Who are the "middle class" supposed to support in the class stuggle?
from DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 02 Sep 17:18
https://sh.itjust.works/post/45280620
from DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 02 Sep 17:18
https://sh.itjust.works/post/45280620
As in: Which makes the most sense from their PoV, ethics aside.
#nostupidquestions
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The middle class is a fabrication. It’s an income bracket created by capitalism, not a true analysis of one’s association to the means of production and labor. It’s “real” in the sense that many people identify themselves to it, but it’s not real in a Marxist sense.
A vast majority of people in the middle class are the proletariat. Some of the people in the middle class are petite bourgeois.
Edit: I think your question is a good one, simply because so many people do see themselves as part of this Middle Class first before they think of themselves as workers or business owners, but I think that’s a sign of effective capitalist propaganda meant to distract the workers from their relationship to labor. The Middle Class largely is made up of people who need to be reeducated to understand that they are part of the proletariat and the bourgeois have been robbing them for centuries.
The “middle class” is just the working class with debt. In class struggle terms, its not “rich vs poor”, it’s “owners vs workers”. If you have to work to support yourself, that tells you all you need to know.
I have relatives that own their house as well as a few rental properties, but they also work normal jobs, they get the new iPhone (or sometimes Samsung Phone) every year, they rarely use public transit, always drive their cars. I’m assuming they have health insurance as well. And I also heard they have other investments besides rental income (as in stocks)
Now I don’t know if they need to work, but they definitely have enough rental income to get by even if they lose their jobs.
Idk what class that is supposed to be.
Theyre landlords so yes, they basically are
Buncha people in here still don’t get how this works…
When I bought my current home, I rented out my previous home to friends of friends. They covered the payments on that house until they were in a situation where they could get a loan to buy it from me. There were no yachts or caviar for me during those years.
Renting out one or two homes doesn’t make someone “owner class”.
You had them cover your other mortgage. These people can coast off of rent money. You are not the same.
“My uncle Greg is one of the good ones” yeah yeah I’ve heard it before, go read some theory
You must be right, because generalizations are always 100% accurate.
Theory and practice are the same in theory, but in practice, they are different.
I think the line is when the primary bread winner is your tenant. Covering costs of mortgage only is a nice thing to do, profiting off of them beyond the mortgage is exploitation. That’s the difference, your assertion at the end is highly dependent on how they choose the rates for said houses and whether they profit off the work of others in that transaction.
Does it matter? These are just concepts. Marxists would tell you theyre petit-bourgeoisie. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie
Ultimately, supporting the working class helps everyone.
I think an easier interpretation than the “owners vs workers” in this day and age is, are they billionaires. If you’re not a billionaire or close to it, you should be on the side of the working class.
The billionaires that make up only 1% of the population ans own nearly half the wealth of the entire world are the problem.
You don't need to be a billionaire.. 10 million plus is sufficient to never have to work again if you are not absolute degenerate and know how to manage money.
100 million if you have to cosplay being "rich"
1 million is commonly agreed upon in the FIRE community as the number to hit to have a confortable retirement in perpetuity. Following the 4% rule, you could withdrawal $40k each year to live off of and would almost certainly not run out of money before you die, even accounting for inflation.
That number doesn't math... Unless you also have a paid off house.
Why not? I lived on about 20k last year. I live in a camper van most of the time, so no rent for me. But even paying (imo, a rather exorbitant) $1000/mo for a studio, you are still only at 32k per year.
You CAN do it but that sucks. 40k a year is not enough money unless you’re happy to live like you’re poor, but just don’t have to go to work every day.
Financially independent, sure. But I don’t plan to retire to sitting in my van reading a library book eating rice and beans until I give up the ghost, you know? Color me entitled, but I think we can draw the hypothetical lines a little higher than you have set them for you.
This year I spent 3 months rock climbing in mexico, then travelled to Utah to hang out with friends in the desert and go canyoneering, then went to Yosemite. Now I am back home in Denver. I travel to beautiful places, cook tasty and healthy meals for myself (eggs for breakfast, pork burritos for dinner), occasionally go out to bars or restaurants or to concerts, have fun riding my motorcycle, and engage in quite a few DIY projects.
I honestly don’t understand where people spend all their money. I have an awesome life on $20k. I assume they are spending it on self-medicating or something.
Housing mostly
Right. As I noted in a previous comment, you could spend an additional 12k per year on a studio, and still come in well under 40k.
My very affordable mortgage (2.175% interest, thx COVID) with insurance and small savings for house repairs is 3k per month. I’ve got a wife, a dog, and 2 kids under 5. Daycare costs are about $600 per week for us both to work. Groceries with fresh produce for the kids and not much out of a box or can (and diapers and wipes) are about $800 per month. Yeah it’s gratuitous for groceries, but I ate a ton of hot pockets and lunchables and shit like that as a kid, but my kids don’t have to.
I’m already at 75k per year right there.
We own our cars outright, we are healthy and no medical payments, and we don’t regularly eat out. We have extended family overseas. One or two vacations a year (visit family every other year). We don’t spend money to medicate in any fashion :).
I remember living fine on 24k per year when it was just me on grad school, but now it takes a hell of a lot more. People can and do make it work for less, I wouldn’t personally want to downsize to retire earlier.
Oh right, I forgot. Don’t have kids. Worse than buying a boat, I’ve heard.
I guess I’ll find out!
Honestly you can just remove the ambiguity and put the number right at 1 billion dollars of net worth. Up to that point is obscenely wealthy, but a billion is the line that guarantees the majority of your wealth came directly from the exploitation of the masses.
You can’t ethically make a billion dollars as an individual when the working class sees 1/10,000th of that in a year as doing fairly well in most areas.
Ethically, the bar is much, much lower. By the time you have $25M net, you had to have exploited someone to get there and you’d have the clout to make at least local politics bend in your favour.
Chill out, dude. Somebody’s gotta fund your revolution.
Eh… There’s definitely ways to obtain that much without exploitation, although rare.
$10M and up would probably qualify. Below that, people would still need to work to maintain what they have with some measure of comfort and dealing with risk, inflation. Above that, they should be able to be self sustaining without working for a paycheque.
Sounds to me like petite bourgeoise. Wannabe owner class
“they have health insurance”. It is a given in quite a few countries. No link to being wealthy. Driving your car is not about being wealthy, dependant low wage workers have to drive to go to the factory too.
The stability of the owner class comes from the lack of necessity to labour to have spending money. You can be a wage worker like Emmanuel Macron, president of France with a current wage of net 8k€ ; but he just sold his wife inherited house for 3m€, when they got it for 1m€ (1.5m after the tax bureau caught him for under-valuating it). This is not working class.
That’s a really good way of putting it. We have the wealthy, the poor, and the poor who’ve been given scraps by the wealthy and are complicit in protecting them. The “middle class” believe they can gain more in scraps than they can by revolution. And so it continues.
The workers, 100%.
The difference between even a millionnaire and a billionnaire is one billion.
It’s such a large gap that in my view, no one really could claim to be a “temporarily embarassed billionnaire”. Nobody is; there are only workers and there are oligarches.
You can't put ethics aside. All we have is ethics. Ideally, ethics get codified into laws against doing unethical things, but not forcing people to only and always do that which someone said is ethical (no drunk driving, but no banning on alcohol). Problems crop up when the laws are unethical -- like saying corporations are people or landmines aren't warcrimes.
The 1% richest hold 50% of all the wealth. If we’re being reasonable, everyone vs them is probably more than enough.
Middle class is a fiction of post ww2 westoid regimes.
They are just a deluded working class who forgot where they came from.
The middle class is nothing more than poor people who are convinced that they’ll be rich someday.
Nope, that’s blatantly not true. I’m a middle class, I don’t think I’ll ever be rich. Sure, some people dream of being the next billionaires, but most of middle class doesn’t.
Fair enough. How about, middle class is just poor people who don’t know they’re poor.
Could be. Though for me it was always about how you live:
The only real struggle there is between the upper class and everyone else. The concept of the middle class doesn’t really do anything but divide workers.
Nah, I know I’m poor. I suggest the cut off is between purchasing economy and comfort+ seats for a flight. /s
The lower classes, because “real” capitalism grows from the bottom and trickle down is discredited nonsense, and we work so are working class too. There is no benefit to supporting those who don’t need it. Buying from small local shops and employee owned outfits, and if you are a business owner, paying well and giving employees ownership stake and profit sharing, that at least moves the needle in the right direction.
AFA self interest, middle class has more to gain by the poor becoming middle class, than by the rich getting richer.
The middle class isn’t real. You are either working class or owner class. Anything else is just there to divide the working class in a forever class war with the owner class.
As wealth inequality increases the line for who matters at the top gets smaller. At this point the top 1% controls 50% globally so on a global scale if your not in that 1% you don't matter. But like in the us its 2% so that is what it takes to be in the in crowd. In europe its 10% to be in. As wealth inequality gets worse those who previously benefited from slanted playing fields will find they fell down to the bad side of the board and they will be a major source of sucking for the top to increase their wealth expansion.
In the book 1984, one of the characters postulates that in any system of government there are 3 groups. The unwashed masses comprising 90% of people, the elite who are better than everyone else making up 1% of people, and a middle buffer of 9% of people. The buffer is used by the elite to keep the unwashed masses from uprising. Anyone from the 90% who looks like they might be trouble for the 1% gets to be in the 9%. They get treated a bit better in exchange for defending the status quo. Perhaps if they defend it hard enough they can be given a spot among the 1%!
I believe the argument made by this character is supposed to be flawed, but it ends up being pretty believable. The "middle class" would be the buffer zone of people who defend the status quo in exchange for slightly better treatment by the 1% than the average person gets.
Setting aside the "the middle class isn't real" point, distributing the rich's wealth for the benefit of everyone else is the sales pitch of socialism, so the middle class is still on the side gaining from a successful proletarian class struggle. I mean, the bourgeoisie winning means the status quo with its permanently declining quality of life, so I don't think many middle class people are too thrilled about continuing with that.
There is no middle class, there is only working class and the parasitic class.
It depends, how do they feel about guillotines?
This has always been my thought. As someone who is living a comfortable life, some would consider me as well-off or rich. Regardless, I am not private security rich, so would be an easy target at the start of the uprising.
Hence, ethics aside, it’s in my best interest to keep the ‘workers’ happy.
The middle class still works to make a living. So they are part of the working class.
People who have to work a job to live are workers.
Every other abled bodied person who lives without contributing doesn’t need to be around.
If you don’t know, you don’t have enough rich friends.
Middle class is a fabrication designed to make the working poor think they’re better off than they really are.
Everyone that sells their time to make a living is part of the same class. Everyone that makes their money through appreciation of capital is a different class.
This, lets not forget that there used to be poor aristocrats. The amount of assets you have does not necessarily define your class, but rather how you are forced to spend your life time.
Look at a graph of wealth distribution. The difference between any two points in the lower 99% is barely noticable, when compared to what the top 1 and even .001% have access to.
“Middle class” is a social class (like “upper class” and “lower class”), not an economic class (like “working class” and “ruling class”).
If you think having a nice car makes you closer to the ruling class than the working class, you’ve internalized the mind control and it doesn’t matter what you pick, you’re a threat.