Why do the radlibs who claim that income has absolutely nothing to do with class and that artists and actors are totally proletarian even think Marx used these definitions? If proletarian is such an arbitrary category that contains many people who objectively do NOT have a self-interest in revolution then what purpose do they think these categories serve in regards to Communism? Marx defined them for an actual reason, you know.
>inb4 thread deleted because god forbid we don't talk about something that isn't American or Chinese electoralism
190 posts and 12 image replies omitted.>>2228494I don't want to reduce marxism to mere sociology but a proletarian is a
wage worker who sees communism in their self-interest owing to their lack of reserves and property, having no stake in capitalism at all, who has absolutely
nothing to sell
but their labor.
>>2228520that's the thing. there is always
something a person can do to accumulate a little reserves. not a lot. they can pawn everything in their apartment. they can turn off their electricity every night. they can stop using water except in public. they can avoid all substances and recreation. they can cook meals every night. they can steal. this is why I think individualizing it is silly like this. It's a social average for the whole class. each individual could theoretically make any number of strange sacrifices to "break out" but on average they aren't going to do that and on average they are reserveless, propertyless, and stuck in a vicious cycle.
>>2228529If you need extreme hypothetical examples then you've kind of lost the plot. A professional earning a lot of money could invest their disposable income immediately or only after a couple of months. You can't say the same of some barista or factory worker or cashier.
And for what it's worth I somewhat agree with your point. The fuzziness of the middle class is a specific characteristic of it which is why I mentioned not wanting it to reduce this talking point to mere sociology.
>>2228530I wouldn't go that far. Prisoners don't earn a subsistence wage like proles do. They actually earn
below subsistence and in addition in many US states they are in debt to the jail when they get out because they are charged boarding fees from which their "wages" (legally allowed to be minimum wage) are subtracted.
so prisoners are even more exploited than proles, but because they are convicted criminals they are dismissed as "deserving" etc.
when I said
> It's full industrial proletariat commodity production inside a jail.I meant they are doing the surplus value generating labor that used to be associated with the working class, before deindustrialzation, outsourcing, and prison labor put "normal" imperial core workers into more service sector jobs
>>2228531there's a much less extreme and much more common (and non hypothetical) example earlier in the thread: avoiding having children.
>>2227544Increasingly because of contraception, abortion, etc. in the imperial core countries (getting rolled back in some places but still highly available compared to Marx's time), the fertilitiy rate is below 2. many people don't have children. Marx says subsistence is not just the wage needed for the worker to stay alive, but he wage needed for the worker to stay alive AND raise at least 2 kids to child bearing age before they die. Reproduction of the working class is necessary for the bourgeoisie to maintain profits. So if wages fall below subsistence it does not mean immediate starvation, but it does mean less people will have children. People who deliberately choose not to have children (increasingly common) can indeed accumulate savings even while making a proletarian subsistence wage, while having nothing to sell but their labor power, because Marx says subsistence is not just maintenance but reproduction of the working class.
So I suppose you could argue that anyone who has less than 2 children is petty bourgeois, and that would be fine, but at this point you need to admit that petty bourgeois and bourgeois class traitors are needed for revolution. And defectors in the military. Engels was a class traitor. Lenin was a class traitor (lawyer from a petty bourgeois peasant family). Castro was a class traitor (lawyer from a plantation owning family).
>>2228537>but at this point you need to admit that petty bourgeois and bourgeois class traitors are needed for revolutionThat's fine, the reason Marx tried to define classes was more for the proletariat to not fall for opportunism and reformism because the petit-bourgeois love to recruit the proletariat to fight their battles for them.
>>2228539That's two examples out of how many millions are filling jails to the brim today? Even today with a castrated labor movement you still have organized struggle between proletarians today.
>>2228551they are usually paid above subsistence so they get a portion of the surplus value produced by the people being paid subsistence wages. they also get privileges (a guaranteed salary, paid time off, an office to themselves, less oversight) and lastly their job is the delegation of tasks rather than the performannce of tasks. they are overseers of production. they do what in earlier times the small capitalist would do directly. in adam smith's time a capitalist was also usually a manager. but in late stage multinational capitalism the capitalist usually just sits on the board of directors and accumulates stock dividends and does very little day to day management
marx talks about "labor of superintendence" in theories of surplus value. such labor would still be necessary under socialism, but it would be shared collectively between the workers, rather than being hierarchical. think rotating managerial duties. you still need to plan things and delegate tasks. but it won't come with exorbitant privilege anymore.
I responded in regards to a similar topic starting here
>>2226528. A lot of the issues in this thread I feel can be chalked up to moralizing the proletariat. Just because someone is proletarian, does not mean they will always be revolutionary. Their specific role in a given moment may even trend them towards being counter-revolutionary. It's simply that in general the proletariat is a revolutionary class, in the sense that it is uniquely the proletariat that contains the potential to supercede both itself and class society as a whole. This idea that someone is or isn't proletarian because of their interest at given juncture is working backwards; Marx didn't go and say that the English proletariat were no longer such because they were better off and had little revolutionary potential so long as the Irish remained in their situation.
>>2228555This doesn't say what you think it says. Managers are contextual, but they are by large working class. They just largely also won't share interests with other workers, because their role in the production (the "brain" vs the "hand" as Marx would put it) may very well lend them towards aligning with capital to keep the benefits of their given role. As a side tangent, racial segregation in the workplace is another example of proletarian workers aligning with capital because they see their current role as better off then other proletarians (white factory workers vs black janitors), and so seeing themselves as beneficiaries of the capitalist, largely lack (though not impossibly so) revoltionary potential despite being proletarian. Their position above other proletarian and being able to dictate their labour in the workplace can cause them to see capitalism as necessary toward maintianing that role.
>>2228575labor power is a commodity. the commodity is sold at its value. the value of the commodity is the labor time required to produce it. labor power is paid its value. its value is the subsistence wage. the subsistence wage is the wage needed to keep the worker alive long enough to keep working and have at least two children. the worker sells their commodity (labor power) in exchange for the subsistence wage. but the labor power is unique because it produces more value than it is worth. How is this? by a violation of entropy? no. By overwork. A worker produces more value in a single day of work than they themselves would need to survive and reproduce. We see this in feudalism. A single peasant with a plot of land can produce crops for himself, his family, and the lord's rent. The lord's rent is the surplus labor. In capitalism the surplus labor is performed during the work day. You work long enough to produce the value of your own wages, and then you work longer than that. During that extra time the capitalist makes profit. It is stolen.
put more simply: a capitalist will only hire a worker if the worker produces more value than the capitalist pays out in wages, otherwise the capitalist won't profit. see image related.
>>2228574>But that's exactly what makes them not proletarian. It's the same with cops.Cops are extensions of the state, so that part get a bit more fuzzy, but strictly you could define them as class traitors to the working class. Again though, you're moralizing the issue. Are white workers in the 1960s who are placed in roles above lower level black workers not proletarian? No. Are they as likely as said black workers to be revolutionary? In all likelihood (but not absolutely), no.
If a capitalist pays a worker to whip someone whenever they stop working in the context of production and while they are engaging in wage labour themselves, they are technically proletarian. But the benefits they receive in said role are of course entirely dependent on said role existing, so it's unlikely they will align in revolutionary interest with other proletarians, and may even see other proles as a threat.
We should also remember that while class is what it is, people themselves are always in fluid transition, falling and rising in ways that eventually tip them to one class or another. You have the prole with petit-bourgeoisie "hustles" or aspirations (as successful or unsuccessful as these are), and then you have petit-bourgeoisie proper.
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