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https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/18ao0je/is_class_even_a_thing_the_way_marxists_describe_it/
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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I think maybe he goes over this in Das Kapital? I mean he goes over a lot in that damn book tho lol.
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
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
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I want to see this dork seamlessly switch between Walmart greeter and Walmart owner. Just do it, if it's that easy.
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...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.
Man whose brain is made of bubblegum: "think of social mobility like a pack of juicy fruit"
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.
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.
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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"
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 
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.
Damn, it's almost as if sports guys make enough money to transition into the bourgeoisie (like Jordan buying restaurants and car dealerships and MiLB teams, licensing his name out etc) or have to work doing something else. 
Damn, it's almost as if sports guys make enough money to transition into the bourgeoisie
The pay is upper middle class for most players but we only really hear about the handful of super stars that have fat contracts and tens of millions in sponsorship deals. Only a tiny percentage ever make enough to transition out of the working class.
The vast majority ending up with broken bodies and working at a used car dealership the rest of their lives. These men and women were born with bodies that are statistical flukes and not made for a long healthy life due to their exaggerated size. We then ask them to do extreme things with their bodies and push limits that human beings shouldn't be able to cross. This is why players unions that can secure lifetime medical benefits for former players are so critical in professional team sports.
This is why players unions that can secure lifetime medical benefits for former players are so critical in professional team sports.
Especially for sports like American football, where brain damage is so prevalent.
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.
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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.
capitalism doesn't exist because we are still in feudalism. Societal change didn't happen at the throwing of a switch so it didn't happen
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
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?
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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.
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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?
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.
Actually I think more like all the crytobros that could have sold at the top or close but end up holding the bag due to of a combination of greed and feeling like they're soon to become billionaires instead of just "richer".
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
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 i.e form a monopoly. The path of least resistance is forming a price cartel with 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 tubes think the point of competition is to compete endlessly. 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.
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.
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 youWhat 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.