H-hi, I’m upper middle class don’t kill me pls

Have some Fucking Fruit Juice and then PUT ON THE GLASSES

I didn't realize owning a shop with 3 employees making 60k a year made me capitalist oppressor

...

It means you leech off of the labour of 3 people.

Steal a purse and you're a thief. Kill another person and you're a murderer. Why do you have to steal a certain amount of peoples' wages before you're classed as the criminal you are?

Hard to say exactly off the top of my head but the entire operation made a 78k profit after tax last year of which I paid myself 15k a quarter, reinvested 9k and paid the other 9 as bonuses. My employees are all part time on inconsistent schedules but I pay them between 14 and 18 an hour depending on their roles. I try to run a fair operation and always do at least some profit sharing every quarter to keep the positive incentive structure there.
I hate this idea that you can't be a business owner and be an anarchist/socialist/etc. Imo the best way to further the interests of the working class is to be a good employer. If you want something done right you have to do it yourself instead of waiting for the revolution to come and just magically fix everything

If you're trolling then I say well done, sir, well done.

And here we have the capitalist trying to argue their own self preservation.

Being a good slave owner is worse than being a bad one. At least bad slave owners arent trying to obfuscate the relationship by sprinkling sunshine and stardust everywhere.

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Middle class doesnt real

It does.

My employees can leave whenever they want, get paid above market rate for their labor, largely get to set their own schedule and I certainly don't whip them lmao, they're not slaves

Your relationship to the MoP is all that matters.
Don't mater if you a good man or not, you're still bourg.

None of that changes the class dynamics at play. You're still extracting surplus value from your workforce.

You're petit-bourgeois.

will you violently oppose the appropriation of the means of production by the working class?
if your answer is yes you'll have to go one way or the other, sorry.
nothing else really matters in this case, especially not your Weberian class status.

There is still wage-labor and thus surplus value, you petite-bourgeois fag.

Again, you're trying to make yourself out to be a moral character whilst still being an exploiter. They can't leave whenever they want because they have no assurance they'll be able to get a job on the same payscale. Now he can't leave the job because he needs food and rent money. Just as man is a slave to his natural needs so must he be a slave to their pursuit.

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Uhhhmm…

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..No thanks

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He said he's american, so no revolution for him for about 1000 years

You are a worker, just unsuccessful at selling your labor. You would be technically called "reserve army of labor.' Unemployment is inherent in capitalism and there are always workers who are unemployed. These days a lot of people have become permanently unemployed, which in economic terms is considered to not be participating in the labor force. The economy would give you a job if that were good for profits but it isn't, and the unemployment figure is supposed to be low as a sign of economic health, so it doesn't count people who are not participating in the labor force. Compare "Unemployment Rate" and "Labor Force Participation Rate."

If you buy labor power you are a porky. Small business owners for instance tend to do actual work. The difference is they do not sell their labor power to an employer (since they are the employer and get paid proportionally to their labor instead of a fraction left over after porky takes the profit), so they do not do both. I'd be interested to see an actual example of someone who both buys labor power and sells their own. I'm having trouble thinking of an instance. Someone who buys labor power (porky) is going to be in a position to hire more workers or play the stock market, so if they have access to capital they are generally better off economically if they do anything other than sell their labor power. That's another way of defining the difference between a worker and porky. Workers have to sell their labor power. Porky does not have to.

You are in a sense outside of the class system. If your job is something you sell directly on a market you do not sell your labor to a porky. You are still selling your labor power and often getting paid less than the value you put into your product. Often in cases of self-employment the buyer is not an individual human consumer or household, but a company. In that case you are still likely selling your labor power to a porky, just without the benefits of employment, since those people tend to coordinate and buy things at below their value. This is what's going on in the gig economy. This is actually a good example of the difference between being otuside of class in theory and what actually happens in the economy in practice.

I would love to see some data comparing what percent of a laborer's value is expropriated by a small business owner vs what's expropriated by a massive corporation. A big company can actually be less exploitative at the level of individual employees because the huge profits can come from sheer numbers, not per capita exploitation.

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which are*

My brother is a business owner who also works as the director of sales for a company in New York and does freelance consulting

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in that case

you are fine
for a consistent Marxist violence is a necessary evil and to be employed carefully, though the threat of violence should be employed to the full. the 'liquidation of the bourgeoisie as a class' preferably means removal of the person's class status, not their existence.

we'll see. America is going down the drain rather rapidly, and an empire on its knees generally provides ample opportunity for radical politics. cut off the opiates from appalachia and replace it with agitation and radical labour organisation and we'll see fireworks yet. You could even do some kind of municipalist experiment since that would fit American conditions to my understanding.

CEOs who own stock in the company they manage. While not all CEOs actually do meaningful labour they do sell their labour as a commodity, even if they own and control a part of the commodity sold.
Furthermore, what work CEOs and stockbrokers (basically the most 'naked' capitalists of the modern managerial capitalism) do is generally much like economic planning. Using the (Austrian school?) idea of money and its flows being in essence economic data, the CEOs and stockbrokers are more or less the organisers and planners of the economy. Capitalism is no less bureaucratic than a centrally-planned economy, the bureaucracy is just privatised.

Idk man, americans seem to reactionary and generally speaking politically illiterate to give much of a fuck even if they see they're being cucked by the elites.

Management is work, but in capitalism it's usually overpaid using surplus from workers. This would depend on (1) the management structure but likely to be bourgeois and (2) what the actual product of the company is. Speaking of which…
Sales is not exactly productive labor. It's necessary for capitalism to function but so are cops. In socialism sales would be replaced with planning, so this point is debatable depending on where you draw the line on what is productive labor.

Consulting is largely horseshit. There are useful consulting services but it mostly amounts to servicing bourgeois management by justifying whatever projects they want to do (as insurance against shareholders punishing them for failure). Even the useful sorts of consulting (improving production efficiency) hurt workers in capitalism because it tends to increase the level of exploitation and result in layoffs. You could define this activity as part of the superstructure of capitalism (similar to the role of cops, someone whose income leeches off others' work and serves the structure of capitalism) or as technically working class but acting as a class traitor by creating a product (in a word, innovation) that directly harms other workers.

If, however, the consultation is in the context of something like human resources and advises companies how to treat employees better, then it's debatable but the consequence is more likely to help the interests of capital by insulating them against complaints/lawsuits by the workers.

It would be to the benefit of a revolution to allow porkies to surrender peacefully, cutting down on casualties in general.

The bone I have to pick with this is that CEO salaries are vastly overpaid, so their labor is not being exploited at all. I agree with the rest of that paragraph though.

for now. but lets not fall into idealist essentialism

but they do sell their labour. a housemaid doesn't stop selling their labour just because there is a decimal error in their pay slip.

Just FYI so you are aware of the obstacles here, the overwhelming majority of heroin in the US (like ~90%) comes from Afghanistan, which provides that much of the world's heroin poppy supply. 2010 was also when Afghanistan was restructured [2] and when the CIA took control of the poppy fields [3]. Despite a show of attempts to fight drug production, it has dramatically increased over the course of the ongoing Afghanistan war [4]. I'm using (mostly) wikipedia to show just how mainstream this information is and how obvious the connections are here. Allegations of the CIA being involved in drug trafficking are pretty extensive [5].

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic
[2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Conference_on_Afghanistan,_London_(2010)
[3] globalresearch.ca/a-conspiracy-theory-that-became-a-conspiracy-fact-the-cia-afghanistans-poppy-fields-and-americas-growing-heroin-epidemic/5533673
[4] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan#Afghan_War_(2001–current)
[5] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking#United_States

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That said though, which country do you think right now has the most revolutionary potential?

Well now I have to get more technical here. Workers do not sell their labor but their labor power. They sell their capacity to perform labor, and are paid an amount corresponding to a certain amount of work. The exploitation comes from being covertly forced to do an amount of work beyond the quantity purchased. In contrast, someone who is overpaid as a matter of course (rather than incidentally in a mistake) is paid a salary and works an amount according to their discretion. Laboring for them is barely even a prerequisite for their position, but rather something their position grants them as a privilege.

The salary is not correlated with their labor or labor power (which is why you can have competent CEOs who make little and terrible CEOs who get huge salaries), but with what they are able to get away with allocating for themselves or convincing the board to allocate for them, or some similar scam. In no sense is this pay purchasing something from them in proportion to their ability to labor. What is related to their labor is their benefits or dividends from stock ownership. The relationship there is more akin to gambling, however, since expending labor to manage the company is a sure thing, but the positive results are not.

Contrast this most directly with salaried workers, who not only must meet the value their salary pays but work beyond that value to some higher amount of labor in order to be allowed to keep their job.

I'm well aware. Restarting poppy production was the quickest way to make a profit out of the Afghan operation after all.

A major revolution with serious geopolitical impacts? China.
Lesser ones could happen just about everywhere barring the Western core states in the current circumstances, especially if you strictly mean a traditional central-government political revolution. In the geopolitical 'west' I'm gonna go for a hot take and say the Korean peninsula is the most likely place for a revolution.

Yeah but other people are reading the thread and may not know.

Your wallet is a relic; a mere vessel.

Hand over your Means of Production, and a new world awaits you.

We demand it.

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user with brother in management. He's a consultant for small business coffee shops, which is the industry he's involved in. I don't know how many small business owners you know but honestly they hardly fit the description of Porky. Basically it plays into the larger world of credit and investment, which Marx said was the decider of a man's Morality In a capitalist Society. I see no need to correct him in this regard how's the people I know in this class are hardly reprehensible in their dealings. After all, they're part of the proletariat, just a different part of the proletariat. People describe the bourgeoisie as being some sort of special class, when in fact they are part of the proletariat. The people who have resentments against them or those who simply have no grasp of basic economics. As for management, it is an intense mental labor. Certainly he's not throwing anvils into a forge to build tanks but there is an immense amount of effort that comes with that field.

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Yang Wenli?

Do you exploit worker's labour value to produce personal profit?
[YES] You're a capitalist
[NO] You're a prole.

Just like a criminal isn't a prole, so can't a small business owner be a prole. Both leech from the labour of the worker.

That's ridiculous. If that's your qualification for the proletariat and working masses than you have a decidedly and poor understanding of the labor force of any country

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While this sounds internally contradictory (because the bourgeoisie is a class, and being bourg inherently excludes being prole) but there is a level of truth to it as well: in the modern managerial capitalism the relations of production are obscured. Ownership is obscured behind shell companies and diversified portfolios, and the old, straightforward leisure class centered around wealthy bourgeois families doesn't exist anymore. A CEO can very well work 9-5 or more, whereas back in the day the bourgeoisie would more likely just collect rent and pass time doing things unrelated to their wealth. Capital has also enslaved the ones who are supposed to be in charge of it.

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Of course they do.

Mah nigga.

Too bad, if you were actually one of those you'd turn it into a worker cooperative.

jacobinmag.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-wages

There's a difference between "true" bourgeois and petty bourgeois. Some small business owner has little sway over politics but they still take the value produced by others.

Hey now. it depends on the criminal. Someone who farms weed is a prole. Not all crimes involve theft or what have you.

What standard are you using? The question of class is not a matter of wealth but about structure and movement of value. The notion of class put forth by OP is a liberal corruption meant to obscure class struggle. The idea of class long predates Marx, for instance in feudalism you have the nobility, the merchants, and the laborers (peasants and serfs). Those are separate classes based on their relationship to the economy.

Capitalists have only ever been the custodians of capital. They are not in control any more than the proles are, because their behavior is constrained by what is feasible within the margins of profitability.

Thanks, comrade.
849/1793 = 0.4735…
Now here's a wage gap to raise hell about. Small business employees earn
LESS THAN HALF
what other employees earn on average.

Then the proletariat is meaningless, because no majority truly inhabits that demographic. Our modern economy is divided up such that management has worked into absolutely every single aspect of the job that is not automated. There is no surplus value because the proletariat of the 20th century has been replaced by the robot.

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So your solution is that nobody should employ anybody ever under any circumstance. No two people can engage in an exchange of labor and anything commercial should be done by a single person so as not to "exploit" anyone. And anyone who breaks this arbitrary set of rules should be purged.

You guys convinced me I will literally never refer to myself as a socialist of any kind every again because god forbid I be associated with you imbeciles in any way.

You do know that you don't have to exploit people right? We've got a name for the business type already, a co-op. We're merely stating that the current Capitalist mode of production is designed to exploit the worker by short changing him for the work that he does. The fact that you're going "boo hoo i only made 75k last year in my small business, i give them enough money that they'll stay with my company that means i'm good" shows that you're not even thinking about the exploitation that you're doing to your workers. Running a small fucking business isn't going to help the political revolution it's there so you can exploit workers out of their labour so you can get even more money to live a comfortable life. The difference between you and Samsung is quite simple, you don't have enough power to exploit that many people.

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Kill yourself, porky

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The funny thing is when I started this I was way more idealistic and tried to do it with 4 other people with all of us having equal ownership (basically a coop) and over the last 5 years they all either were voted out for not working, stole 15k and vanished, or just left and now I'm the only one left. Its easy for you to say just start a co-op but you've sure as hell never done it or you would know its really hard to find people who are consistent enough for it to work, especially at such a small scale.

I didn't make 75k, the company did, I had 60k in personal income for working near full time at my business. Should I just manage and work for nothing and starve while I pay my employees 35$ an hour? Do you guys think small business owners just sit around with our feet up making money? I work harder than any of my employees because I know that ultimately I'm responsible for the whole enterprise and the income it supplies everyone who works there.

Managing things doesn't make you not a prole, but "management has worked into absolutely every single aspect of the job" in the sense that Corporate micromanages the workers, e.g. Amazon's motion sensitive bracelets keeping their warehouse workers in line. That doesn't make workers not workers, and neither would the workers having to manage themselves (to maximize production for porky's interests).

Suburbanites get the bullet first. Death to the decadent first world "middle class."

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Hahahahaha yeah ok and I’ll garrison rightwing deathsquads in my house. Keep dreaming my boy.

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You seem to be confused on how democratic workplaces operate. If it's true that you genuinely work so much more than your other workers, they will of course vote to reward the extra labor you do with a higher salary.

My nibba

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fucc off retard

Now this is just dumb. The status quo may be slavery and a despicable state of affairs, but armchair philosophical waxing aside no one should actually think that Simon Legree is the better one for not >sprinkling sunshine and stardust everywhere.

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Ignore the leftpol-tards here.

Quite funny how Marx was all about that muh human nature.