Are they Bourgeois?

okay honey

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Really? From what I’ve seen they’re more likely to spend money on their cars than they are just clostes full of high-priced Air Jordans. Poor people (and not only blacks) will spend a fair amount on having good shoes but usually not thousands and thousands of dollars. None of my poor black coworkers spend thousands of dollars on shoes annually that I know of.

The funny thing is people rarely even define what they mean by poor in these types of debates. I have a pretty solid income range in mind at least usually people earning $10-30,000 a year—the kind of people who actually struggle paying for day-to-day essentials. Those type of people usually go for big purchases that will make a change in their quality of life, like a new car, a better apartment, new furniture etc. if they have a fair amount of disposable income to burn.

Ironically enough, I often see my poor black coworkers wearing the same shoes to work that they bought with their employee discounts for months on end—a typical pair of sneakers wears out within two months in retail.

And while I don’t doubt that poor sneaker heads exist I kind of doubt that that a typical black worker who scrapes buy making 10,000-14,000 a year is gonna spend 10% or more of their annual income on shoes. I won’t say that it’s unheard of but does that mean this is really a proletarian hobby? Is collecting thousands of dollars of model trains a year a proletarian hobby because it seems to be associated with older bourgeois white guys to most people’s minds.

Miss me with that weak shit

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i think i should agree in a technical sense but i sometimes don't think the strict class definition is very pratically useful. as marx said, the capitalist class are Capital personified, that is, they are the social relation of capital embodied, so it is in their interest to keep the relation going.

a wage worker, if he is very rich, would tend to be way more reactionary than a small-landowner peasant, even if he is technically bourgeois. that happens because the wage worker has more interest in the social relation of capital than the landowner. so yeah, i think that if youre rich you should be classified as bourgeois even if you dont own any factories or banks.

You know, the capacity to accumulate large debts usually implies a greater ability to pay, right? I mean doesn't a fair portion of the "poor people" that the author speaks of have debts of their own?

Even leaving aside the whole debt question we see parts of the working class that cannot survive on what they make without debts and/or government subsidies and other parts (such as Doctors, Engineers, some other skilled trades) that make enough that they can live comfortably on what they make. Parts of the working class make so much that they could hire other parts of the working class using only a small chunk of their annual income.

Orthodox Marxists are in such a hurry to deny the existence of an intermediate group of people between the capitalists proper and the rest of the proletariat that they sometimes even argue that celebrities that make millions of dollars annually are working class (as long as they don't use their money to start new businesses). And sure, okay, I guess most of that money came from the proceeds of their "labor" which maybe complex and difficult with rewards for unique talents that they posses but… they have so much income that they can invest it in stock portfolios, bonds, and savings accounts and earn capital gains, dividends, and interest off it. In effect, it is well within their ability to transform themselves into small-time money capitalists…and they can often live riotously while doing so.

There is a portion of the working class that that has enough disposable income that they can also do this but they usually don't live as riotously and maybe they are more invested in the prospect of capital gains from their small real estate holdings than income from bond-holding.

Most capitalists also have debts. Many billionaire oligarchs are only billionaires on paper but once their debts are added in then their short-term worth on balance often isn't that impressive

STOP DILUTING WORDS THAT HAVE SPECIFIC TECHNICAL MEANINGS. THIS MAKES IT HARDER TO MAINTAIN THEORY MUCH LESS COMMUNICATE IT.

Better pay doesn't change their relation to the means of production moron.
IF, they invest in owning property or stocks then they are at least partially bourgeoisie, probably petite-bourgeoisie.
Debt is obviously universal.

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This

Owning stocks/real estate is owning means of production, those who must labor but have enough income and invest are petite bourgeois

Is this always the case? Certainly, you had to have noticed that the higher-up someone is in management the more likely they are to get pensions, stock options, payment-in-stock, and innumerable other "small" privileges to keep them loyal.

In the 50s and 60s a lot of tripe was written about how managers were the new ruling class since big-time CEOs for a brief-time were considered to be more powerful than shareholders but it did sort of hit on the fact that these people are bourgeois or newly bourgeois.

I think its a little absurd to think someone that makes millions of dollars a year isn't bourgeois because they don't own any stocks or capitalist private property. The interest on their savings account alone would probably be enough to live on. They could invest in a fair number of physical possessions that isn't technically real estate or means of production that might appreciate over time.

Its just kind of silly to me that there are people who think that as long as a CEO that earns millions annually from their "labor" doesn't own securities and rents his home then he's a true prole. On the other-hand, a prole who might have a small pension via their McJob with a mortgage on a small-house would be petit-bourgeois according to the same reckoning.

It seems like a fundamentalist interpretation of Marxism rather than a holistic one.

So we should applaud them for buying hundreds of high-end shoes instead of stocks?

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Yes. A prole is a prole. Ceos that don't own any MOP are proles.

Why do you think they came up with stock-options?

No but at the same time they could be doing better and take the lifestylism pill, but then again most people here don't so at this point it can't be considered a mistake.

Sort of overlooks the fact that most CEOs own stock in the companies they manage even if they aren't deciding shares. They dont have jobs that are actually productive in a Marxian sense this is different from the job being necessary which it arguably is where they produce surplus-value but some of these guys earn so much that they could run on a small business just off part of their income.

I think you outta rethink this, because whatever stage of socialism i achieved in the coming decades, however primitive and rudimetary it is, I doubt that 100:1 disparities between regular workers and cooperative/SOE managers will be allowed. These guys only pull down huge salaries like this precisely because capitalist enterprises are not democratic in nature.

True but its not as if stock options are really necessary when you have a multi-seven figure yearly salary.

They're niggers

Well if they own stocks they're bourgeoisie.
Simple as that.

I don't know. Is brand mayonnaise bourgeois?

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Yes, but it isn't outside of the buying power of a typical prole to buy a few stocks. Even some proles in poor low-wage service sector jobs might be offered a modest 401k that they can pay into.

If you have to work day-in-day-out to maintain your lifestyle but you have a small house in a "bad neighborhood" and maybe a few shares of company stock and a small 401k then you are still a prole. I don't buy that someone who gets paid so much they never have to work again after a decade or a few years is a prole just because they rent and they don't have investments.

I think its far more logical to assume that the management is converting a portion of the profit they get from exploiting the working class into "salaries" that that disguise their super-profits. Its true that the ruling class only takes a small part of their profits in the form of income (because of tax purposes) but we are still talking about massive amounts of money.

Where's the evidence that higher CEO pay actually produces performance? Or that the job is in any sense productive from a Marxist standpoint? So we have a non-productive job where someone can just sponge up the equivalent of hundreds of their fellow workers salaries a year…

You own stocks, you're extracting surplus value.
Bourgeois.

Don't expect Zig Forumstards to change their mind on the subject. They're too used to superficially reading 19th-century authors as a status symbol to ever admit capitalism has changed since then and we therefore need new theoretical approaches to certain issues such as class distinction. The lack of Marxist writings on these new developments doesn't help, though I would suggest reading Bruno Astarian if you understand French.

See: hicsalta-communisation.com/accueil/menage-a-trois-episode-1

Friends of mine have caught this disease. It is utterly alien to me. I cannot conceive of why anyone would need more than two or three pairs of shoes.

At any length, it is not bourgeois as it doesn't relate to the MOP. It's just another fad that helps absorb overproduction in the system. It's no less retarded than people who spend thousands of dollars on video games that they will never finish, and could have gotten for free to boot.

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Let me elaborate
When I say "poor black people buy lots of shoes" I mean "unemployed black welfare recipients buy lots of shoes"
Poor black workers actually do have their priorities in check though

Go back to Zig Forums, whence you came from.

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/thread

What about the well paid prole who is a non-productive laborer but also not a manager? He has high compensation but does not have a say in the overall operation of a firm, he probably owns some stocks or shitcoins and has a 401k. I would classify such a person as petite bourgeois.
Sure, all non-productive laborers depend on productive labor for their income. I'm not sure that qualifies on as an exploiter. It doesn't help that the line between productive and non-productive is unclear. Is an internal payroll software developer productive or non-productive, they produce a product to create a use value for the firm (easier time managing paychecks).
But overall I do agree that a quantitative change in salary most likely leads to a qualitative change of someones relation to the means of production. It's a stochastic relationship but still, the more money you make the more likely you will purchase MOP for a more secure retirement or for a better return than what savings accounts earn. This behavior is due to both the 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧human nature🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 of seeking future security and society structured around trying to force as many people into the financial sector as possible.