"If you're making $300k a year, you have more in common with someone making minimum wage than you do with Elon [Musk, the founder of Tesla and other corporations]. There are people that walk among us that have so much wealth, that even generations of mismanagement can't squander it. These folks you speak of are not those folks."
Imo high-paid workers are potential allies, but don't count on it
GenericFatGuy said: "There's only two classes. Working class, and owner class. If you're required to work in order to survive, then you're working class. Doesn't matter if it's 20k, or 200k a year."
he's cool, but why is news week literally reporting :reddit-logo: comments lol
“If you’re making $300k a year, you have more in common with someone making minimum wage than you do with Elon [Musk, the founder of Tesla and other corporations]. There are people that walk among us that have so much wealth, that even generations of mismanagement can’t squander it. These folks you speak of are not those folks.”
I mean isn't this technically true?
Sure upper middle class yuppies tend to be wealth obsessed sociopathic ghouls same as the actual capitalist class but there's still a whole lot of difference in their wealth.
No. They're literally just counting the wealth gap. No analysis of how the petty bourgeois/PMC actually lives compared to working people. Their jobs are fake. They are comfortably wealthy. They probably own property and have access to actual lines of credit.
Sure their lives are very different, but in the end most of the PMC, unless they become rentseekers themselves with real estate, in which case they become capitalists anyway, are still dependent on their "labor", however useless it may be, for their income.
Eventually all PMC become rentseekers though otherwise they can never retire.
This is provably false? Most people's retirement is held in stonks, if you're making 300k/yr you could probably retire with just cash
Stocks are rent-seeking. All passive income is rent-seeking. Any creation of value that doesn't produce anything is rent-seeking. Is everyone that owns stock evil because that value, at some point, was extracted from someone not being paid the full value of their labor? Probably not. Modern capitalism has been quite brilliant in this regard. It's basically said that instead of even attempting to reconcile any of its contradictions, it's going to keep creating more and more, which will require a larger and larger bureaucracy to defuse. Add in constant boom/bust cycles and you've got this self-perpetuating monster called global capitalism.
Depends when you go to collect. If you are retiring in 2008 or 2022 then no. I live in a retirement community and I guarantee you most of these people have investment properties. In the US most people's retirement is absolutely fucking nothing with some social security crumbs. The rest are a mix of investors. Some are stocks only but many are diversified. Also real estate companies, management companies, and banks make great stocks.
thats more of a selection bias because the people that ever get paid that much and work for it have been hand picked by the ultra rich themselves usually. some of them are good at putting on a face for work of course
Sure upper middle class yuppies tend to be wealth obsessed sociopathic ghouls same as the actual capitalist class
Plenty of wealth-obsessed sociopaths in the middle and working classes too. A lot of them are crypto bros.
f you’re making $300k a year, you have more in common with someone making minimum wage than you do with Elon
Then start fuckin acting like it you petty suburban fascists
If you're making $300k a year you are less than 2% of the population. It's not worth alienating the other 98% to placate your PMC guilt.
Wait a minute, this site told me PMC was evil, so I quit my six figure a year management job to go back to school to become a nurse. Are you telling me I didn't have to do that?
"Never take advice from strangers on the internet" is as true here as it is anywhere else.
Fwiw I hope nursing brings you more satisfaction on a personal level than the job you quit.
The plan is to continue through a DNP in psych/MH, and that kind of money is possible, but I'm looking to do community based mental health, so probably not, but I'll definitely be comfortable.
A feature of capitalism is when you have a group of workers able to live less precariously, they become protective of it because it ultimately is temporary. They’ll seek out means to make even their own income stable over time.
This creates that false division of upper middle class. It’s the moderator vanguard to capital and they dont even have to be told to do it
It's almost as if they are a slightly different class, but still not the bourgeoisie? It's almost as though Marx talked about this...
What would constitute petit bougs in today's western economies though? Is it every high paying job?
definitely not. you can get paid 120k in san francisco and LA and still live paycheck to paycheck unironically because of how expensive housing is there. 150-200k would be in the comfortable range, as insane as that is
ultimately, passive income is what defines your class character. workers that own their own house and nice things are the same as workers that do not have those things. its just workers without those are overexploited in comparison to the rich worker's exploitation lite. a landlord makes money passively, a small business tyrant makes money passively, someone with a ton of stocks makes it passively (and im not just talking about hedging against inflation), and so on. its easier for these richer workers to accrue money to get passive income, but that doesnt necessarily mean they have it.
And even on that note, most of the true movers of the markets are not those former or current workers. You can have 10 million in the stock market and still be completely subjected to the whims of capitalists. You're going to be better off and mostly secure, but your ability to manipulate the stock market is basically non-existent. That being said, if they are using that money to manipulate their local or forgien markets, then they are into petite-boug territory. But passive income is a better marker.
I always situate the conversation around control of the market, rather than anything else.
id say having 10 million in the stock market, S&P is usually at around 5-10.5% returns. that means youre accruing a million, more or less, each year. sure, its petit booj, but lets not kid ourselves by calling them a worker
There are plenty of guys who started their careers engineering in the 80's for whom this is the case, due to the enourmous inflation of the markets. They are still workers whose labor value has likely been extracted. Likely not close to the rate of the factory workers who actually executed their designs, but saying they are in the same class as even C-suite people, let alone owners is absurd. Are they likely to side with workers when the revolution comes? Not really. But are they workers whose primary generated income was the exchange of labor? Yes. They are some other class, idk what to call them though I guess the moniker is PMC, though I'd hesitate to call most engineers managers.
Interestingly enough, it's these kinds of people who are mostly in charge of running China atm.
Edit: So are they our enemy? Yes, but not really. They are easily paid off if you actually are able to sieze the means of production, and they are unlikely to fight you, but they will probably be passive aggressive dicks about the whole thing.
possibly dumb and granular, but honest question: what about those in sinecure type of positions? like the true, high income bullshit job. i'm thinking of dean and above level positions in the academy, nepotism-style no show non profit/foundation jobbery, VP of whatever at a fortune 500, paid board seats, etc.
my heart tells me those are passive income with a varyingly thin veneers of of working class character.
It's not an income thing.
Like most of what Marx wrote about it's defined by your relationship to your means of production.
If you own other people's means of production and live by profiting off the gap between the value they produce and what you pay them you're bourgeois.
If you do not own your means of production and are paid a wage to work you're working class.
If you own your means of production but don't employ anyone else to work it (ie, a freelance contractor or independent shopkeeper) then you're petit-bourgeois.
I think the term you're looking for is "labour aristocracy", which was coined by Engels to describe the upper section of the working class who receive high enough wages it can act as a bribe that causes them to betray their class interests.
Lenin extended the argument to say that these wages and the lifestyle labour aristocracy lives is dependent on the profits of imperialism to be sustained, and knowing this they actually have reactionary class interests opposed to the vast majority of workers.
If someone is making enough money to enjoy all the treats they want and if all their joy is derived from bourg treats they are going to do anything in their power to preserve those treats, only when they lose everything will they be potential comrades but more likely potential reactionaries. yes, technically, property ownership and passive income are markers of which class they belong to, but people living comfortably tend to be true believers simply because the system IS working for them and as such the most they will be willing to do is reform it, they will only want revolution once the system is no longer working for them. I live in a pretty "woke" place that happens to also be a place with lots of money bouncing around and everyone in my broad social circle who makes comfortable money is at best a "progressive" or radlib and thinks I'm crazy for my extreme beliefs.
Newsweek is so pathetic, writing a story about a reddit post you saw?
Even more unbelievable, I saw that post a day or so ago and barely paid attention to it because the comments were so bland. I hope this writer is dumb enough to not be bothered by their station.
Having tried this line with NIMBYs multiple times, I can confirm that this is only effective when it benefits the person making $300k.
Nevermind all the Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires who believe they're just one more Bitcoin away from joining Elon's country club.
Identity is at the heart of legitimizing capitalism. Everyone needs to believe they are aligned with the billionaires if the billionaire is to sleep safely.
Man try explaining eco socialism or degrowth to someone making 100k plus. They will never understand that not every single person in this country can own and drive a car 45 miles every day to and from work etc.
Maybe if they're lucky enough to work in an industry that can survive the coming climate apocalypse but yeah.
I know the deal. Working and owning class... but the working class in the USA is a different beast and I strongly believe we can't count on most of them to be on our side. Not to say we shouldn't try but yeah.
The future is completely, completely unpredictable. We can only try to be well positioned to take advantage of events as they happen, and maybe steer things a little when we can. Not saying it's fruitless to try to predict what comes next, just that... well, a fucking asteroid could wipe out the east coast and whoever was best positioned to restore some semblance of normalcy after that would be the winners.
You're right. Its easy for me to get locked into looking at things from a certain paradigm but things are changing very fast and who knows what conditions will look like in a few months or years.
The quote in the OP and this are both true. Unfortunately I think this take is what matters most in the end. Being paid PMC salaries is basically a bribe to keep those with tiny modicums of power from getting unruly in the imperial core.
