Karl Marx: classes are just income brackets so my theories will have to be adjusted for inflation.
:picard: level of income is not the same as relationship to the means of production
Counterpoint: when someone's income is large enough to the point where they have a sizeable amount left over after paying monthly expenses, the vast majority of people use that leftover to invest, and at a certain point, the passive income from their investment is enough to push them over to being petty bourgeois.
My point is that someone who earns $200k/yr is only proletarian if you believe they blow all their money on expensive cars or stuff their money in a bank account where interest doesn't match inflation and not use their money to invest in real estate like what people who earn $200k/yr actually do. Everyone I know who earns in that income bracket has a rental property or has a noticeable investment in stock.
I think there's a danger in completely divorcing income bracket from relations to the means of production because it assumes people who earn a shitton of money won't invest at all, which is completely unrealistic.
200k/yr prole who spends all excess money on drugs :rat-salute-2:
They're called labor aristocrats. It is really weird seeing some people on here (obviously not you) defending people who make $100k a year as "working class". It's so ridiculously divorced from reality.
“Defending” and “working class”
It’s obvious this is moralistic to you, and so you refuse to use Marxist definitions of class but instead insert your own
The only thing that determines class in a Marxist analytical framework is: do they own the means of production? is their income made from ownership of production, or selling labor to those who own production? If it’s both, in what proportion.
That specifically is the definition of class in the framework we are using. It doesn’t mean those on one side of the line are “good” or “bad” or even “revolutionary”. It just means whether we are calling them proletariat or bourgeoise. There are subclasses, and overlap that we can discuss and not all segments of the proletariat are necessarily revolutionary or progressive (lumpen for example). There are also side cases, such as remnants of old classes from pre-capitalist arrangements like peasants (basically no peasants in USA though).
I see many liberals conflate class with cultural signifiers, with difficulty of labor, with arbitrary income brackets, with specific industries. This is all false and not how Marxists use and apply the terms. We are talking about grouping classes up by shared material interests in regards to the means of production, because only along this axis can one group come into consciousness enough to grab the means of production for itself and move forward history.
grouping classes up by shared material interests
That's what makes someone making $100k a year not "working class". Their material interests are with the people richer than them.
do they own the means of production? is their income made from ownership of production
which can be gray in a lot of cases. Like knowledge workers having their brain as the means of production.
It’s the investment and the passive income that follows that alters their class, as they become owners of the means of production. It’s not the income that does that automatically, there’s a correlation but it’s not 1:1 and we need to have coherent definitions of class, and this type of thing on the OP is sloppy liberalism
shout out to the programmer who told me "he's of a different class" so universal healthcare is bad and there's not enough to go around anyway.
his wife is a Vietnamese gusano - granddaughter of one of the South Vietnamese generals - so his argument is basically communism bad because they took away my wife's inheritance. she gets mad when people call it Ho Chi Minh City.
Any musician worth that much owns their own production company because the production/publishing contracts are gnarly as fuck. Many musicians make $0 from concert ticket sales and only get a cut of merch sales.
She owns a ton of real estate and makes a lot of money from endorsements and trademarks on her lyrics. All forms of leveraging property ownership (even if that property is her likeness, it’s still commodified)
I will say that high income effects stability, quality of life & consumption power by enough that it will interfere with class consciousness in a measurable way.
While a football coach or software engineer might make $250,000-1,000,000 annually and still technically be proletarian (they do not own the means of production, they are paid a wage, they share an interest, albeit smaller, in overthrowing their bosses) they will not have the same levels of potential radicalism as proles who are less comfortable and more precarious. These proles have a LONG way to go before the squeeze on the proletarian class effects them in any noticeable way, they have a much bigger buffer. They will tend to have Liberal and collaborationist ideology deep in their brain folds.
So it’s worth a nuanced discussion, but still strictly speaking the OP breakdown is jibberish. Class is a distinct and different type of categorization than income. Conflating the two as the same removed important distinctions.
Anyone wanna point me to the software engineering jobs that pay $250,000 👀
https://i.imgur.com/0DpXOXo.jpg
Just get 15+ Years of experience, move to California and work in Finance industry on the upper end of the bound. Duh
work in Finance
You forgot the part about being wealthy enough to network with people who can get you a job in finance
It’s called getting a Masters in Comp Sci and a CPA in 1999 sweaty
high income... will interfere with class consciousness
No, they're just of a different class lol. Someone making ~$80k+ in an office job is comfortable. They've got stocks, so they can retire. They have all the necessary insurance. They have their needs taken care of because they can afford anything they need. They're labor aristocrats. "Class consciousness" for labor aristocrats is to support capitalism and imperialism. Do you seriously think someone that is that comfortable would benefit from a more equal income distribution, and the global south no longer being subjugated to produce cheap goods?
Every country has a "knowledge worker" class of labor artistocrats to manage the state and design technologies of control and infrastructure and all that stuff. And they're paid well for their services in support of the status quo. Those people are generally not going to have any connection whatsoever to people who are worse off.
Do you think the clergy and knights and stuff of feudalism were "misguided proles"?
Please read Marx, class is determined by relations to the means of production. Labor aristocrats and Lumpen are a subset of proletarians, and petty bourgeoise and national bourgeoise are a subset of bourgeoise. There are subclasses, but if someone does not own the means of production and is paid a (high) wage that’s still proletariat.
Someone who makes passive income off of investments and stocks would be partially bourgeois for that reason - not because they have an office job or a salary over a certain threshold.
Your confusion comes from some sort of moralism or something you are trying to apply to classes instead of being scientific. Not all proletariat are revolutionary, that’s why we have terms like labor aristocrats and lumpens, to distinguish those reactionary portions of the proletarian class from the more advanced and revolutionary segments.
As for your absurd leap to feudal arrangements, proletariat did not exist until the advent of capitalism and their dialectical opposite, the bourgeoise. During feudal times there was peasantry and aristocracy as dialectical opposites. The bourgeoise emerged from late feudal merchants, became a powerful class over hundreds of years and then seized power and abolished the aristocracy in most of the world through bourgeois revolutions.
Yeah it gets taken to the extreme like "Yeah he made a million dollars dumping toxic waste but he did it all by himself without exploiting any labor!"
Whether you exploit labor or not does not determine your class. Small business owners without any employees are still petty bourgeois. Class is determined by relation to the means of production. If the person dumping toxic waste in a river was doing it to cut costs they are likely bourgeois since only bourgeois care about costs. Proletarian are paid a flat wage, and it doesn’t matter if the cost to their employer is higher or lower.
Yeah I kind of knew that was a bad example when I typed it but admittedly couldn't think of a better one. I would like people to at least admit that wealthy people are responsible for the majority of excess consumption, regardless of their class, which is killing the planet - and no amount of calling yourself a prole is going to stop you from looking like an asshole buying yacths and flying private jets everywhere. It is fine to criticize people who do stuff like that, IMO.
"Why no, I've never read Marx, shit is too old timey for me, come on we dont need theory :blob-no-thoughts: " - this person probably
Well you see proletariat = working class, like blue collar. So lumpenproletariat is like more even lower than that, so poverty class.
Someone's got to make an early reader version of Marxist theory with lots of pictures because I am getting very tired of having to explain it to people on the regular
“Middle class” isn’t real
There are highly paid proles: labor aristocrats
There are landlords and small business owners: petty bourgeoisie
There are hybrid and border cases: someone who makes 30% of their income passively through investments but the remaining 70% from labor, those who have pensions, or flip homes occasionally, etc.
Liberals love to conflate all three of these into a single “middle class” because it furthers their delusion that class collaboration is sustainable and the natural state of capitalism. It’s not a single class though because the material interests don’t align neatly… what benefits petty bourgeois often damages labor aristocrats (deregulating the environment, for example); and what benefits the labor aristocrats often damages the petty bourgeois (rent caps, free college)
hey im not american but isn't there households in expensive cities who struggle with 100k salary (before tax)? What salry do you expect people/families not to struggle with. Like 1 meter apartments in newyork cost 1000 usd a month.
Imagine seeing this chart as an African or South American prole who makes $500 a year
Class is extremely simple and is about your relation to the means of production. Why obfuscate it. Fucking moron.
