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.
How can you write so many words when you clearly don’t understand what class even is.
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.