Drake saying no to the conventional class system of lower, middle and upper class, but saying yes to the marxist distinction based on one’s ownership of means of production and the ability to profit off of another class’s labor.
Proletarians sell the value of their labor to bourgeois who profit off of the excess value the workers produce, and typically own the means and infrastructure of production, be it a factory or a farm, or in more recent and digital times, usually the “Cloud”, ad space, the social media platform (youtube, facebook, twitter), and digital marketplace (Amazon, who has monopsony power on digital sellers)
The ruling class is someone who primarily uses capital to gain capital.
The working class is someone who primarily uses labor to gain capital.
An artisan is clearly selling their labor. “But they own their own tools” is so astoundingly irrelevant.
No it’s not irrelevant because Marx says that people gain class consciousness through recognizing that they are exploited by the people who purchase their labor. The artisan doesn’t experience the same struggle as someone who sells their labor directly to a capitalist.
The problem is not “selling your labor”. Exploitation occurs by surplus labor value being extracted from your labor. The exploitation is that the capitalist pays the proletarian less than their labor value produces. When an artisan sells things that they have made, they receive their full labor value.
The artisan is not being directly exploited by the capitalist and therefore probably does not see capitalists as the “ruling class”.
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There’s no such thing as pure class. Marx is explicit that his analysis is abstraction to aid understanding.
Does the artisan or “small business owner” have student or business loans to a bank? Do they pay rent or a mortgage? They are exploited by capital.
Artisans class consciousness is affected by the fact that access to capital and self determination is kind of pay walled. Artisans are often the children of bourg and petty bourg, or aspirational intellectual proletariat. Noone else can afford to go to art school or conservatory for 6 years and support themselves unless their patents are rich or at least well-off.
Artisans don’t experience the same alienation, though. They aren’t alienated from the means or the product of their work.