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
>>2215716>he defined them according to their relationship to the means of productionMoney can be capital under capitalism.
>anybody who produces surplus value has a long term interest in revolutionNot even Marx was retarded enough to claim this bullshit. Apparently the police and managers have an interest in revolution but nobody told them yet!
>>2215716lol people who never read marx talk sooo confidently about him
marx said a proletarian is without reserves by definition, not your stupidly reductionist "definition." do you think that there are any proletarian millionaires?
>>2215717>Not even Marx was retarded enough to claim this bullshit. He does claim this though. He cites teachers (in a private school) and performers as examples of people who produce surplus value and are thus proletarian, despite not producing physical commodities.
>Apparently the police and managers have an interest in revolution but nobody told them yet!This wouldn't apply to police since they don't produce profits, but are a public service paid for by the state. Some managers could fall under this category if they contribute socially necessary labour and are paid less than the value they produce.
>>2215718Marx says that if you produce surplus value you are a productive labourer. According to you then you can be both a productive labourer but not a proletarian? Marx was writing at a time when virtually all wage labourers were reserveless. But that's no longer the case. According to your reasoning workers who successfully went on strike to raise there wages enough to save money would stop being proles.
>>2215718>>2215719It's incredibly frustrating how the cycle of rad lib discourse on here is just to mindlessly repeat one slogan picked up online, people point out why it's inaccurate, and then that gets absorbed as another slogan to repeat, equally mindlessly. Obvious example of this is how on 2016 radlibs were always talking about "the rich", "the billionaire class", and so on, then people pointed out that income doesn't equal class, so now the (equally wrong) trendy slogan is to say to income is irrelevant to class entirely.
We went from "nobody should have a billion dollars! redistribute the wealth! support small businesses and UBI!" to "actually proletarian just means you work for a wage so professionals are proletarian no matter how much they make!" (see
>>2215716). Both equally retarded sentiments.
>>2215721Marx correctly pointed out only the reserveless propertyless wage worker has a tendency towards association and abolition of class society. Engels even went as far as to call homeowners non-proletarians. You're speaking pure bullshit.
>>2215721the text youre thinking about is marx talking about productive labor, not about what constitutes a proletarian
as for marx, merely earning a wage doesnt make you part of the proletariat, the mass of dispossessed, reserveless wage laborers
marx was not stupid enough to subsume everyone not acting as a functional capitalist under the category of proletarian, and took great care to make distinctions. it is painfully embarrassing for supposed communists to want to throw very wealthy people into the same boat as the reserveless lmfao
you just have to open the MECW to realize this btw
>>2215733>petit-bourgeois is about intention teehee :)))))Holy shit imagine calling yourself a marxist and pulling this bullshit. If people with reserves don't invest and want to instead fill their wall with anime figures that's their problem.
This is like saying all the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois in the Great Depression were actually proletarians because they could lose their property and reserves at any moment.
>>2215730>not all proletarians will tend towards revolutionOh my fucking god you've never a single fucking page of Marx yet act like an authority on the subject.
>>2215734>the text youre thinking about is marx talking about productive labor, not about what constitutes a proletarianWhere does he draw the distinction between the two?
>for marx, merely earning a wage doesnt make you part of the proletariatYou're right, but the only distinction he draws with regard to that is between productive and non-productive labourers.
>marx was not stupid enough to subsume everyone not acting as a functional capitalistJust having some savings doesn't make you a "functional capitalist" if you don't turn it into capital. Under your reasoning the vast majority of wage workers wouldn't be proletarians since very few people live at a genuine subsistence level. Moreover what does this consist of? If you have extra money to spend on non-essentials are you not a proletarian? Again, you're essentially arguing that a person's class changes the moment they save some money. It's wishy washy unscientific nonsense.
>it is painfully embarrassing for supposed communists to want to throw very wealthy people into the same boat as the reserveless lmfaoI'm not throwing anybody into the same boat as far as political tendencies go, but Marxists have always distinguished between income strata within a class category. E.g. rich vs poor peasants.
>>2215745Literally small capital holdings. This is what has been repeatedly told to you ITT by several anons already but you seem to ideologically refuse to comprehend it.
Examples could be investments, appreciating or stable physical property valuations, etc. This distinguishes them significantly in terms of practice and consciousness from the
reserveless majority of the working class, and especially the reserveless industrial proletariat. Clearer now or do you need a 27th example/variation to make you stop "replying" to strawmen?
>>2215768i hate the very ideological construct of "middle class" because it's used interchangeably to refer to petty bourgeoisie (people who own means of production and employ workers at a small scale but cannot compete with monopoly capitalism and tend to be driven from the market and get proletarianized), the professional managerial class (people who work a salaried job and perform managerial duties such as task delegation and planning which the capitalist historically performed but no longer does), and labor aristocrats (workers who won concessions in past labor struggles and are therefore paid at a slightly higher rate and exploited at a slightly lower rate than non organized workers)
like that's 3 different strata, be specific.
>>2215808> This is a neomalthusian lie.Completely unrelated shit
> Bourgeois governments use child tax credits and such to negate thatTax credits and subsidies are comoletely insufficuent to cover child expenses. You have no fucking clue of what you're talking about
>>2215954No, you are just exposing your own ignorance while cheerleading the vaguest conception of an Identity (a flagfag) parasocially on an anonymous imageboard.
What was made clear ITT was that Fatcat had problems with basic concepts from Marx and Engels, being needlessly obtuse, not admitting errors, instead just bailing from the thread.
You Yourself can get an understanding of scientific socialism for praxis in about 6 months of ACTUALLY READING one book each of Marx, Engels and Lenin and then joining a labor union, thereby surpassing what Fatcat has improvizationally paragraph-shitposted about for the last SEVERAL YEARS up until today.
Are you up for the task? If not, get to the root of your key obstacle/trauma and work past that. People could do these things who lived in worse conditions than you do today. Believe in yourself.
>>2215972I specifically mean the long point at which Fatcat refused to concede while discussing proletariat, working class and "
reserves" / holding small capital.
>your claim about all proletarians inherently tending towards revolutionI personally haven't advanced such a claim ITT. Remember mods stupidly has made all torposters appear with a name-filter. There could be 12 different anons writing under "Glownonymous" ITT.
>>2215877Interest is not synonymous with desire.
Someone can desire things that are not in their interest, and can lack desire for things that are in their interest.
>>2216228No they mean that China is a regime of wage labor, capital accumulation, and alienation of the workers from their products as well as from control over the productive process
But then, MLs chortle, surely you have seen China’s red flag, before insulting you based on your presumed nationality.
>>2215966Marxists?
You mean MLs?
Well MLs generally need to justify why they have an utter fascination with bourgeois regimes from Africa and Asia and why they desperately want to kill proletarians so it makes sense
>>2215725Engels even went as far as to call homeowners non-proletarians.
Context? Source?
>>2215712> If proletarian is such an arbitrary category that's the point,
is arbitrary. or do you find in the wings of falcons the written definition of what proletarians are?
who objectively do NOT have a self-interest in revolution that apply for workers, too. fuck, workers die on a hill to not unionize, that super common in this side of the hemisphere.
>>2215715>There's no contradictions in Marx's work[…]yeah… no, now that doesn't mean that he's necessarily wrong but it does mean that there are certain things he changed his mind about later on.
For example, later Marx was pretty much loosing all interest in his earlier philosophy of history (HistMat), maybe because he finally understood what it meant to completely reject all ideology and philosophy, there's even one letter to Engles where he criticises the fact that Dietzgen was moving closer and closer to dialectical materialism, possibly implying that he had already understood that all philosophy is useless to communists
>>2223755marx's point about labor organizing is that it can reduce the rate of exploitation, and even raise proletarian wages above subsistence, but it can never bring the rate of exploitation down to zero. Now why is that? This answer is my intuition: because if the rate of exploitation is zero, or less than zero, the capitalist will be unable to keep the business open, and will just declare bankruptcy and sell the enterprise to private equity cultures. Capitalists NEED profit to expand production and stay in competition with other capitalists. if workers organize and demand very high wages, and they do that only on a limited scale, like a single business, or a single sector, in a single country, they will at best get higher wages for a while, until it's rolled back due to the union becoming undisciplined, or they will simply run the business owners out of business, and more exploitative employers will win out over the market. So it's a band aid on a gaping wound. Unions and cooperatives are nice but they cannot solve the problem of the mode of production itself.
>>2223765>paper money>real moneywhat's the point here? neither marx nor most contemporary marxists seem to care about the rise of ious to replace commodity money
>Finally, some one may ask why gold is capable of being replaced by tokens that have no value? But, as we have already seen, it is capable of being so replaced only in so far as it functions exclusively as coin, or as the circulating medium, and as nothing else. Now, money has other functions besides this one, and the isolated function of serving as the mere circulating medium is not necessarily the only one attached to gold coin, although this is the case with those abraded coins that continue to circulate. Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only so long as it actually circulates. But this is just the case with that minimum mass of gold, which is capable of being replaced by paper money. That mass remains constantly within the sphere of circulation, continually functions as a circulating medium, and exists exclusively for that purpose. Its movement therefore represents nothing but the continued alternation of the inverse phases of the metamorphosis C—M—C, phases in which commodities confront their value-forms, only to disappear again immediately. The independent existence of the exchange-value of a commodity is here a transient apparition, by means of which the commodity is immediately replaced by another commodity. Hence, in this process which continually makes money pass from hand to hand, the mere symbolical existence of money suffices. Its functional existence absorbs, so to say, its material existence. Being a transient and objective reflex of the prices of commodities, it serves only as a symbol of itself, and is therefore capable of being replaced by a token. [38] One thing is, however, requisite; this token must have an objective social validity of its own, and this the paper symbol acquires by its forced currency. This compulsory action of the State can take effect only within that inner sphere of circulation which is coterminous with the territories of the community, but it is also only within that sphere that money completely responds to its function of being the circulating medium, or becomes coin. >>2226538>ignored post>complained about screenshotwhy?
>why are you a goldbugnot a goldbug just noting that the abstraction of money intensifies the obfuscation of our relations to production
>>2226543i didn't find anything objectionable in the post, hence why i didn't feel the need to comment
>not a goldbug just noting that the abstraction of money intensifies the obfuscation of our relations to productionhow though? money itself is an abstraction by acting as a medium of exchange. i don't think the fetishistic relations that emerged with the rise of capitalism change whether the social token of exchange is made out of gold, out of paper, or pixels on the screen
>>2226611>Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
>Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
>The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. >>2226628how does a worker abolish themself
what a stupid statement
does this zigga really believe communism is when no one works or does anything?
>>2226667the reserves question is so annoying. when marx and engels said the proletariat is reserveless they meant collectively, not individually, and at the time of writing, in england. they did not mean that if workers won higher wages through unionizing and were able to save up a little bit of money or get themselves a pension that they were no longer exploited. it's so unfathomably stupid to watch people on here over and over again say retarded shit like "nurses aren't proles because they do service work instead of commodity production" and "people who are able to save up enough money to buy a video game have reserves so they aren't proletarian."
like stfu
stfu
STFU
it's like feds are trying to divide the proletariat along as many lines as possible by pulling the prolier than thou card
god damn
i mean
think about it for one fucking second; do you WANT the coalition that opposes capitalism to be as small as possible? Do you REALLY think it's a bad thing when proles win concessions that enable them to have more free time to educate, agitate, and organize for revolution?
do you REALLY care that much about the question of savings when it's not employed as money capital to exploit labor?
>>2227325>they meant collectively, not individuallyWhat the fuck are you even talking about.
<hurr you're a moralist for analyzing class societyYou're the idiots who get offended when the petit-bourgeois are correctly categorized as such, though.
>do you WANT the coalition that opposes capitalism to be as small as possible?Democracybrain strikes again!
>Do you REALLY think it's a bad thing when proles win concessionsThe point of asking for concessions is not winning them but that the act itself drives proletarians to associate further and arrive at communist conclusions themselves.
>>2226569>. i don't think the fetishistic relations that emerged with the rise of capitalism change whether the social token of exchange is made out of gold, out of paper, or pixels on the screentrue but it does become more abstracted from productive processes. everyone can see that for example copper, silver, or gold had to be mined, smelted, refined, shaped into a measurable and quality controlled coinage unit in order to be exchanged for something that took a similar amount of labor time to create. with fiat, crypto, digital, etc. that concreteness is increasingly abstracted and increasing fetishized. It's not that the fetish itself changed, but that it became increasingly abstracted and divorced so it's even more automatic and hard to notice for people not accustomed to thinking abstractly.
>>2227325>>2227343People here get hung up too much on isolated sentences to think about what makes the proletariat and what makes the middle class.
Every person selling their labour power in the developed world is a politically emancipated proletarian? Really? Is it a bit too hard of a fact to cope with that the responsible employee; good democratic citizen is middle class, and a worthless audience? That the proletariat is a minority, especially in developed countries? Even Marx predicted the middle class to grow as capitalism develops further.
Engels's housing question already talked about above is a great example of how the insights from Capital can help evaluate the class content of different policies, and thus make the labor movement not squander its energies fruitlessly. Engels takes care to differentiate between the proletariat and the middle classes, and shows how different policies proposed represent the interests of that latter. Consequently, it is also clarified how the proletariat is to instead proceed if i.e. housing is a problem. That is, the proletariat fights for higher wages to pay for rent. This reduces the total amount of surplus value. Posited that the wage increases can't be nullified, capital will fight with landed property to preserve its profits. Rent is thus reduced, which mediately also helps the middle class. But the result is different from immediately demanding reduced rents, which benefits the middle class above all, because it means a reduction of wages for the proletariat.
This is a practical example of how the labor movement can meet a need best while also strengthening itself. I do not see reformists be interested in stuff like this anywhere.
>>2216287I'm not trying to make up an idealized proletariat. There will of course be lots of proletarians engaged in all kinds of stupidities that need to be criticized. I am just saying it is political folly for a communist to address the proper citizen of the state.
Again: the people with whom the state succeeds, that take up their duty as good citizens, precisely do not tend to be proletarians, but the middle classes who have a stake in this society and hence accept its playing field. The state is also perfectly aware of this fact. Everywhere, the middle classes are discussed as the cement holding together the democratic state, and whose erosion is viewed with anxiety because of the disorder that comes with it.
There's a difference between the state treating its subjects in that way, and the way these subjects relate to this treatment. Just because the state practically abstracts from class and treats all classes as citizens, aims at creating a people, does not mean that this is what they actually are.
>>2227368>you do realize class is defined by relation to the means of production<People here get hung up too much on isolated sentences to think about what makes the proletariat and what makes the middle class.Bruh you did not even read the posts you're replying to. Middle classes used to refer to all classes in the middle including the aristocracy, landlords and petit-bourgeois, but centuries later the only one remaining is the petit-bourgeois so they're interchangeable today. And no, petit-bourgeois does not only mean small business owners.
>tbh your emphasis on someones revolutionary potential being tied to how alienated they are from state institutions and not just pure relation to the MoP reminds me of Bakunin more than anything else.It's literally in Marx and Engels. I'm not using alienation in a sociological sense.
>>2227512>Middle classes used to refer to all classes in the middle including the aristocracy, landlords and petit-bourgeois, but centuries later the only one remaining is the petit-bourgeois p sure landlords remain(unfortunately). also in this schema do members of the labor aristocracy not count as middle class? not to mention how does "small-means of production owner" not only mean small business owner? are we talking like the small amount independent craftsman/artisans still active? artisanal miners?
>It's literally in Marx and Engelswhere?
if you don't want to bother typing out a bunch of bullshit and just want to throw pdf at me you can im perfectly fine with reading some more theory.
>>2227346in america that's like half a month's rent. you think people in the working class don't borrow money from each other at 0% interest instead of going to a usurious bank sometimes? are you retarded?
here's a better example:
prole A and prole B both earn "subsistence" wages. according to prolier than thou rhetoric, they are both TRVE proles unlike the stinky petty bourgeois who has $200 in his bank account. OK. let's say prole A has children and prole B does not. Prole B is able to save money while prole A doesn't. Why is this? Because part of what Marx means by "subsistence" includes the reproduction of the working class. Not just their maintenance.
<The owner of labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous,and the continuous conversion of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labour-powermust perpetuate himself, “in the way that every living individual perpetuates himself, byprocreation.”8 The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear and death, must becontinually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power. Hence the sumof the means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the meansnecessary for the labourer’s substitutes, i.e., his children, in order that this race of peculiarcommodity-owners may perpetuate its appearance in the market>Capital Volume 1 chapter 6So if increasingly in the imperial core proles don't have children due to birth control, contraception, etc. the birth rate falls below 2, labor power as a commodity becomes more scarce, and consequently wages rise above their equilibrium price (i.e. their value, i.e. their subsistence). This enables proles to save money, especially if they don't have children. Does this mean the entire nation is now petty bourgeois? No.
>>2227912>honestly who caresPeople who want to study the class struggle.
>you can just be a bourgeois class traitorEasier said than done.
>>2226630>how does a worker abolish themself>what a stupid statementNever read Marx award.
>>2228466Since 4chan went down I've seen the same retard calling anything they don't like hazoid or zigga.
>>2228485>proletariat is the section of the population that the party or organisation must work with the most and pay attention to the most.Of course, it's not a 1 to 1 relation but communism is the proletarian association itself.
>They might become ones.Non-proletarians, especially petit-bourgeois at risk of proletarianization, only join the communist struggle when the labor movement is at its strongest, which it definitely isn't today.
>>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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