https://twitter.com/lysenko_weed/status/1545160259878232065

Reminder that farmers in western/imperial core countries are rich land owners who owns all the machinery and relies on exploiting migrant labors; also known as kulaks. And the protest itself are mostly driven by environmentally destructive livestock farmers.

Meanwhile the truckers are bourgeois as they owns their means of production (truck) and they're protesting on the behalf of corporate interest fighting against unprofitable Covid measures.

edit: alright, the truck part is a very terrible take and that's on me

Also fuck you if you think service workers are not working class.

    • Quimby [any, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      at scale, I think owning a fleet of trucks would constitute means of production, like owning a railroad would.

      because now you control a distribution network, where logistics are a necessary part of modern production.

      But I agree that "owning a truck" doesn't suddenly make someone part of the bourgeoisie, lol.

        • Quimby [any, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          that is also a good point! means of distribution != means of production. and I see how trucks would be the former, even at scale.

          I guess in theory if you owned a fleet of trucks and didn't do anything with them, you would be wasteful, but not bourgeoisie. But the only way to earn money from a fleet of trucks is "passive income", since you can't drive them all yourself, so then that means labor exploitation and puts you in the bourgeoisie that way.

      • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        at scale, I think owning a fleet of trucks would constitute means of production, like owning a railroad would.

        I disagree. Remember the industrial revolution happened before cars were invented.

        To make things will always require tools and a place to call a "factory". You could picture many different sorts of buildings and locations that fit the concept of factory too.

        But if you don't have a truck you could use any other option between rail, sea, air and ultimately even the old horse wagon could do the job. Of course we can concede that sometimes the modern infrastructure makes some of these impossible and a sudden large scale change could make production very inefficient and expensive, but ultimately not really impossible.

        As long as people have legs and horses exist you'll still be able to move stuff, but without tools and a place to work you'll never actualy make anything.

    • drinkinglakewater [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I might be misremembering, but didn't Marx explicitly say that transportation/distribution of goods is productive labour?