• Civility [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Not in my experience.

    If you work for a wage, you're proletarian.

    If you pay someone else a wage and profit off the "surplus value" generated by their labour, you're bourgeois, if you sell things you produce or contract in a meaningful fashion (ie, as a self employed plumber, not for doordash) you're petit-bourgeois and if you make a living doing crime shit you're lumpenproletariat.

    I don't have hard numbers to back this up but in my experience the class character of the so called "middle class" is overwhelmingly proletarian, secondarily petit bourgeois with the remaining, like 10% being SmaLL BuSinesS oWnErs.

    • GreenDream [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Yeah but the middle class don't do any work themselves. They're the low-level operatives who organize the exploitation for others. The system wouldn't work other than they take the bribes.

      • Civility [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I get where you're coming from, but unless I'm missing something I think this is kind of the opposite of a Marxist take.

        There's nothing inherently anti-worker about being an administrator. The PRC, USSR, and pretty much any other socialist project you'd care to name had a whole lot of administrators making everything tick along smoothly.

        I get what you're saying that you're saying about the work they do in our current capitalist system serving capital and furthering exploitation, and if they all stopped the system would stop, but both of those are also true of pretty much every group of workers.

        Like, truck drivers and warehouse workers move stuff from one place to another place so it can be sold at a profit, enabling the exploitation of the workers at both ends of the supply chain by allowing capitalists to cash out and if as a collective, they stopped taking wages and doing work the system would grind to a halt, but that doesn't make them not workers or what they're doing not work.

        • GreenDream [none/use name]
          ·
          3 years ago

          The PRC, USSR, and pretty much any other socialist project you’d care to name had a whole lot of administrators

          Those were the hives of secret right wingers that sabotaged projects and tried to hijack the revolution onto the capitalist road.