social formation that represent's capital's interests in your day-to-day work, or at least be wary of how deeply held and lasting its "values" are. It cares about what capital cares about. Does capital care about you? That's your answer for whether the professional managerial class, as an aggregate, cares about you.