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"
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.