- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
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Even if you have some minor investment in the stock market, you might still be working class…
Tying retirement to the stock market is insidious class warfare
It really is. This, plus the creation of a large homeowner class, is the most effective thing America has ever done against socialism in the US. Absolutely destroyed class solidarity by fabricating a new “middle class” that somehow everyone is part of. Tying the majority of the population’s life to the imaginary line will make a lot of people fight and die to protect line go up.
“Investment” is millions of dollars. Your paltry 500 hundred dollars in stock isn’t even a rounding error.
Thank you, that’s what I wanted to say. OP’s post doesn’t make this explicitly clear.
agreed, I’d phrase it as if your labour is the primary means of paying your bills
Under the “low-middle-upper” class paradigm, i have yet to meet a person that calls themselves low/upper class. Everyone thinks they’re middle class because there is always someone richer/poorer. These terms fog the real class dynamics.
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Agreed, but this is moreso adding nuance to class analysis whereas the Liberals attempt to negate it entirely and say that class analysis is entirely useless and outdated. We have to go further into class analysis, get more details, information and more sophistication - where the Liberal wants us to abandon the lens entirely
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While there’s obviously a lot of nuance past the basic class definition. I do think that it’s an incredibly useful starting point for any analysis. Looking at whether a person’s primary source of income comes from their labour or from capital they own helps understand where their interests lie. I completely agree that one should not use reductive analysis here, but it’s a good starting point, and it’s the basis for class contradictions within the capitalist society.
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The middle panel up top has baggage. Maybe it goes without saying, but even people with sizeable investments profit or exist at the whims of capitalism. More than 1 ghoulish landlord lost most of their hoarded wealth during the housing crisis, and plenty of “small business” owners can see themselves muscled out if larger capitalist set their eyes on a market and bribing (buying out) is off the table. Every petite bourgeoisie is always one manufactured capitalist crisis away from losing their artificially granted “class”.
They will probably not come around but it’s worth reminding them to take the wind out of their sails. Maybe they’ll be materially worse off under a Marxist system right now, but there is value in living in a society where you will not be abandoned by society or go hungry, nor have to see others suffer that way.
I went off topic but I think that “no other investments” line is too open to wrong interpretations.
If you consider how value created by labour globally is distributed, you’ll see that all the Western workers are labour aristocracy, which together with petty bourgeoisie forms the so-called middle class (not exactly a Marxist term)
