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.
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.