https://twitter.com/lysenko_weed/status/1545160259878232065
Reminder that farmers in western/imperial core countries are rich land owners who owns all the machinery and relies on exploiting migrant labors; also known as kulaks. And the protest itself are mostly driven by environmentally destructive livestock farmers.
Meanwhile the truckers are bourgeois as they owns their means of production (truck) and they're protesting on the behalf of corporate interest fighting against unprofitable Covid measures.
edit: alright, the truck part is a very terrible take and that's on me
Also fuck you if you think service workers are not working class.
Chairman Gonzalo in front of an American flag profile pic
online lunatic, not worth responding to or taking seriously in any way
The Hazites are indeed a purely online reactionary "politics purely as aesthetics" phenomenon, but the Maupinites actually do exist IRL and are embarrassing.
EDIT: Oh yeah and a reminder that idiot Hazite posting like this isn't a novel way of trying to make the tent bigger by "reaching out" to CHUDs, its *ust engaging in the exact same culture war brain poison that recenters politics on essentially meaningless aesthetic and cultural associations rather than material politics. One of the most prominent and successful examples of actual praxis ongoing right now in the US is the organizing drive among Starbucks service workers, but this shithead with an American flag on his avatar is more concerned with shitting on those workers because Starbucks baristas are culturally and aesthetically associated with liberal cosmopolitanism as a result of media influence. Thats how engaging in culture war on CHUD terms deranges your politics.
Being proletarian and being reactionary aren't mutually exclusive. Even if we were to agree that everyone in the farmer shite and trucker convoys were proletarian, that doesn't make them any less reactionary.
Yes. Focusing too much on categorization is bad. We simply can look at what they're doing to decide if they're good or not. We don't have to rely on categorizing them as working class and then universally declaring all working class to be good.
Meanwhile the truckers are bourgeois as they owns their means of production (truck)
Dude, this one's gotta go back to the drawing board. The vast majority of truckers are completely dependent on logistics companies for all their work. They own the means of production in the same way an Uber driver does.
Yeah. They're more like tradesmen who own their own tools. In a very, very technical sense you could say they own the means of production, if you squint. But that's not really their role in the economy.
"Do you depend on others' capital/resources to produce things?" "Do others depend on your capital/resources to produce things?"
If the answer to the first question is no (i.e. you're vertically integrated) or the second question is yes, then you have some control over means of production.
A carpenter is needed for their labor, not their saw. But the carpenter needs wood, not labor, from whoever owns the lumber. Thus, the carpenter is proletariat and the lumber yard owner is bourgeoisie.
@flirty_fawn I think this also gets at the distinction between a truck and fleet. Truck companies need drivers' labor, not their singular, individual trucks. But the driver absolutely needs a truck, which they must purchase or lease from the bourgeoisie who own fleets.
Also many has to take out bug loans that the majority of their pay goes to paying back for a while.
That's still a bit much to say they own their means of production. It's more like a mechanic that owns their own tools; their profit is pretty low, they're making money off their own labor, and they're still dependent on the infrastructure of a much more profitable organization.
They are, however, reactionary suckers.
They're more like long-distance uber drivers.
Edit: just read further down and several other people just said this, lol
That's all fair, but there is still a difference in class character among truckers between owner-operators and others.
Not enough for owner-operators to actually be bourgeios but it's still worth pointing out.
A bit, but owner-operator is also kinda deceiving when they're mostly owned by the bank.
Yeah, fine, anyone able to not work for so much time for a brain dead "goal" can't really be working class I guess
love being burgeois and having to starve in the gutter if i don't sell my labour power
Petit bourgeois would be the more accurate class character of someone who owns their own means of production.
they're gonna do to the farmers what they did to the miners in the days of yore, moreso because these reactionary movements lack any kind of coherent organisation, they'll trash about for a while until they tucker themselves out and then say that any minimal tonken concession they received was the deep state losing power or w/e
of course, they need not obtain results now, just trashing about is another stepping stone on the hypernormalisation trail
Yeah a competent enough fascist can fake their way into power using the aesthetics and bootstrap into actual mobilization
the representatives of the modern labour movement find that they have plenty to protest against but nothing to despair about. Despair is typical of the classes which are perishing, but the class of wage-workers is growing inevitably, developing and becoming strong in every capitalist society, Russia included. Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.
Hey, never said it would never happen. Just unlikely to happen in our lifetime.
If my depression keeps up, I wont even need based xi to shoot me
that's not the qualification to be bougeoise the debt heavy ownership they have is arguably closer to the Marxist description of peasantry
Uber drivers are bourgeois by the same logic.
The operator part really cancels out the owner part. As if you remove their labor of driving the truck, the truck doesn’t work.
It's from a viral video for working at LinkedIn and is completely bullshit. I'm sure it was posted here and criticised but I can't find it now.
This picture plays into the aesthetic intersection of a traditional pre-feminist Marxist conception of the working class as masculine workers with the right wing cultural claim over the rural population. The other side is the traditional rejection of feminine caring work as work and right wing rhetoric of "latte sipping elitists".
The situation also left traditional male craftsmen in a particularly distressing situation; not only were they thrown out of work by the new factories, their wives and children, who used to work under their direction, were now the breadwinners. This was clearly a factor in the early wave of machine-breaking during the Napoleonic Wars that came to be known as Luddism, and a key element in allaying that rebellion seems to have been a tacit social compromise whereby it came to be understood that it would be primarily adult men who would be employed in factory work. This, and the fact that for the next century or so labor organizing tended to focus on factory workers (partly simply because they were the easiest to organize), led to the situation we have now, where simply invoking the term "working class" instantly draws up images of men in overalls toiling on production lines, and it's common to hear otherwise intelligent middle-class intellectuals suggest that, with the decline of factory work, the working class in, say, Britain or America no longer exists-as if it were actually ingeniously constructed androids that were driving their buses, trimming their hedges, installing their cables, or changing their grandparents' bedpans. In fact, there was never a time most workers worked in factories. Even in the days of Karl Marx, or Charles Dickens, working-class neighbor hoods housed far more maids, bootblacks, dustmen, cooks, nurses, cabbies, schoolteachers, prostitutes, caretakers, and coster mongers than employees in coal mines, textile mills, or iron foundries. Are these former jobs "productive"? In what sense and for whom? Who "produces" a souffle? It's because of these ambiguities that such issues are typically brushed aside when people are arguing about value; but doing so blinds us to the reality that most working-class labor, whether carried out by men or women, actually more resembles what we archetypically think of as women's work, looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking, not to mention caring for, monitoring, and maintaining plants, animals, machines, and other objects, than it involves hammering, carving, hoisting, or harvesting things.
Who “produces” a souffle
no one in industrial england that's for sure the diaspora from the countryside resulted in much of the knowledge of peasant cooking being lost as people could no longer get the ingedients they were used to and were much poorer than they had ever been before and were thus more preoccupied with survival than passing down knowledge or culture.
The middle and upper classes also came to lose their ability to cook as they began to have working class servants who never learned to cook because of their material conditions and everyone became used to bland food.
the stereotype about British cooking isn't wrong it's just out of date
The truckers often don't actually own their means of production. Equipment are often owned by large businesses or the bank. This limits the extent of their bourgeois-ness, keeping them in a category with mom and pop shops that don't even own their store. They're bourgeois-aspirational, having some control over production but not ownership, and what they owe to the bank is a form of being exploited by the bourgeoisie. These ones are also reactionaries.
Farmers also often don't own their equipment or land, though they do nearly always rely on the exploitation of an immigrant economic underclass.
Farmers also often don’t own their equipment or land
Amazon leases the land their warehouses are on and most of their equipment, not sure that means that Bezos is a proletarian.
Yeah duh. The next part of that quote is the fact that farmers gain from exploitation despite sometimes not owning the means of production for "their" business. They are provided much of the control that ownership provides such that they can begin relatively minor amounts of accumulation. In Marxist terms, they are somewhere in the neighborhood of petite bourgeois. The banks that actually own the land and equipment are then of the haute bourgeoisie.
This relationship is very common. "Small business owners" that are all in debt via business loans such that they don't really own their equipment, they rent their space, etc. But they control enterprise and gain directly from exploitation via employing others. The people they owe are all bigger capitalist fish to which they aspire and with whom they align themselves politically.
Its also worth pointing out that its one of the most heavily subsidized industries, so long as they grow and produce what the lobbiests want for their adjacent industries.
Yes, absolutely. And when farmers don't own their land or equipment, those subsidies go to (1) that production and (2) the banks, much less so to the farmer or workers. A very large amount of subsidies in general go to banks, as everything is overleveredged, including personal finance. $1400 in COVID checks? The vast majority went to be servicing debt, i.e. paying the banks. Equivalent to cancelling debtby just having the gov pay the banks directly on your behalf.
Good extra detail, thanks. Its funny how people use this as a talking point "farmers are socialists!" Checkmate rednecks.
lol yeah. What thinking "socialism is when the government does stuff" does to a person.
truckers often don’t actually own their means of production
i should think that the truckers with the freedom to go on months-long protest cruises are the ones who do own they trucks
I bet a lot would, yes. They aren't earning from direct exploitation so they'd need to have a lot saved up to continue making payments and fuck around.
Farmers also often don’t own their equipment or land,
:doubt: Source? Are you suggesting most farmers in the US rent their land rather than own it? I thought "farmer" in the USA was a synonym for agribusiness owner.
though they do nearly always rely on the exploitation of an immigrant economic underclass.
Yeah I guess it depends on whether we're using the liberal redefinition of what it means to be a farmer, which is, like you said, basically any agricultural outfit, which is now mostly huge businesses. I mean smaller-time folks, people who employ others to work a piece of land and sometimes work it themselves as well.
you do manual labor indoors, therefore you are not working class
what even is the point here, this moron needs to never be in charge of anything ever
at scale, I think owning a fleet of trucks would constitute means of production, like owning a railroad would.
because now you control a distribution network, where logistics are a necessary part of modern production.
But I agree that "owning a truck" doesn't suddenly make someone part of the bourgeoisie, lol.
that is also a good point! means of distribution != means of production. and I see how trucks would be the former, even at scale.
I guess in theory if you owned a fleet of trucks and didn't do anything with them, you would be wasteful, but not bourgeoisie. But the only way to earn money from a fleet of trucks is "passive income", since you can't drive them all yourself, so then that means labor exploitation and puts you in the bourgeoisie that way.
at scale, I think owning a fleet of trucks would constitute means of production, like owning a railroad would.
I disagree. Remember the industrial revolution happened before cars were invented.
To make things will always require tools and a place to call a "factory". You could picture many different sorts of buildings and locations that fit the concept of factory too.
But if you don't have a truck you could use any other option between rail, sea, air and ultimately even the old horse wagon could do the job. Of course we can concede that sometimes the modern infrastructure makes some of these impossible and a sudden large scale change could make production very inefficient and expensive, but ultimately not really impossible.
As long as people have legs and horses exist you'll still be able to move stuff, but without tools and a place to work you'll never actualy make anything.
I might be misremembering, but didn't Marx explicitly say that transportation/distribution of goods is productive labour?
In general they're both downwardly-mobile petty bourgeoisie aka the chief social basis for fascist movements
