in amerika, "farmers" are petit-bourgs who are owners/owner-operators and most rely on farm laborers to work their lands. "farmers" are the modern kulaks but we must not forget about the farm laborers who outnumber them and are legitimately propertyless proletarians
many of these laborers are undocumented immigrants and severely exploited. agriculture is a very important factor in any revolution and organizing with farm laborers should be more emphasized among communists
emphasis on "laborer." organizing with farm owners will get us nowhere, they are almost all reactionary and most of them are very exploitative, even if they only hire a few laborers
Like you said, they are the modern day kulaks. The revolutionary rural class is always the peasant, the migrating seasonal worker, the plantation slave, the one who does the back-breaking labor on the field, not the agri-entrepreneur who has others extract the wealth of the land for him.
We all know which class the Dutch farmers protesting rn belong to. The ones referenced by the nazbolette in the OP. These modern day kulaks are the ones who have successfully lobbied until they had been allowed for decades to pollute Dutch drinking water with absurd amounts of pig poop to yield higher profits, in total defiance of water protection laws upheld literally everywhere else in the EU, and who are throwing a tantrum now because their business model that relies on systematic destruction of a vital public good is about to get outlawed.
My local IWW chapter is full of labor workers. They really know their shit and it gives me hope
Of all the farmers I know literally only two support themselves from small operations with no employees. Everyone else has a spouse that works off the farm, exploit temporary workers or rely on government grants. The only farmers left are huge agribusinesses turning people back into sharecroppers
Remember kids, the Dutch farmers are in fact land-owning bourgeois and not workers!
i'll defend truckers any day of the week. why, what are the teamsters up to?
wait you mean a minority of non-union petty bourgeoisie who aren't fighting for their rights as workers, but instead their rights as consumers, and they happen to own trucks? aight bet
why, what are the teamsters up to?
Preparing to fuck up UPS in the next contract negotiation I hear.
99% of modern farmers are simply landlords with extremely exploited tenant laborers
But they all take on the aesthetics of working class people. Just… tidied up a little. It’s fucking sickening
it's so bizarre that "farmers" (large rural land owners) seem to do that all across the globe. act like humble poor little hicks when they own a McMansion in the suburbs of a huge city and go to the country side like once a month just to check in. it fucking infuriates me.
I defend all working people in their capacity as working people. But just because someone does wage labor doesn't mean I'll support them in their struggle to like, end the public school system because they don't want their kids to become secondhand trans or something. Obviously this is a non sequitur
This notion that literally anyone who sells their labor is a "proletarian" or "working class" with maybe a small carveout for the PMC class is in my opinion not Marxist at all.
Short answer would be, while capitalism is the system where workers sell their labor to capital, that doesn't mean every worker has a similar relationship to capital. A comfortable office worker in Seattle has a very different relationship to capital than say, a garment worker in Hyderabad.
I think it's a salient point that, in all of the works of Marx and Engels I've read so far, I can't recall them once ever talking about the middle class - arguably those who sell their labor as lawyers, doctors, bureaucrats, etc. All of the discussion is around factory workers but agricultural workers and domestic servants also get mentioned as well.
Now, there's this passage in Capital vol 1 that sorta contradicts what I said:
If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.
But in this instance, the schoolmaster is still "working like a horse". And I'm not saying a middle class worker is automatically the enemy of Marxism. Just that there's a different relationship there. Even in this example, the schoolmaster is clearly being compared to a factory worker. And in this sense I'd say yeah, there are quite a few folks outside of factories who I would still consider proletarians (say call center workers). But at some point I don't think we can pretend that making a decent income is precisely the same as a worker who's making virtually nothing.
Baristas == reference to Twitter struggle session
Furries == reference to Twitter struggle session
Farmers == common talking point from people who have read Settlers and won’t stop talking about it on Twitter. It’s an example in the book of how white workers in the American colonies ended up accumulating capital by nature of their whiteness
Truckers == reference to culture war bullshit about trucker conveys and also Twitter drama around whether or not owner-operators are proles
Fucking NPC brain
Farmers == common talking point from people who have read Settlers and won’t stop talking about it on Twitter. It’s an example in the book of how white workers in the American colonies ended up accumulating capital by nature of their whiteness
Actually I think it's culture war bullshit. I think she's referencing the Dutch farmer protests
Patsocs think farmers and truckers are the people who own the land and the trucks lol. I'll die for the undocumented and documented immigrants actually doing the farming and trucking, not their petit bourgeois owners.
Fighting for the rights of the trucker who smuggles migrants past the border gestapo.
They're braver than any troop.
It completely depends on what's she's even talking about. Like I would defend truckers, are they unionizing? Or driving to the capital for some reactionary reason? Farmer too, are they standing up to the agribusiness or complaining about not being able to waste water in a desert?
Also a few dozen owner-operators managed to shut down the border against the wishes of literally the overwhelming majority of truckers who need to cross the border for work. Something that gets forgotten about the trucker protests is that truckers hated them more than the general population did, lol.
Most people most people work with in the West probably aren't worth defending, so at some point you gotta take a principled stand or just give up on leftism.
i mean we really can't be expecting literally everyone we organize with to have perfect socially progressive beliefs off the bat. solidarity and respect is built in the process of struggle.
that doesn't mean that openly reactionary movements of nominally working class people are "leftist" tho
Former Miss New Jersey who started working for RT and is now a Nazbol/Russian State media hack.
"Let's put a sickle on our flag to show how much we hate farmers."
I mean I’ll definitely defend wage workers on farms and in trucking. I won’t defend the petty bourgeois truck owners or land owners though which is what she means
the same red fash piglets talking about "defend farmers" on twitter are also telling you that we need to Secure The Border to prevent migrant laborers from stealing American jobs
My grandpa was a Kulak farmer in Idaho who owned thousands of acres of farmland and ranching land when he died, who employed immigrant workers who lived in a segregated part of town. He was a bircher and a hardcore anti-communist Mormon with intensely bigoted views. My dad said he went on a huge rant against MLK during the Civil Rights times.
These are the “farmers” this person wants “leftists” to defend? Not the far more numerous and exploited farm laborers they squeeze dry?
you can be a truck owner and be basically in the same position as an uber driver, who i guess could also be classified as petit bourgeois in terms of tax accounting and labor law but neither of them necessarily can pick up their car/truck and have a job elsewhere than from the limited number of businesses and platforms they can have contracts with, which puts them in effectively the same position as anyone else on the labor market with limited employment options. i think owner operator truckers that are reactionaries are working class but are basically the same as scabs at any other job site and have mistaken their class interest. it doesn't help that more and more employers are turning to apps and skirting labor regulations by misclassifying workers as small business owners and it also isn't helping it that some workers are buying into the fantasy.
I disagree because owning a small personal transport car is personal property that you might normally have anyway, almost every American adult has one.
There is no reason one would own a semi truck unless it was for profit generation, and the capital investment to get a semi truck is many fold higher.
It’s similar to how someone renting a room out of their personal house they already own is a different relation than someone who owns a multi-unit complex and rents for profit.
The value of the property and its other possible uses determines whether it is personal property or private property.
its an expensive tool for work, similar to owning your own tools as a journeyman in any trade. the tools are more expensive but its the tools needed for the job. and its different from renting because they are actually putting in the labor that generates the value, unlike with renting which is passive income for the owner. are they small business owners that exploit their own labor? technically yes, they are sole proprietors but if they effectively move things for the same companies anyway and have no choice about the matter they are basically reduced to being workers with no labor benefits that have expensive tools
Is a small business also “an expensive tool for work”? Most small business owners also work. lol you have just backed yourself into flattening the entire contradiction of interests between private property holders and wage earners, the entire premise of Marxism
Every single one of your arguments also applies to small business owners who are at the whims of a large supply chain or in any debt
actually marx talks about this in terms of piecemeal work. there were plenty of tailors for example that owned property for their work that they wouldn't have used personally unless they personally wanted to work. they were still considered proletarian but they owned their own tools. at what amount of money for the tool is the qualitative difference in your mind between personal and private? also a big part of why they were proletarian is because that mode of work ultimately drove prices for labor down and they screwed themselves in the long term and so could never become bourgeois.
most of these owner operators will never own a business where they exploit other truckers. that might be their dream but most of them are stuck being workers for a few companies doing long hours with no benefits and labor protections whether they like it or not. there are also many "classical" workers that are scabs and reactionary and don't see themselves as workers, they have more in common with them than they care to realize
at what amount of money is the qualitative difference in your mind behind personal and private
An amount that is sufficient for barrier to entry for a majority of the population, such that a proletarian class remains. The bourgeoise cannot have their entire population own their own personal means of production, else they lose their entire extractive position as owners of those means of production and they would cease to be the ruling class. Therefore, in any capitalist society the owner-operator class remain smaller than the wage paid classes, partially enforced by markets and by barriers to entry and to high capital costs for means of production.
In terms of these smol bean truckers having to take out debt to get semi-trucks, so what? They still control the asset and extract profits from it, the debt is merely a driving cost and does not fundamentally change the owner-operator trucker’s class nature
You don’t have to have employees to be bourgeois, many petty bourgeois are sole proprietors
I’m not placing a moral category on them, I’m making an objective statement of class nature. Someone who is a sole-proprietor with property they control is not proletarian and is not paid a wage
right but you run into the contradiction that the uber worker by that classification is also bourgeois
also, many people can't afford to get into debt to buy the car either, so that makes them bourgs as well i guess, that's a barrier of entry right there and is kinda arbitrary
i also am not placing a moral category on them i just don't think marx even dealt with the question of piecmeal work in this way either and also i think these definitions are lacking if we walk ourselves into an argument that uber workers that ofen make below minimum wage are bourgs because they own the means of production and dont get paid a wage. owner operator truckers are just a more contradictory example of the above, so if we are classing one group of them as workers we should the other and the quantitative difference in the price of the tools doesn't matter
Uber drivers are indeed paid a wage, and they receive tips which doesn’t alter their wage relation (most people who get tips are proletarian).
Again, owning a car is obviously not prohibitive to most of the population since most of the adult American population has one. The fact that some cannot afford one does not change this.
A personal home owner is not bourgeois. A landlord who owns that same home and rents it out is. The addition of mortgage or debts doesn’t alter this either. The actual property does not physically change but it goes from personal to private property when it goes from a home owned by the resident to one owned by a 3rd party and rented out. That change is due to 1) most people cannot afford multiple houses, cost prohibitive barrier to entry and 2) the act of profit generation from this.
An Uber driver is not receiving profit. They are being paid a wage. The common car is just the prerequisite they need to qualify for this proletarian position. If cars were so expensive that only a few people could get them, car owners (including uber drivers) would wield way more power in such a society of rare cars. That’s not America right now though.
Truck owner-operators are receiving a profit. They are not being paid a wage. The capital intensive rare truck is the prerequisite for the petty bourgeois position. Trucks are so expensive and normally unnecessary that owners (including owner-operators) do wield way more power in this society. That’s America right now.
Also I would sooner concede that Uber drivers have some petty bourgeois interests than I would concede that truck owner-operators share proletarian interests if you really insist on drawing the lines this way. If you knew these people you would see this clearly, these petty bourgeois owner-operator types are often wildly reactionary and anti-worker in a way I have not experienced while working prole positions
if you read what i wrote i did not defend them. i called them reactionary and scabs and i do think the extra money they make vs uber drivers makes them that way and makes them more likely to be that way. we should definitely focus more on the uber workers than them in terms of trying to get them class conscious. earlier i wrote a post that I edited out that basically said the same thing and said these accounting categories aren't super useful sometimes but what is important is class consciousness and that there are reactoinary layers of proletarians as well so we have to be careful with these definitions and who we try to organize with. anyway i wanna back away from hexbear for a bit to do some IRL stuff but i think we can agree on some things and disagree to degree on others so ill leave it here for now
Truck owner operators aren't bougie. They're more like tradesmen who own their own tools. The truck doesn't make stuff it just moves stuff around, and owner operators are only self employed in a couple of technical ways.
Well farmers in Mao era China were mostly serfs and peasantry, and he wiped out the landlords (land owning “farmers”)
