Class is very much an intellectual construct, an ossification of natural behavior. The simple fact is that some people have the wish and talent to boss, and some people - say, 79% of them - do not. These people self-select into roles as bosses and workers. In that context, workers have economic interests as workers and should organize to negotiate the best material outcome for themselves. That's not "class"; it's job description.

Class, on the other hand, is a social thing. The issue around class is mobility. The haves have always used class to keep what they have, discriminating against people who are NOCD (Not Our Class, Dear). That's a social problem that needs to be addressed by stories of self-made prosperity and cross-the-tracks romance.

For the most part, though, people choose to remain in their social class, the best evidence, I think, being their accents as semiotic signifiers. If you want to join the elite, you have to drop dese, dems and dose from your pronoun list. That so many people choose not to make that leap is telling about how they view class membership. And, perhaps making a virtue out of necessity, working class people can take pride in their ethic.

What Marxists seem to me to miss is that most members of the proletariat are happy to be in the proletariat so long as their material interests as workers are improved by industrial and political action. (Politics is just labor relations continued by other means.)