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.
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.