askchapo

Because the "middle class" is a fictitious category that everyone from people struggling to stay above the poverty line to literal millionaires think they belong to. It's what "respectable" people are, the small landholders and people who aspire to own land.

It was cynically created by encouraging suburban land ownership among certain privileged (white) working class demographics, and later reinforced by encouraging tying small amounts of stock ownership into pensions or workers' benefits. It's a way of making workers mistakenly see their own material interests as being aligned with the ruling class's, and insulating them against reforms that would benefit them directly at the cost of meaning less value for the meager property they've acquired.