Yeah as we all know this is nonsense. $400,000 a year puts you in the top 2% of earners in both New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, the two highest cost of living areas in the country. If we can't accept that anybody in the top 10% of earners is definitely "wealthy" then I don't know what to say. I live in NYC and just barely make six figures and feel incredibly wealthy. Making four times that would propel me to levels of wealth and extravagance I can't even fathom.
From personal experience there are indeed quite a few people, especially in New York, who pull in $400k or even $1 million and feel like they're poor. Their houses are huge, but they're not even close to the size of the residences of those making $10 million+. They get to go to the Met Gala, but their richer friends get to actually interact with the celebs. Stuff like that. NYC in particular is like a fractal experience of wealth—no matter how wealthy you are, you're always going to feel poor unless you're pulling in billions, and even then I'm sure you feel poor compared to Bezos. This is partially why the abolition of classes benefits everybody. Even the mega-wealthy are caught in the rat race of never-ceasing capital accumulation! Of course, they all get Central Parked when the time comes, but at least their distance ancestors won't have to feel trapped the way they did.
NYC is ridiculous. I make 100k exactly here (sorry comrades, I'm good with code, I work at a start up, flame me if you have to) and I wouldnt call myself lower class, but its not like I get to own everything. Everything here is just unreal expensive, it sucks.
Engels' family owned a factory, don't beat yourself up about it. Agreed that NYC is some weird hellhole where everything is expensive, but it's also weird to me that I have friends who are like "it's so expensive to live here" on $100k+ families when neighbors down the street with three kids get by ok on $65k. I feel two ways about it, in that the expensive trope is simultaneously very real and something only specific to 20 and 30 somethings "trying to make it" in the city.
I totally get what you mean by that, and I think a part of that is if you're moving into the city you're more likely to land in an expensive neighborhood, and it makes all the difference. But it also could just be people in their 20s don't know how to live yet, idk
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Fucking oversized apartment/house, in the most expensive area
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Their 4 kids go to insanely expensive private schools
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They think they have to buy expensive clothes and don't know what used cars are
That can be enough by itself. They are still saving money up, but they still have to think about money a lot because they are burning so much of it.
You'd need to make a million dollars a year (and like every year, re not just one good year, over the course of your kids education) at least to afford this in SF or NYC. 4 kids in private school is like 200k in post tax money already.
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If you want an honest answer, it's that 400k a year after taxes is like 250k in SF or NYC. You can own a 1.2 million dollar place that costs like 6,000 a month or 72k a year (in SF or Manhattan that's like the median home so nothing fancy outside of the location appeal).
In these big cities 20% of kids are going to private school, and that costs 40k a year per kid. If you decide to go that route and have 2 kids, you have like 70k left for everything including savings for retirement and what not.
The point here is, that this is what middle class America is. It's just that in like Texas or Florida or something you can get this same lifestyle making half as much if not even less. And it's also that in places like SF or NYC a middle class life just isn't possible unless you make an insane amount of money. Additionally, if you are like the average age of people on this website, your parents could have that lifestyle in these places making less than half this amount in today's dollars.
I know some libs like this in the bay area. The husband has a huge spending problem and the wife picked up on it also.
The husband is upper management at a tech company and is constantly trying to keep up with the owner who has hundereds of millions. New motorcycle every other year. New mtn bike every year. Constantly getting new gear.
We stayed at their place once and i went through the closet and it was just filled with hiking mtn biking and motorcycle gear that was used once. Some of it never used. And that gear is all expensive and he was getting the top of the line shit.
The people that say this are just playing keeping up with the Joneses that's all
Oh definitely, but "keeping up with the Joneses" is the social equivalent of the compulsion for capital accumulation. Unless you're very consciously trying to work against it, you're going to be swept up by its currents.
Someone who makes 400k a year in these areas absolutely lives very well, but you're not going to be able to transition into the ownership class from this income alone beyond like retirement savings and homeownership. Maybe you can send kids to private school but depending on how many kids you have that's a stretch (although this depends on if we're talking 400k pre or post tax).
Making 4 times that is no longer about living a life of luxury as much as you've just reached the point where you can live life as a capitalist. You can buy up rental properties, you can start all sorts of businesses you never actively touch and so on, you can become an important donor for a political party of your choosing.
Also lastly, there is a substantial disparity between the top brackets of income and the top brackets of wealth. A person who works for a 400k salary is still worse off than a person who got a gift of 5 million on their 21st birthday which is how a huge portion of available wealth is reallocated.
I would probably just retire after like 5 years if I made that kind of money. I honestly wouldn't know what to do with it.
Also how about these people not live in the middle of Manhattan or whatever and commute a bit instead of owning a ridiculously expensive condo? This article mentioned a $2 million home, like yeah maybe that's why you're feeling the pinch at $400k per year.
Problem is, at least with the NYC metro area specifically, all the easy commutable areas outside the city where you can have like a real home are also insanely expensive for real estate. $2 million condo in Manhattan or $2 million McMansion in NJ/Westchester.
Agreed on the retiring though. Save that money up, after five years even if you're saving half you've got almost a million, and then just fuck off to Croatia or something.
So I don’t know what’s going on in this quote, but I can say that, as socialists, we should define class not as a function of income, but as roles in relationships of production, aka the Marxist conception of class.
For example the capitalists are the "owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor," while the proletariat is "the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in order to live."
It’s pretty important to stick to our guns on this point, as the ruling class (as you can see in the OP), make all sorts of attempts to cut across working class unity by obscuring the relationship between classes and the resulting class interests.
Obviously there is some relationship between productive role and income—like an exceptionally well-paid worker might amass enough wealth to live off investments. What we want, however, is maximum unity of the proletariat in the Marxist sense, and power to the proletariat in that same sense.
So middle class absolutely exists within this framework. A middle class person is both a part of the ownership class, but is still working themselves for a living.
Petite bourgeois are often middle class, as say if you own your own restaurant, you're still under the boot of much larger landlords, product suppliers and so on. Professional workers are middle class as they earn enough in income to also be able to make investments and generate income from that in a way a more precariate working class person cannot.
The petty bourgeois are the middle class, and they are the ones who voted for Trump. All those small business owners that both political parties love to cater too. Those are the "moderate Republicans" that libs obsess over.
Biden is not even hiding his contempt for the poor here. He is literally acting as a call back to the old GOP of the 2000s, who frame everything being about the "middle class" as a way to say fuck you to the poor.
This presidency is going to be an outright nightmare of class war. We're in a recession and Biden will enter office with the worst economy and highest unemployment numbers since the great depression and stuff like this, is just admitting he's ready to pass austerity budgets. We're almost to the point now where naked class warfare is all that is left as liberalism is failing and becoming more and more useless in the eyes of the majority. I give it 2, maybe 3 years, and we'll have a fascist movement from the right that is far more radical than anything Trump could've ever done, and it will be a direct response to Biden's admin doing nothing about wealth inequality.
That's a fair point on the definitional side, but anyone making 400k/year can comfortably enter the capital class in 4-5 years. So there won't be that many workers in this income bracket, as that's a very temporary condition to be in.
If you have enough savings to live off for 20 years, you can put that in a mutual fund and live off it indefinitely, which would make you a capitalist.
So then jobs that pay well but don't put you in a position of ownership are fine? Just clarifying. I assume jobs like professor or doctor where you can earn upwards of 200k a year if it's specific enough are not considered capitalist. What if you serve institutions like private hospitals and universities? I am genuinely curious about this as my entire family is university professors in various fields that are all successful and I never thought about their relationship with exploitation.
They are working class because they don't own the hospital or university. The amount the capitalists value their workers doesn't really change anything.
Labour aristocracy is still Labour. There was a time when you had to be bourgeois or Aristo to be a professor, that time is long past and tenure has been long commoditized.
Most doctors aren't workers because they own their practice. This is becoming less and less true, but even doctors who work for large hospitals as wage workers still earn enough to join the bourgeoisie ownership class within 10-15 years of finishing med school
If you make $400,000 a year, anywhere in America, you make enough money to have an insane amount of surplus which you can use to buy property, stocks, etc. So yes, even if you do work for that money, you will very quickly amass enough to be part of the bourgeoisie. It's inevitable unless you purposely sabotage yourself.
If you have get paid 400,000 a year (so like ~ 250k after taxes) for your labor, you will likely have some left over to make certain investments, sure. Obviously you are not going to have enough left over to purchase a commanding stake in a Fortune 500 company. The investments will probably be more on the level of buying a house or making investments for retirement. Definitely not the high bourgeoisie.
The rule of thumb question is whether you need to sell your labor to secure your livelihood. Most people who earn those sorts of high wages will still need to work for a number of years before they could realistically live solely off investments. In the meantime, in most cases these people, doctors, lawyers, some high-paid tech and finance workers, will live off a combination of labor and investments, making them more-accurately petite bourgeois.
If you make $400k a year, you can easily save enough in 10 years to have several million dollars. $2 million in an S&P500 index fund and $200k in cash to ride out downturns let's you spend $65k a year (average household income!) without working.
Working people don't understand how easy it is to be a bona fide bourgeoisie if you're a well paid professional. Check out a "financial independence" forum because that's exactly what that means.
Sure it’s possible, but again, what sorts of jobs are going to allow someone to earn a wage of 400k for 10 consecutive years? Small segments of Law/medicine/finance/maybe tech.
How many doctors do you know of that retire at 42 and live off investments? Or lawyers?
Almost all of them continue to work. Probably a clearer example of actually owning the means of production is folks with private practices or equity partners in law firms, but even those people generate work for their firm, and are more accurately petite bourgeois.
And if you look at law or medicine, the tendency is away from private practice or partnership, it’s a sort of proletarianization
Like the big capitalists do not generally become big capitalists by building up investments from scratch using wages earned.
Doctors choose to work because it's a prestigious job that they spent a lot of time training for. Most of them that are asset poor chose to be that way.
Like the big capitalists do not generally become big capitalists by building up investments from scratch using wages earned.
No, but it's not hard for a six figures earner to get up to $2-3 million in their 40s. A PMC couple can easily hit $5 million. A couple with $5 million can live on $150k, forever, never working again. Just lmfao if you don't think that's the "bourgeoisie"
It's like 50/50, and dropping, but it's still a lot more than most professions.
No kidding, they are historically petite-bourgeois professions, but now are increasingly on a wage labor model.
True, but they still earn enough W2 wages to easily be bourgeoisie by their 40s. Tech is even more egregious because they can make $300k+ by age 35 without any debt or real hard work (tech workers do not work long hours)
You're missing basically the entire point of this.
Workers who are well paid might over time make enough money to retire early or something, fine.
They definitely do not have the same role in production as high capitalists who own considerable means of production and extract billions of dollars in surplus value.
No, but these are the people who become landlords, oftentimes with dozens of properties. These are the people who vote based on their stock portfolio. These are the people start boondoggle small businesses. They aren't humble workers, and they are actually closer to the large high Capitalists than they are to the working class.
They're actually overwhelmingly exactly in the petite bourgeoisie.
The petite bourgeois don't have independent class interests in the marxist sense, they align with the workers sometimes and the capitalists sometimes, depending on individual circumstance and conditions.
A doctor who rents out his vacation home while continuing to work as a doctor is not in the high capitalist class. The people who own commanding shares of Marriott hotels are in the high capitalist class.
Doctors don't just "rent their vacation home". They buy up house and apartments and rent them out, as landlords.
The modern trend is to chase "passive income" which is quite literally being part of the bourgeoisie! Doctors start out either as wage earners or petit bourgeoisie, but they pretty quickly amass enough Capital to be full on bougie. They CHOOSE to keep practicing medicine mostly because being a doctor isn't something you just casually do or discard (plus it's a lot easier physically than being a plumber or a line worker)
Compare like the total real estate holdings of any one major financial institution to the total income property holdings of all doctors in the United States. They may be landlords, and they may therefore have politics more aligned with the big bourgeoisie, but they are not big bourgeoisie. The difference in scale is massive.
~45% of rental properties are owned by individuals. Of the 55% owned by corporations, many are owned by individuals who put their assets in a holding corp for tax/liability reason.
Your landlord is far more likely to be an individual as opposed to a major corporation or a "high capitalist". Not necessarily a doctor, but very likely some tech asshole, some spoiled heir, maybe a doctor.
The Capitalists we're fighting are real people you know, not nameless faceless corporations. They exist, and they are bad.
Edit: Only 25% of rentals are owned by institutions vs individuals. Source https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/who-owns-rental-properties-and-is-it-changing
You are missing the forest for the trees. Capitalism has a tendency to create concentration of capital. Land-holdings, income property-holdings, are no exception.
If I want to socialize the economy, should I expropriate 5 million small businesses, or the 500 corporations that account for 75% of the US GDP? By expropriating the fortune 500, the working class could offer quite a few of those small business owners a considerably easier life, and probably more income, than they would have grinding away at a corner store or something.
Brave and noble of you for disliking landlords, but come on.
You should do both. Major industries are the easiest target for nationalization, but "small business tyrants" and small time landlords are some of the cruelest exploiters and most unreasonable leaders.
Most small business owners aren't slaving away at a corner store. They are the prototypical Chud jet-ski dealer. Or some hippy woo-woo who quit a tech management job to sells fair trade coffee in the sticks, but fights like hell to pay baristas more than $8 an hour. These are also the people who DOMINATE current politics. They are the "middle class" constituents who uphold the status quo, and they are the ones who will fight like hell to reverse the revolution.
Maybe you don't nationalize their business or perp walk them like you do Jamie Dimln, but crushing the Kulaks is critical. These people are the ones causing everyday misery, and they need to be brought to task.
These are also the people who DOMINATE current politics.
The people who dominate politics and society are the literal ruling class, the high capitalist class. The petite bourgeoisie does not, and it’s actually getting squeezed out by that concentration of capital that I talked about and you ignored.
To get rid of capitalism you have to overthrow that high capitalist class. Then you have to keep the small capitalists/petite bourgeois from growing into large ones.
Are many of them morally repugnant? Sure. Are they the motor force of capitalism? No.
In a Democracy, these petit bougie people are the ones who supply the consent. They are the ones who vote for people like Pete and Liz Warren and Trump and all the others. Their concerns dictate the state of political discourse. The high capitalists don't even really have to do much besides provide the cash. It's the "9.9%" who really fuck things up.
Also, the lines are blurred between the high Capitalists and the low ones. They do rub shoulders and "network". They trade places.
you will very quickly amass enough to be part of the bourgeoisie
Petite Bourgeoisie. Rich enough not to care about day to day or year to year shit, but still precariously balanced on the razor's edge that is the Boom/Bust cycle.
You don't have to be an idiot to lose a fortune to, say, an Enron collapse or a Housing bubble pop. And I don't want to talk about how many professional class neighbors in my Houston suburb bought in on the Beanie Baby craze.
You don’t have to be an idiot to lose a fortune to, say, an Enron collapse or a Housing bubble pop.
Yes, you do actually. A couple million dollars in an S&P500 index fund is about as safe as it gets. The only way you go bust with that is if society collapses.
A couple million dollars in an S&P500 index fund is about as safe as it gets.
Currently, the S&P500 is so heavily weighted towards a handful of tech stocks that it might as well be Apple And Amazon Holding Company, Inc.
Check out the P/E on Amazon right now. Tell me that's sustainable.
This is the same reason why professional athletes paid millions are often still comrades. They still don't own the means of production, and are still getting exploited. Important caveat on this however is that cops aren't proles, because their relationship to the means of production is that they protect them.
Important caveat on this however is that cops aren’t proles, because their relationship to the means of production is that they protect them.
True, and you could just as easily miss that if you’re just basing your analysis on income.
Cops and Military are interesting, because they generally get pulled out of the working class into those positions. Troops however, generally return to the working class after a few years in the military. They have closer ties to that class, and historically tend to split/rebel more than domestic police in revolutionary situations.
Troops however, generally return to the working class after a few years in the military. They have closer ties to that class, and historically tend to split/rebel more than domestic police in revolutionary situations.
True and many of them only go into the military to begin with, cause there are no jobs where they come from. If you live in a rural southern small town, your options are limited entirely to working minimum wage your entire life at a Dollar store or McDonalds, or trying to "get out" of that hell hole, and the military offers a solution as a way to get out.
This is such an ass backwards position that's promoted by Rablibs and Idpol obsessed morons. Cops are 100% working class if someone like LeBron is also considered "working class".
Edit: Pro Athletes who make a show for social justice are just SuccDems, like Killer Mike or celebrities who went hard for Bernie but are also landlords/business owners, etc. They are vaguely on the "good side", but from a pure class analysis, they are NOT working class.
Cops are working class, but also class traitors. During a revolution, some working class people will be counter-revolutionary. Cops just sold out earlier.
Simple solution - 100% tax on incomes above $400k (could set the bar lower, but let's be libs for a sec). BOOM! Now everyone making $400k is the richest they could possibly be. Problem fucking solved.
Corporate media needs to be dismantled as thoroughly as the police.
Biden is basically making it clear here, if you're poor, then fuck you.
He isn't going to do shit about the wealth inequality and us down at the bottom who are poor. 2 years within his presidency, we are going to see an extreme reactionary right wing movement like the Tea Party with how they took over the GOP. When this right wing movement starts addressing the class war and talking about wealth inequality, the Dems are going to be absolutely fucked, cause they have spent the past 4 years shunning the progressives in their party and ignoring this problem. The GOP will frame it around blaming immigrants for the wealth inequality.
I posted a thread the other day with my predictions of a Biden administration, you can find it here - https://hexbear.net/post/34180
I 100% agree with you, and the COVID bill Dems try to pass, will most likely be at the expense of defunding medicaid and social security. We didn't get a stimulus check back during the 2009 recession with Obama. All we got were tax credits that amounted to nothing. As for Medicaid, Biden has already made it clear that he thinks Obamacare is all we need and they'll gladly gut medicaid for it. One of his key plans is to bring back the mandatory tax fines to Obamacare which is the main reason people hated it to begin with.
Biden is going to inherit the worst economy and highest unemployment numbers in the US since the great depression and he has nothing to counter it. No plan whatsoever. Last month, his staff were already talking about how they wanted to pass austerity budgets and cut down federal government spending and just blame it on Trump's mess.
Liberalism is failing and slowly being replaced. It's job of negotiating between the oppressed and exploited and the ruling class is failing. All Democrats have had to offer for years now has been identity politics and empty platitudes. The wildcard with Biden is that he is not even trying to pay lip service or give empty platitudes, nor is he playing into the identity politics. He's out loud and proud of how conservative and right wing he is. Just the other day, he was bragging how he beat a socialist in Sanders and how he's this die hard centrist. Seriously, I don't buy any of this talk about Trump being the "accelerationist". If anything, Biden is going to put the pedal to the metal and accelerate us straight to it. I 100% expect Harris to lay the groundwork for a fascist dictatorship by pushing for more authoritarian laws and giving cops more power.
There is definitely going to be a backlash. The Tea Party sprung up around 2010 and they went on to dominate state elections and quickly merged their way into the GOP. The next reactionary right wing movement is going to be a lot worse with them, and if it's fascists trying to address wealth inequality and talk about the class war, the Dems are going to be fucked come 2024 cause they've spent years now shooting down M4A. I think the next fascist we get, is going to push something like M4A but for Americans and frame the class war entirely around blaming immigrants and protesters.
We're in for an absolute nightmare under Biden.
2 years within his presidency, we are going to see an extreme reactionary right wing movement like the Tea Party with how they took over the GOP.
2 months. Maybe not even that.
Trump's defeat is going to drive a lot of conservatives insane.
what is up with the fetishization of the middle class? why does everyone (rich and poor) think they're middle class?
if you live in a building that has walls and a roof, but don't have more money than the gdp of a small nation you are american middle class apparently
exactly, this headline is from the same assholes that think poor people aren't actually poor because they rent an apartment with a fridge in it and have access to the internet
"If you take out your own trash, you're middle class" school of thought
I do not understand how everyone making between 50k and 400k is middle class here
Dog whistle for white people. Middle class are cool and good and live in suburbs. Working class bad, live in scary urban neighborhoods.
Because it's part of the dehumanization of someone below that is poor or seen as a lesser.
American culture is all about feeling superior to someone below you.
Remember the Obama years when they were defining $250k as wealthy? I think it was around the Plumber Joe saga. What a nice, economically stable country.
The article pushes this idea I’ve seen Ass howls throw around that class is actually meaningless and to focus on that is wrong in America because poor people can feel richer then rich people in big cities because big cities cost so much so reslly why don’t you stop putting class I to this hahaha :nuke:
How many millionaires are upper-middle/middle class retirees, though? Honestly, 85% sounds about right.
When you're a millionaire living in a gated community surrounded by other millionaires, it's very hard to understand exactly how wealthy you really are.
Have people living on $400k/year in large cities tried eating less avocado toast?
I'm assuming CNBC is Children's NBC like what CBBC is to BBC.
'Cause only a child would believe in such granular stratification that includes 'upper middle'Make $35K a year? Middle class. Make $400K a year? Also middle class. It's almost like "middle class" is a bullshit distinction used to obfuscate class consciousness ?
It only is viewed this way in American discourse. When you talk to people from the UK in my experience they use the correct definitions of these terms.
Middle class is someone who both works for a living and benefits from returns on property ownership.
Yeah it's true that in the UK there's far more of a cultural conception of class than as being something purely financial, but by those metrics there really doesn't exist an upper class in the US in the same way where you have people who are poor but have some weird patronage title.
But yeah, the cultural middle class of PMC is not the entirety of the middle class as a whole. The sorts of middle class people that are like a regional manager for a bunch of gas stations are going to be different culturally.
That's true of a lot of actually middle class people in the US too, the problem is that they often use it to justify the existence of capitalism for themselves.
That makes more sense. In the US, the majority of people consider themselves “middle class” despite a huge and undefined range of income and material conditions. It’s pretty much a way to flatten the idea of class to avoid the need of class struggle. It also has its own built in caste hierarchy (upper lower middle class, lower upper middle class, etc...) That way we’re simultaneously “on the same team” but still have distinction to make us feel better than whoever’s on the rung below you.
So the whole thing is complicated because in some areas people making 50k a year can move into the ownership class at least by the metrics required to be considered middle class. In others that amount is far higher than that. Lower middle class makes sense as a comment on that some people own their homes but outside of that would just be poor.
This said though, what we call upper middle class in American parlance is literally just what being middle class is in other parts of the world.
Oh my god how are people defending this shit in the replies, genuinely what the fuck is wrong with you
