TWO main terms have been suggested as 2016’s word of the year: “xenophobia” and “post-truth”. But another fashionable term right now is “working class”. For decades, a consensus ran that everyone was middle class now except a tiny group of alleged unfortunates at the bottom of society’s heap. 2016 has been the year that mainstream pundits (re)discovered the term “working class” in the same sense that Columbus “discovered” America and Captain Cook “discovered” Australia.

However, while in previous decades the working class have been seen as redoubtable allies of progress, today you’d be forgiven for getting the opposite idea. The fashionable, media notion of the working class associates them with support for those other 2016 buzzwords, “xenophobia” and “post-truth politics”, and blames them for the rise of Donald Trump and Theresa May. Essentially, we’re being told over and over that a “working-class voter” has come to mean a straight white man who fears change. In America, he probably also works in manufacturing, lives in a semi-rural area and has a low level of education.

Sensitive journalists are often careful to hyphenate the term: the white working class, the male working class, the rural working class and so on.

Yet, we rarely hear about the black working class, the Hispanic working class, working-class women or, for that matter, the vast number of college-educated working class people. So the term becomes culturally exclusive, misleading and ideologically loaded. And, honestly, I’m worried about that. The “working class” gains meaning from our idea of it. Just as “freedom” has come to mean Disneyworld and “human rights” has come to mean invading Iraq, I’m worried that “working class” will come to mean “rights at all costs for white men”.

It shouldn’t.

Here’s my modest proposal on the topic: the working class refers to people who work. More specifically, to everyone who must sell their physical or mental labour, their skills and knowledge or their time to someone else in order to live month-to-month. If somebody is telling you when to work and how to work every week, and you’ve got no alternative but to go along with it or work for someone else, you’re working class. If you choose to work when you don’t have to or if you profit from the work of other people, then you’re not working class. It’s pretty much that simple.

What about unemployed and disabled people? Well, they are forced, thanks to “welfare reform” in the most humiliating fashion to “sell” their poverty to government agents every week in return for a meagre ration. So they’re working-class too.

Whether you watch football or opera, whether you wear a beer hat or a tweed jacket, whether you read Proust or the Sunday Post, whether you are black, white or Asian is broadly irrelevant. You’ve got to sell yourself for someone else’s profit. That’s what counts. If we remember this, it’s clear that the working class are the majority in just about every society worldwide.

Only about eight per cent of American jobs today are in manufacturing. But that’s not because everyone suddenly became “middle class”. More Americans than ever are forced to sell their time and their skills on the labour market for piddling wages, meagre health insurance and limited job security.

The American working class is bigger than ever. And, despite what pundits want to portray, it certainly just isn’t made up of uneducated white males. The American working class is black, Hispanic, educated and female to a far greater degree. But, reading the coverage, you wouldn’t know that. The “imagined” working class is made up of white males in the American rust belt.

Why worry about definitions? Couldn’t we just use another term? First, we should worry because the fashionable approach to the “working class” is turning it into a special interest minority of forgotten-about, left-behind white males. Working-class politics here becomes a leering parody of Fathers for Justice: we’ve spent decades listening to women and ethnic minorities – isn’t it about time we listened to “the working class”? In that sense, the term becomes even worse than that famous Westminster canard “hard-working families”.

But if we’re clearer about defining the working class, these problems melt away. Women will soon be the majority of workers; they’re already the majority of low-paid workers and the majority of trade union members. So how can women’s rights be set against worker’s rights? Women work. And our work is equal work. And, let’s remember, women who don’t have jobs “work” too. Women still do the vast bulk of domestic work, housework and social work in society, free of charge, because society expects us to do it.

Second, we should worry about a shoddy definition because if we’re not clear about who the working class truly are, then we’ll lose our majority power: the working class really are the majority, and the agents for social change. United, we are a threat to people who dictate our lives. Divided, we are nothing.

That’s why the story of Trump’s “working class” appeal is the enemy of working-class politics. He’s selling white males the fantasy that they can empower themselves and regain privileges over women and minorities. But depressed white male workers can only regain their influence in workplaces and in society by making a collective peace with feminism and anti-racism and using that alliance to unite against the billionaires who run the country.

We can’t be naive. The “globalisation” and “free trade” of past decades has been a disaster for wage earners, particularly in manufacturing. Trump and the Brexit campaign hit on real problems. But they don’t offer solutions. They dole out cultural solace and they cash in.

The only possible solutions to today’s crisis are working-class solutions, socialist solutions. Only a united, inclusive and oppositional working class can drag us out of this worldwide depression. So it’s time to draw a line in the sand. Working-class people are people who work; they are black, Hispanic, Asian, female, gay, lesbian, transgender, educated and uneducated. They aren’t a special interest minority group set against others, they’re the majority, and they encompass all the different identities in society.