"Class" and "Status" in Myanmar vocabulary

The use of the term "လူတန်းစား" in the recently posted review of the film "Thingyan Moe" highlights the ambiguous way in which this term is sometimes used. Native Myanmar speakers often conflate "လူတန်းစား" with "လူအဆင့်အတန်း". This conflation is misleading.

"လူတန်းစား" should be translated into English as "class" and "လူအဆင့်အတန်း" should be translated as "status". In a Marxist (မာ့စ်ဝါဒ) sense "လူတန်းစား" refers to socio-economic groups defined in terms of their relationship to the means of production ("ကုန်ထုတ်ကိရိယာနှင့် ဆက်ဆံရေး"). Defined this way, the word can be used in terms like the following:

အလုပ္သမား လူတန္းစား ။ working class
ပစ္စည်းမဲ့လူတန်းစား ။ proletariat (lit. property-less class)
အရင်းရှင် လူတန်းစား ။ capitalist class
ဘူဇွာ လူတန်းစား ။ bourgeois class (propertied middle income class)
လူတန်းစား ပဋိပက္ခ ။ class conflict

However, native Myanmar speakers sometimes use the word "လူတန်းစား" as though it meant "status", in terms of socio-economic stratification, as with the following terms:

အခြေခံ လူတန်းစား ။ lower class (lit. 'basic' class)
အလယ်အလတ်တန်းစား လူတန်းစား ။ middle class
အထက်တန်းလွှာ လူတန်းစား ။ upper class

The terms "lower class", "middle class" and "upper class" are, of course, commonly used in English as well. And they are just as misleading in English. When class is (mis)understood as referring to income level, rather than a relationship to the means of production, it misses the fact that even people of middle income (and even at times high income), if they are wage earners, are also part of the proletariat (ပစ္စည်းမဲ့လူတန်းစား) and thus have shared class interests with low income workers.