Serious question not trying to troll here: Isn’t everyone stuck in this hellish capitalist system part of that class?
No. Classes are determined by how you get your money and by how comfortable you are.
If you are working for a paycheck, you do not touch capital.
Then maybe labor should organize its own capital and not some entitled prick of a class.
If you are working for a paycheck, you do not touch capital.
Ok so I have my beef with capitalism, for sure, but this is inaccurate. People all over the country own property, shares in public and private companies, shares of government utilities, just to name a few examples.
Ownership of things does get distributed through capitalism. As manipulated as it is, that’s the concept of the stock market.
I’m not rich, but I do own a small amount of capital. My net worth far, far exceeds what I have in my bank account when you account for my car that I’ve paid off, small investments that have appreciated over time, stuff like that.
Now the top of the capitalist class? They have SO MUCH cash, and so many resources to draw on that they can manipulate stock prices and company values at will. That’s where the whole system starts to break down.
Idk what definition of capital you used to determine this but I will be using the Marxist on because capital is a Marxist term.
Capital is private property used to create surplus value usually involving the purchase of wage labor. It can be the money a capitalist uses to pay their employees, the land their workers use to produce surplus value for them, and/or the machinary required for their workers to produce surplus value as a few examples. Buying stocks does not mean you own the means of production in any significant way. You may have stake in how those means of production are use but you do not control them and you do not use them to produce surplus value nor do you purchase wage labor, you only profit off someone who does.
Furthermore your personal possessions like your car are not capital.
If you sell your labor to someone who possesses the means of production you are proletariat
If you work for a living, and being unemployed indefinitely would threaten your survival, you are part of the working class. Owning a few crumbs of capital is a nice cushion, but does not define your class.
If your income is passive, and you could live your whole life off the returns from your investments without ever actually working, you are part of the capitalist class.
'Ownership of things DOES get distributed…"
Uhhhh, no? Are you dumb? Owning stock in a company is far, FAR removed from owning any part of a company’s assets.
It’s not quite so black and white, though.
My spouse and I both work for a living, and we’d be in a hard spot if either of us lost our jobs. We also own 3 rental properties, and I have a military pension. We also own a farm where we raise 6 cows and enough chickens to have some eggs to sell.
So, we get most of our money from our labor, the rental properties pay for themselves most of the time but we don’t pool that with our personal money…it’s for the mortgages, taxes, maintenance and to cover for when we don’t have renters (which is almost never…weird how that happens when you aren’tcharging exploitative rents).
We sell eggs and make a small profit on those, but not enough to support ourselves…same with the beef…it’s mostly for us and family to eat (because fuck factory farming) but if we don’t have the freezer space we’ll sell the extra as well. That makes us both labor and capital… and my pension and military retirement benefits are basically as close to socialism as we’ll get in the US anytime soon, the biggest difference being I had to earn it.
The landlord side of it is the murkiest imo. You having a military pension doesn’t mean you’re in the bourgeoisie, it just means you’re getting paid for having given time from your life. Similarly, selling the surplus from your own agriculture doesn’t place you in the class of controlling capital because you aren’t using others’ labor; you’re creating something through your labor and when faced with having a surplus, are distributing your goods. Yes you sell them, but it’s not fair to criticize you for trying to offset your costs while living under a capitalist system so long as the price isn’t exorbitant.
Imo being a landlord is usually the scummiest, but if you’re charging rent at a price set to maintain the buildings and ensure that your tenants still have housing, then I don’t think you’re exploiting anyone. Imo the more profit you take from your rental properties, the more it moves out of the grey area. It sounds however like you don’t take profit or take a very minimal amount, and that you price your property so that it’s self sufficient but not much more. In that case then you aren’t really exploiting your tenants. Are they still being exploited? Yes, by the system that forces them to pay for housing. Do you have a hand in that exploitation purely by being their landlord? Yes, however if you aren’t trying to extort them for money so they have housing, then I wouldn’t say you’re exploiting them more than just owning their housing. Theres a reason that leftists tout that theres no ethical consumption under capitalism; even in trying to help people or do the right thing, you are still feeding into a system of exploitation and extortion. That doesn’t mean you still aren’t trying to do the right thing or be genuinely helpful, it just means that unless we find an alternative system then we will all continue to exploit each other and be exploited. This is why the proletariat must be unified as otherwise, we will never shake the binds of our collective oppression.
Congratulations, you’re one of an extreme few still living in the middle class.
Now realize how minority your experience is.
Based on my definitions. Owning the 3 rental properties makes you owner class as that is private property, also when you pay off the mortgages you are going to be in a great spot right?
Farms are weird, if you only had the farm and have hired nobody else to help you run it then working class. If you hire people, well then you are owner class.
You both also have jobs on top of running a farm? Out of curiosity how do you have the time to manage your farm and work at the same time?
No.
Basic and simplified class analysis is about shared interests based on similar social relations to Production.
The Workers do not own Capital, at least not in significant amounts.
Capitalists own Capital. They pay Workers wage labor to create commodities for sale.
There are other classes, but that’s the long and short of it.
The actual specific class you belong to can be tricky because there are sub-classes and shit like that but generally speaking you can simplify class dynamics into the owning class (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat). If you own the means of production, the actual property such as land or machinary required to produce things, and you buy others labor to produce these things that you then sell, you are bourgeoisie. If you sell your labor then your are proletariat. You’ll find that the interests of these classes are in opposition; the bourgeois wants to increase profit through any means so as to provide for themselves and for investors while the prole wants a better standard of living, a safe work environment, and less work hours among many other things I need not name. These interest come into direct conflict when the capitalist runs out of ways to externally increase profit controlling a certain market niche, there is only so much demand. When this happens the capitalist looks inward at their company and wonders if they can increase profit through other means like cutting pay, skirting around safety regulations, finding ways to get around providing benefits, cutting pensions, etc etc. The really big bourgeoisie also look towards the legal system, if it only cost them 60mil of lobbying to change a law that makes them billions then that law is dead. The profit motive kills
How does this work for the modern world though? Many of the people who make the financial decisions for the company that I work for are also normal people with a normal income. Their job is to maximize profit for the company under certain constraints, but it’s not like they directly get that money for themselves. The image of the proletariat working ungodly hours in dangerous factories while a few rich fat capitalists claim all the money is often quite far from reality in my experience, apart from the ultra-rich CEOs like Musk and Bezos. And I don’t disagree that we should regulate the income disparity or anything, I just think that these classes don’t really make that much sense anymore
Apologize in advance if I over explain somethings or repeat myself with different wording, I’m not infantilizing you I’m just trying to be very clear.
I use industrial and agricultural labor as examples because they are typically more dangerous work and often more heavily exploited but even your manager is technically a prole. You’re friends that manage a finances are proletariat. If you sell your labor and the person purchasing that labor makes extracts surplus value from your labor, you are a proletariat.
Specifically, the capitalists who run the company you work at purchase the labor of those finance managers and extract a profit from their labor while doing essentially nothing other than being the person who owns the business and the capital required to produce whatever it is their workers produce.
Think about how a business is run. You have workers, the proletariat, who provide their labor in whatever form required whether physical or mental in exchange for a wage that they can then use to buy whatever necessities they need and extras they can afford. These workers are alienated from the product of their labor; they do not own the product nor do they own the means of production, they are also paid less than the product they created is worth so that the capitalist who does own the product and the means of production can extract a surplus value. In the case of your financer the product of their labor is literal money, they produce money for the capitalist and see very little of it. Their wage is what the owning class allows them to have. In a cruel twist of fate they are then required to give that wage back to the capitalist class in exchange for food, housing, electricity, sometimes water.
We still do have proletariat working ungodly hours in dangerous factories though, they are often just immigrants and minorities, sometimes children. I’d link a source for that but honestly just look up working conditions of abattoirs, specifically Tyson chicken. Or the laborers being exploited in that manner are just in another country worker for the same capitalist and getting paid less than the US minimum wage because it means the capitalist can extract more surplus value.
The problem with regulating capitalism is the that under capitalism wealth accumulates into fewer and fewer hands over time. This happens for a number of reasons but the primary being that wealth is easier to accumulate when you have it. A bigger business can buy or outcompete a smaller business, sure we can bust monopolies but it doesn’t really matter if every company in every industry is primarily owned by a few people. Creating a society where capitalism is more heavily regulated and with social safety nets would only be temporary. This is seen in Nordic countries where in the pursuit of profit their capitalist class is lobbying against any further nationalized industry and actively attempting to roll back those social safety nets. The only reason those places were even able to develope social democracy is because of the giant red superpower right next to them at the time. Had the USSR not been their to provide Nordic proletariat with the threat of a supported revolution the capitalist class would never have given those concessions.
Das Kapital explains it better than I can if you’re that invested into the topic but it’s a tough read.
the Marxist project is also a great start from an academic lense and is easier to digest
Sorry for the abundance of text lmao, I have no idea if it’s coherent because I wrote it sporadically over the course of an hour and it’s like 3 am
