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.
Nobody’s done the reading, everybody is just reacting to vibes.
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.
Am I dumb or is it supposed to read like wank?
I’m pretty sure all modern liberal “economics” is supposed to read like wank by design
Feels like the self-selection scammers go for, anyone that would find it wank would self-select themselves out of the pool.
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.
This person seems to think people are magically ordained with the elastic social mobility of bubble gum when in reality his reddit brain is made of bubble gum.
Man whose brain is made of bubblegum: “think of social mobility like a pack of juicy fruit”
“u can have two flavors at the same time!”
What did their comment say?
Lmao, it was something to the effect that the bazinga brain believed that social mobility was as pliable as bubblegum, but actually it was their brain that had the consistency of bubblegum.
How have we not considered the complexities of real life?
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.
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
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.
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.
Not just that, but even many otherwise very principled leftists do not think critically about some of the more deep-rooted Enlightenment-era values. You don’t take off the glasses to see through ideology. Fascists don’t diverge from a pre-ideological, objective reality, they aren’t simply misinformed; they enjoy fascism. To quote Anti-Oedipus: “Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused.” This is why tireless explanation alone does nothing to convince them out of their position, and possibly even feeds it. Žižek says a lot of silly stuff, but he’s absolutely right in seeing the radicality in Freud and Lacan.
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.
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
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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.
Low density workplaces AND low density housing, too.
I agree. The housing is a good point.
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
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.
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
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
Basically everything that Marx writes about capitalists is based on belief that there exists collective class interest.
Any CEO worth their salt will just fuck over their competitors if given chance, not act for good of capitalist class.
Whole idea of “reserve army of labor” is based on belief that capitalists will act to their own detriment for good of other capitalists.
this person has never heard of the prisoners dilemna
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.
they really do believe that endless competition is more productive than collaboration
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.
fuck that’s a really good point, gonna have to remember this one
It’s a lot like trying to explain the motivation of individual politicians, where they do really compete against each other too but likewise have something of a standard of conduct. They might in extreme cases even kill each other, but you’re more likely to see that than see them adopting a genuinely communist platform in order to gain popularity because a communist platform threatens the class and will be met with reprisal from much more than just the little faction competing against them in the election. Communists gaining a foothold anywhere represents a threat to capitalism everywhere by demonstrating an alternative and giving power to workers.
A bourgeois murderer who kills a fellow member of their class will of course potentially be punished by the state, which could be considered reprisal by the capitalist class because they control the state, but you haven’t seen true collective action from the capitalist class until you have seen how they respond to communists.
Every day we get more and more proof why free speech was a mistake
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
