The same person can be a customer at Walmart, a worker at Walmart, and a shareholder/owner at Walmart. Class as a Marxist concept maybe made sense when you could only be a worker or an owner. But it doesn’t work in a world where you can seamlessly switch between categories, or be all of them at the same time.
Marxists when the Walmart greeter shows them his penny stocks (he is bourgeois now)
Tbf, this is very loosely and poorly describing a process of socialization that is an inherent part of capitalism. Shame Marx never wrote about this in Vol 3 chapter 27 of capital.
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The same person can be a customer at Walmart, a worker at Walmart, and a shareholder/owner at Walmart.
You laugh but this is literally the foundational model of microeconomics: dynamic stochastic general equilibrium that they have been teaching to every econ students for the past few decades.
The economists around the world advising their governments have all been indoctrinated to some degree of this neoclassical belief.
As a literal former Walmart greeter who got a few thousand in the Employee Stock Program, fuck this guy (and double fuck Walmart)
Getting fired by Walmart and making their Wikipedia page for it is the crowning achievement of my career.
The same person can be a customer at Walmart, a worker at Walmart, and a shareholder/owner at Walmart. Class as a Marxist concept maybe made sense when you could only be a worker or an owner. But it doesn’t work in a world where you can seamlessly switch between categories, or be all of them at the same time.
these people have rocks in their skulls
Marx expressly addresses this a number of times in his writings.
Liberals and making arguments already explicitly disproven by books they refuse to read, NAMID.
"Oh you have $60 in stocks in a company, that makes you a capitalist." - people who say we don't understand economics
Basic economics
I want to see this dork seamlessly switch between Walmart greeter and Walmart owner. Just do it, if it's that easy.
...and a shareholder/owner at Walmart...
Oh boy... somebody's gonna lose their shit when they hear about the different types of "shares" a company can buy/sell/trade.
The same person can be a customer at Walmart, a worker at Walmart, and a shareholder/owner at Walmart. Class as a Marxist concept maybe made sense when you could only be a worker or an owner. But it doesn’t work in a world where you can seamlessly switch between categories, or be all of them at the same time.
How can you write so many words when you clearly don't understand what class even is.
I can buy penny stocks in a company where I am a wage slave, therefore no class
I really need to remember the source because this seems to come up a lot. But Marx differentiated between proletarian workers whose labor power was used in production and other workers whose labor power was used in the redistribution of capital. For example, many finance capital workers are not proletarian. The terminology there may not be exactly right, but that’s the gist.
I think the whataboutisms that make class look murky are extremely rare. You’d need someone who both labors in production and owns the company and makes equal amounts from their wages and from their ownership. The capitalist class has long had a word for this type of person: a failure. I’d be happy to just call them petit bourgeois.
Very few large corporations are majority employee owned, at least outside China. Only ones I can think of in the US are WinCo (grocery stores) and Valve Corp (steam, halflife, gabe). I guess there is also Bob's Redmill but they aren't that big. In China a sizeable chunk of the private sector is structured like that with Huawei probably being the most famous example. It's not a perfect structure and there are downsides but it's something.
I find it interesting that large corporations structured like that have a stability and long term outlook similar to well managed state owned enterprises. None of the mergers, reorganizations, and fire sales of assets you see so often with other large private sector enterprises. Then again, it's probably harder to get the board to approve mass layoffs or downsizing to juice next quarters profits when most of the board seats represent rank and file employees.
I think maybe he goes over this in Das Kapital? I mean he goes over a lot in that damn book tho lol.
Class is something you pick at character creation, duh.
Ah, yes the multi-class enjoyer!
How have we not considered the complexities of real life?
aimixin:
Marxism is dialectic, it rejects absolute pure categories. Things sort of exist on a spectrum but sort of don't. The way Marxists use categories is to understand that everything is connected to each other through a series of quantifiable interconnected steps, but that something is always dominant, and this dominant aspect is what determines the overall quality of the thing in question.
If you're trying to shove everything into a pure category of absolutely worker, absolutely capitalist, then this is just a useless endeavor. When we talk of "worker" or "capitalist," we don't mean it as if these are pure categories, where a worker can't ever own capital, or that a capitalist can't ever do labor. They may do these things, they may exist somewhere in between. But clearly at some point, certain characteristics become dominant over others. Clearly Jeff Bezos's class interests are not the same as a minimum wage worker, as the latter likely has next to no capital while the former has far more capital than he could ever, by his own labor, afford.
There is no reason to try and shove this person you're describing into a specific absolute box. If they're a salaried worker who runs some very small business / self-employment on the side as supplemental income, you could just say they're a worker with petty bourgeois characteristics. You don't have to say they're absolutely "petty bourgeois" or a "worker". You can just describe that they have characteristics of multiple categories. No reason you cannot do this.
Notice that none of them have read Marx. They've just found a secondary source they choose to believe. One that aligns with their baby political biases.
Peterson is the perfect example of this.
Spent 6 months prattling on about how he was gonna debate Marxism into the ground then when somebodybasked him what parts of marks writing he disagreed with was like "oh I haven't actually ever read anything by Marx"
lol and his debate with Zizek
That’s because his winning argument is that Marxism is the ideology of Leopold Marks, who was a Democrat (the more conservative party at the time). Horseshoe theory defeats Marxism. /s
a whole subreddit of people who can't take a scientific theory (that was meant to change and evolve) and apply it to current day. also you can tell most of them read the Manifesto at most.
Half of them can't even differentiate between the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie. I don't think they even read the wiki for the manifesto. Just reddit comments.
they think today is totally different because service industries are much more prevalent. Service industries don't suddenly change the owners of the means stealing from the people who actually produce the work.
Capital, Volume III introduces some analysis on this topic, but Marx's conclusion seem to imply that if you have a single dollar in 401(k), you are bourgeois, but CEO without company shares is class-traitor worker.
Marx failed to consider the 401(k)
You'd have to wonder how they don't simply self combust from cognitive dissonance when worshipping models like the laffer curve that have the scientific rigour of 'it came to me in a dream' while trying to nitpick shit like this. Capitalism didn't come fully formed with a neat date, so Marx is full of shit actually
zinger alert
Yeah bro, Lebron literally is proletarian (he may not be at this point due to his wild success, but as a stand in for any other basketball player in those leagues, YES)
Sports dudes will train their entire life to play professionally for a decade, maybe two? And then they have to make that money last the rest of their life because of the damage playing can do to your body. Many couldn't work if they wanted to. It's why the basketball players Union is so important for them, even if it tends to skew towards the top, it gets folks way more money than they otherwise would which can set them and their family for life.
And, respectfully, if you've ever met the kinda guy who owns laundromats, they tend to be fuckin rich dickheads.
The last part of that reply is unironically yes. Or at least Lebron would be a petty bourgeois if we look at his investments and business portfolio.
Yeah that comment is a mess. I'm not even a sports guy but a quick search suggests that LeBron James is at least a partial owner of 5 companies. Literally the first link on DDG. Maybe it was prole in the past but he's def part of the owner class now.
Just prefacing this by saying I am not making a funny ironic post at all, I am dead serious.
Am I wrong in thinking even the highest paid sportsmen are part of the proletariat? They are effectively using their bodies for their employers to generate capital, in some cases having to risk their lives (boxing, rugby, NFL, extreme sports), whilst those employers effectively do nothing but manage the capital these athletes generate and get the majority of the money. Yes many athletes are multimilionairres, but they are the people that make effectivelty most of the money for the multi-billion pound (or dollar or euro) businesses to function.
You are not wrong, and they don't really own the means of production. The owners still make the most money if there is money to be had. Any pushback from the players about exhaustion due to ever increasing amount of games is met with cries of overpaid primadonnas.
Players in lower leagues are often exploited financially. Especially if foreign.
Hard to keep in mind sometimes, but yeah lot of actors and athletes are well off but unless they got their own brands or companies they are still workers
It gets complicated by the fact the really famous ones get a lot of money from liscencing their likeness and things like that, which is clearly bourgeois, especially when it's for like a 2k game or something and the model being made doesn't need their labor input at all.
But generally we can call them labor aristocrats in the sense that the super rich ones are definitely paid in part out of the labor value of other workers.
barzoople
The meaning of classes has been almost completely destroyed by a bunch of people who would be in debt if they missed a paycheck not wanting to admit they're working class.
There's no class solidarity among the working class because people who make 50k a year wanna feel superior to people who make 20k who wanna feel superior to people on medicaid.
Meanwhile rich liberals know not to do too much to rock the boat and won't actually meaningfully oppose the oppressive system that made them rich.
a bunch of people who would be in debt if they missed a paycheck not wanting to admit they're working class.
there's also the opposite problem of petit bourgeois exploiters wanting to pretend they're working class because they have a "job" which consists of owning a couple of laundromats and renting out a 2 bedroom suburban home to some tenants
insert Mao with laser eyes emote
I know someone who is in the process of inheriting the family business. It’s fairly sizeable so he’s making a ton of money. Despite the fact that he will be the owner/CEO, since it’s a business that’s in the trades he genuinely thinks he is “working class”.
But also, the situation in the US right now is that the working class really does more closely resemble the “sack of potatoes” than an actual political class.
So the “sack of potatoes” comment Marx made gets kinda misinterpreted as the context is sort of missed, like with his “opiate of the masses” comment. It’s not meant as a dig at workers’ intelligence or sophistication. He means a sack of potatoes is just a collection of individual potatoes and nothing more - putting the potatoes in a sack doesn’t turn them into something that is greater than the sum of the parts.
But not so with class. For Marx, the mission of the working class is become a class “in” itself to a class “for” itself. By developing class consciousness, workers are able to unite and enact their will upon the world. Whether or not someone is “working class” or not is kinda meaningless until workers are united and acting as a group. A big way this happens is literally by working next to each other and sharing in common struggles at the workplace.
But for the peasants or lumpen proletariat that Marx is talking about in the Eighteenth Brumaire, they are not really able to become a class for themselves because they are so atomized. A peasant’s horizon can’t extend beyond themselves or their immediate family. There’s no shared struggle, it’s everyone for themselves. Each peasant is just one potato in a sack of them, thus unable to act as a class.
And this is part of the problem that we face in the US. Workers are so atomized and separated from each other, that class consciousness is incredibly difficult to develop. Getting people to see a common struggle is hard when people aren’t actually struggling together.
Well said. The way people in America work farther apart from one another is considerably different than conditions that existed when much of our classical political theory was written at least a century ago. This proliferation of low-density workplaces must be taken into consideration when subsequent generations of political theorists try to come up with a way to organize that working class to be for itself.
Real question, if these dorks don't believe classes exist, what do they think the function of a state is? Is there some other conflict within humanity that states mediate? It's probably some kind of dogshit like that racism simply happens for no reason, or criminality just comes from nowhere.
What is supposedly the reason states exist within a neoliberal framework? Because if classes aren't something that are real, why is a state even there? Capitalism can't chug along without one?
racism is just caused by people having misinformed ideas on race, and criminals just don’t properly reason about their actions or are immoral. the state exists simply to protect everybody’s human rights, which are established through rational discourse and proper argumentation. class interests? boorswasee? those are old bad ideas, now we have better ones like stakeholder capitalism <3
That really is the crux of their whole worldview, isn't it? Some people are dumb-dumbs and some people are smarty pants and it's the responsibility of the smart people to argue about why they should own everything.
They only conceive of conflict as misunderstandings, or improper education. They can't see inherent conflict in material terms.
It’s because our ancestors in the state of nature collectively decided to form the social contract so they wouldn’t get eaten by cave bears. Hence the bourgeois state. Haven’t you read theory?
To prop up the free market and wage war.
Oh you own 1/10000000 of a company? Guess you're in the owner class :shrugs:
Technicaly, if you made a strawmen this could work, like if the company had 1 x 10^20 net worth then yeah you'd have more wealth than any other working class person, its why I think you kind of need to be slightly careful when talking about financial market ghouls, the numbers are insane actualy when you get to it. Although yeah obviously fictional monopoly money vs real value and all that.
Class is an entirely useless metric for analysis, here let me show you by doing class analysis and getting mad because there's some nuanced edge cases to it
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You are asking a typical redditor to think critically?
Any CEO worth their salt will just fuck over their competitors if given chance, not act for good of capitalist class.
What is cornering the market?
What is a monopoly?
What is a cartel/oligopoly?
Lolol
The purpose of a CEO is to make as much money as possible, not "fuck over their competitors", e.g form a monopoly. The path of least resistance is forming a price cartel with like one guy - i.e the immediate outcomes of early capitalism and the defining characteristics of the founding of most capitalist states.
Try getting healthy insurance or a phone plan today lmao. Try for 5 minutes to get municipal fiber in your city.
These rubes think the point of competition is to compete forever. The point of is to win.
Regarding the first point, what does this person think the purpose of the bourgeois state is? Yes capitalists each have their own individual interests and compete with each other, but the state arbitrates those conflicts and maintains bourgeois dominance over society by enforcing the private property relations which benefit capitalists collectively to the detriment of everybody else.
There's clearly not a better alternative, that would be born out of capitalism. Nope, nuh uh. Clearly we just have to put up with the capitalists exploiting us until the sun hyperinflates and explodes.
CEOs do fuck each other over, but it is unheard of for them to do this by, say, causing their competitor's employees to unionize. There are real and bitter rivalries in the bourgeoisie, but that does not mean they don't know who the real enemies are.
Every day we get more and more proof why free speech was a mistake
W-2 vs Form 8949 and Schedule D (Form 1040) this shit ain't hard
Either you make your living thru wages and salary or capital gains, if you do both then you're a failed capitalist or a lucky gambling worker
For 99% of us tho, it's either W-2 or Schedule D
Marx literally addresses this. Neo Marxists have taken the concept further by considering the polarisation capital causes on a global scale through imperialism.
Are you directly profiting from the labour of others? You are bourgeois.
Are you not? You are proletariat.
(this is an oversimplification and might be wrong)
We all profit and benefit from each other's labor, the primary difference though is whether your income is from your labor or from your ownership
thank you
Virgin hexbearist marxist vs Chad redditeur deboonker
The Best and the Brightest, everyone.
...
These people are so fucking ignorantly smug
What sort of a question even is that? If you need to work to make a living, you're the working class, you're a worker. If you own so much you don't need to work, you're some form of bourgeoisie.
Yes, there are some edge cases and outliers. But anyone claiming that's somehow not "a thing" is bizarre, it's just a very basic process of labelling.
new class analysis just dropped
Blue Collar Class - construction, trades, janitors, truckers etc., people who work their bodies hard and will "burn out" in their 50s due to accumulated injuries, don't typically work a set 9-5 but instead do shift work
White Collar Class - people who work that there 9 to 5, biggest deltas between working and office class folks is the set schedule and work that doesn't really take a toll on the body
Professional Class - execs, doctors, law partners, etc. - people who amass wealth in a way that white and blue collar folks do not, have multiple homes, and can fund their kids education without debt, and can pay for extracurriculars to get their kids into elite institutions to try and keep that professional class status in the next generation
The Neogentry - the feudal lords of America, they own dealerships, a chain of franchise stores, locally important businesses, and are big fish in a big town but unimportant in a city or populous state. Wealth is intergenerational, but they are more locally/state focused. they probably have a relationship with their congressional rep, and definitely have a number of state govt members who know them on a first name basis
Blue Bloods - the Johnsons etc., high-3 and 4 comma club families with money managers who have real elite pull in society. They can meet with their senators, their governor, and may be able to get the President's attention on key issues
The only thing they've possibly identified here are the ones who own vast franchises, car dealerships, and local businesses usually have undue political influence on local governance. That's a real thing, but it's no different than saying there are small, regional bourgeoisie who exert influence within the framework of larger, international bourgeoisie who exert dominance over finance.
The other things this person says are just muddying the waters. Furthermore billionaires aren't even brought up, like they don't matter.
One of my favorite paradigms for The 2016 election and the rise of Trump, is this regional/nationalist versus global capitalist divide.
The person who owns a couple car dealerships, who owns a couple restaurant franchises, who owns a successful furniture chain, is statistically more likely to vote conservative and support Trump. In this paradigm they represent regional or national capital. A powerful group of class interests, but a group of class interests focused on the local state and national level. The person who owns a couple successful car washes, is opposed to NAFTA, doesn't care about maintaining the empire, but has a very strong opinion on socialized health care or the minimum wage.
The person who is on the board of a multinational pharmaceutical company, the person who is on the board at a defense contractor, is probably more likely to be an anti Trump conservative, or "liberal". In this paradigm they represent global capital, they can support things like a higher minimum wage, or mildly socialized health care, but always with the rationale of making America more competitive in the international marketplace. This is the group of capital most invested in maintaining empire, who have the most to gain from agreements like NAFTA. This is the segment of the bourgeoisie most opposed to someone like Trump.
In America we have two parties, both representing the bourgeoisie, one representing a localized bourgeoisie aligned with socially regressive groups, and the other representing a globalized bourgeoisie aligned with American empire. Both agree on 90% of issues.
"I see your history of all hitherto existing societies and raise you this absurd counterfactual"
Idea for a Kelly comic: Karl Marx falling out of the top bunk of a bunk bed.
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I was a communist, but now I know the real classes and it's all true. In terms of influence 1 blue blood is probably worth somewhere between 50K to a million blue/white collar class nobodies. How could Mark be so blind?
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