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)

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    9 months ago

    (this is intended as a complement to your meme, not a challenge. sometimes people get in the weeds debating which class someone's in and I think this approach cuts through that)

    aimixin on why people can have characteristics of more than one class, what matters is the dominant aspect

    Marxism is dialectic, it rejects absolute pure categories. Things sort of exist on a spectrum but sort of don't. The way Marxists use categories is to understand that everything is connected to each other through a series of quantifiable interconnected steps, but that something is always dominant, and this dominant aspect is what determines the overall quality of the thing in question.

    If you're trying to shove everything into a pure category of absolutely worker, absolutely capitalist, then this is just a useless endeavor. When we talk of "worker" or "capitalist," we don't mean it as if these are pure categories, where a worker can't ever own capital, or that a capitalist can't ever do labor. They may do these things, they may exist somewhere in between. But clearly at some point, certain characteristics become dominant over others. Clearly Jeff Bezos's class interests are not the same as a minimum wage worker, as the latter likely has next to no capital while the former has far more capital than he could ever, by his own labor, afford.

    There is no reason to try and shove this person you're describing into a specific absolute box. If they're a salaried worker who runs some very small business / self-employment on the side as supplemental income, you could just say they're a worker with petty bourgeois characteristics. You don't have to say they're absolutely "petty bourgeois" or a "worker". You can just describe that they have characteristics of multiple categories. No reason you cannot do this.