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this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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No. Classes are determined by how you get your money and by how comfortable you are.
If you are working for a paycheck, you do not touch capital.
there is no capital without labour
Then maybe labor should organize its own capital and not some entitled prick of a class.
That's literally what socialism and communism are
Yes, I am a great proponent of those things. Why did you assume otherwise?
I'm too used to seeing people say "we need another way instead of capitalism", completely (willfully?) ignoring that socialism and communism, that I assumed that's where you were going. Sorry for the tone I put in my comment
It's not quite so black and white, though.
My spouse and I both work for a living, and we'd be in a hard spot if either of us lost our jobs. We also own 3 rental properties, and I have a military pension. We also own a farm where we raise 6 cows and enough chickens to have some eggs to sell.
So, we get most of our money from our labor, the rental properties pay for themselves most of the time but we don't pool that with our personal money...it's for the mortgages, taxes, maintenance and to cover for when we don't have renters (which is almost never...weird how that happens when you aren'tcharging exploitative rents).
We sell eggs and make a small profit on those, but not enough to support ourselves...same with the beef...it's mostly for us and family to eat (because fuck factory farming) but if we don't have the freezer space we'll sell the extra as well. That makes us both labor and capital... and my pension and military retirement benefits are basically as close to socialism as we'll get in the US anytime soon, the biggest difference being I had to earn it.
The landlord side of it is the murkiest imo. You having a military pension doesn't mean you're in the bourgeoisie, it just means you're getting paid for having given time from your life. Similarly, selling the surplus from your own agriculture doesn't place you in the class of controlling capital because you aren't using others' labor; you're creating something through your labor and when faced with having a surplus, are distributing your goods. Yes you sell them, but it's not fair to criticize you for trying to offset your costs while living under a capitalist system so long as the price isn't exorbitant.
Imo being a landlord is usually the scummiest, but if you're charging rent at a price set to maintain the buildings and ensure that your tenants still have housing, then I don't think you're exploiting anyone. Imo the more profit you take from your rental properties, the more it moves out of the grey area. It sounds however like you don't take profit or take a very minimal amount, and that you price your property so that it's self sufficient but not much more. In that case then you aren't really exploiting your tenants. Are they still being exploited? Yes, by the system that forces them to pay for housing. Do you have a hand in that exploitation purely by being their landlord? Yes, however if you aren't trying to extort them for money so they have housing, then I wouldn't say you're exploiting them more than just owning their housing. Theres a reason that leftists tout that theres no ethical consumption under capitalism; even in trying to help people or do the right thing, you are still feeding into a system of exploitation and extortion. That doesn't mean you still aren't trying to do the right thing or be genuinely helpful, it just means that unless we find an alternative system then we will all continue to exploit each other and be exploited. This is why the proletariat must be unified as otherwise, we will never shake the binds of our collective oppression.
Congratulations, you're one of an extreme few still living in the middle class.
Now realize how minority your experience is.
Oh, believe me...I am well aware of my privilege and spend a lot of time trying to question my own motivations... especially around the rental properties. I do feel like rental homes are generally exploitative towards the renters, but the 1st property kinda fell into our laps, and the other 2 were situations where we we were using our credit to help the rentersbgetninto a house they wanted but couldn't finance due to their credit. Basically, they picked the house, we bought it, and they rent it from us while we report their on-time payments to rebuild their credit.
I definitely wasn't born with a silver spoon..was homeless myself several times as a kid and for a while immediately after moving out on my own. Joined the military as it seemed the best way out for me at the time. Wrecked my knees and fucked my brain but at least they're paying me for the trouble. Now we're in the privileged, if often uncomfortable, role of being better off than most of our friends and peers. We still struggle some months, and it feels like we're barely making ends meet for the last year or so, so I KNOW everyone else is hurting. Even aside from our current financial state, I'm a cishet white veteran living in a very red state. About the only privileges I don't have here are being a lefty and an athiest, and even with all that, it still feels like I'm hanging on by a thread. When I imagine dealing with the state of the world today in the socioeconomic conditions I was experiencing when I was younger, I'm not sure I'd have endured.
Even being better off than most is pretty fucking hard these days.
Based on my definitions. Owning the 3 rental properties makes you owner class as that is private property, also when you pay off the mortgages you are going to be in a great spot right?
Farms are weird, if you only had the farm and have hired nobody else to help you run it then working class. If you hire people, well then you are owner class.
You both also have jobs on top of running a farm? Out of curiosity how do you have the time to manage your farm and work at the same time?
My BIL lives on the farm and takes care of feeding the livestock and keeping the pasture cleaned up. Otherwise, it's just family helping family. We're in the middle rebuilding part of the chicken coop now on the weekends. I say farm, but it's more a ranch... we only grow hay and its only about 10 acres, so it's not a huge burden with all of us working together.
Ok so I have my beef with capitalism, for sure, but this is inaccurate. People all over the country own property, shares in public and private companies, shares of government utilities, just to name a few examples.
Ownership of things does get distributed through capitalism. As manipulated as it is, that’s the concept of the stock market.
I’m not rich, but I do own a small amount of capital. My net worth far, far exceeds what I have in my bank account when you account for my car that I’ve paid off, small investments that have appreciated over time, stuff like that.
Now the top of the capitalist class? They have SO MUCH cash, and so many resources to draw on that they can manipulate stock prices and company values at will. That’s where the whole system starts to break down.
Idk what definition of capital you used to determine this but I will be using the Marxist on because capital is a Marxist term.
Capital is private property used to create surplus value usually involving the purchase of wage labor. It can be the money a capitalist uses to pay their employees, the land their workers use to produce surplus value for them, and/or the machinary required for their workers to produce surplus value as a few examples. Buying stocks does not mean you own the means of production in any significant way. You may have stake in how those means of production are use but you do not control them and you do not use them to produce surplus value nor do you purchase wage labor, you only profit off someone who does.
Furthermore your personal possessions like your car are not capital.
If you sell your labor to someone who possesses the means of production you are proletariat
If you work for a living, and being unemployed indefinitely would threaten your survival, you are part of the working class. Owning a few crumbs of capital is a nice cushion, but does not define your class.
If your income is passive, and you could live your whole life off the returns from your investments without ever actually working, you are part of the capitalist class.
That can't be true. I've done the math on my living expenses and it would only take a few years of saving in a high interest account for me to be considered a capitalist under that definition. if social mobility was truly that easy no sane person would be against capitalism.
That doesn't sound plausible like you said. Either you're way off the average living expenses/wages or have your formulas wrong.
If it only took you a few years of saving, you make enough and spend little enough as a proportion of that that you're outside the average.
'Ownership of things DOES get distributed..."
Uhhhh, no? Are you dumb? Owning stock in a company is far, FAR removed from owning any part of a company's assets.
Ok, so are we talking about assets or capital?
Capital is not money, capital can be represented by money but it is not inherently money. Capital is something you use to buy someone's labor. More specifically it is the social relationship between wage labor and profit. Assets (private property) used to produce profit (surplus value) are capital
You do not get any access to the company's resources. There is no dollar sitting in company coffers for your dollar of investment. You don't get to decide what that money does what so evwr, and its value is speculative on the performance.
That is far, far, far removed from owning or controlling any part of a company's capital.
I've been part of multiple board elections where the little people have deciding votes because a 3rd party institutional investor needs to rally the retail investors to oust the current board for environmental ~~crimes~~ reasons.
Having a vote is having control of capital ... and they pay you for it with dividends too.
But it isn't the same as if the entire working class had a collective say in the capital, not just those who choose to and have the resources to pay in. It isn't the same as the workers of that company having a say in their working conditions, shift lengths, compensation, etc.
A better way to say it would instead be the inverse: "If you don't work for a paycheck, you probably hold enough capital"
I wish it was just by how comfortable you are. Because that way in world scale I'd be Croesus
Ok you defined this way better than I did.