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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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A 5% return on 400k is pretty easy to get.
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.
Thank you for the response. This makes sense
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.
Most lawyers and doctors are owners, not wage earners.
Literally not true, google occupational statistics.
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.
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.
And less than a third of doctors own their practices.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
It's too big too fail.
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.
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.
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.