No hate for the middle class. I can’t help but enjoy the irony of people who thought they had solidarity with capital talking like Ned Ludd all of a sudden.
Who are these bourgeois creatives that are somehow able to be replaced by tech?
If you work for a living, you aren’t bourgeois.
We need class solidarity. Not this shit.
I always interpreted middle class to be not living paycheck to paycheck. Because that is the more meaningful difference of quality of life in my opinion. Not having some arbitrary line of more and more expensive shit. I would say the next line is having so much you never have to work another day in your life
Edit: clarity
“Not living paycheck to paycheck” and “not needing to work in order to live” are two vastly different concepts. The former is a member of the working class, the latter is a member of the bourgeoisie
I think that’s totally fair. I just think those are three different categories that are meaningful enough to discuss (I.e. not totally arbitrary).
On a broader theoretical level, I think it should be possible to live without working (I.e. you can eat cheap food, live in a cheap place, and pay for all necessary government ID’s and all) but that people don’t have a right to inheritance. Generational wealth is fundamentally inconsistent with equality and the lofty concepts that America is supposed to represent. Enforcing no inheritance law would certainly be… challenging
Just discussion
I don’t think many people understand what working class means.
If you have to work to live, then you are working class.
This meme fundamentally misunderstands what the working class is.
Bourgeois creatives are people like Hollywood directors and actors who make millions of dollars and could easily retire at any time. They are not the ones being replaced, or trying to be replaced by AI or other tech.
The creatives who do the actual work that get projects done, the ones making just as much as other middle class people are the ones being affected. You know, the ones that actually need the money to live and pay bills. Ironically, it’s also these creatives whose work is being used to train the AI models, without their consent.
So, yeah, this is wildly inaccurate and totally pointed at the wrong people.
Furthermore, being replaced by tech is nothing new for creatives. Every tech advancement in commercial art has made thousands of jobs obsolete and has been a goal of capital all along.
Before computers and modern machinery, there were hundreds, if not thousands of jobs that were done by skilled creatives and craftspeople - sign painters, typesetters, draftsmen, carpenters, sculptors, etc.
Being a creative, doesn’t equate to having an easy life. There’s a reason why the term, “starving artist”, exists.
To further expand, the term bourgeoisie started because you used to have (all things in this reply simplified for conveniences’ sake, there are nuances not discussed)
- Royals / Lords
- Peasants
Either you owned everything as far as the eye could see, or you lived on that land and you were the property of the owner.
Then, as industrialization and/or global trade opened up, a new class emerged in the 1200s: “town dwellers” (literally what bourgeoisie means).
Now you had the aristocracy, peasants and people in between: they had money, property, a small amount of power and it wasn’t necessarily acquired by birthright.
This is still hundreds of years ago, so still not a 1:1 for today.
Overtime, and after a bunch of revolutions, we end up at a situation where the bourgeoisie needs to split again: haute bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie (roughly 1800) The hautes are your corporate overlords, the petits are your guys who own one SME business and are successful at it. The haute don’t labor, but invest, the petit don’t labor but manage.
Today - You could also say haute are CxO, VP; petit are Director; then senior manager and down is just laborers
Between 1800 and end of WW2 the petit bourgeoisie split again: a new layer between laborer and petit: the middle class, this meant people who still worked jobs, still depended on selling the value of their labor, couldn’t stop working on a whim, but were wealthy enough to achieve other markers of the bourgeoisie: property, leisure activities, vacations, travel, cars over horses (at first), more than one hat, inside plumbing…
Between WW2 and today there are much more layers, probably more akin to job titles and workplaces. “Retail workers” “Middle managers” “Blue collar tradesmen” - which aren’t descriptions of their level in society but miniature microcosms of society and economy.
Some workers can be very rich without owning a business. Some can own their own business and be poorer than their employees. It’s not so cut and dried any more.
All that to say, the “middle class” (in developed countries) both expanded and shrunk at the same time: the majority of people have a high quality of living with disposable income, but also can’t retire now or maybe ever.
The line should always be - if you’re under retirement age and quit your job tomorrow, do you have enough assets to comfortably live out the rest of your life with minimal changes to lifestyle until you die of old age?
- Yes? You are not working class.
- No? You are working class.
As for the rest:
Are you worth more than 5 million dollars?
- Yes? Petit bourgeoisie
- No? Middle class at most
Do you and your partner combined earn more than $300,000 a year?
- Yes? Upper Middle class
- No? Middle class at most
$150k?
- Middle class
$100k and below?
- Working class.
“Wow! 100k is a lot”
No, in the grand scheme of things in 2024, it is not.
Thinking artists have money seems incorrect.
