No hate for the middle class. I can’t help but enjoy the irony of people who thought they had solidarity with capital talking like Ned Ludd all of a sudden.

  • Transient PunkEnglish
    126•5 months ago

    Who are these bourgeois creatives that are somehow able to be replaced by tech?

    If you work for a living, you aren’t bourgeois.

    We need class solidarity. Not this shit.

    • @[email protected]
      6•5 months ago

      I always interpreted middle class to be not living paycheck to paycheck. Because that is the more meaningful difference of quality of life in my opinion. Not having some arbitrary line of more and more expensive shit. I would say the next line is having so much you never have to work another day in your life

      Edit: clarity

      • @[email protected]
        30•5 months ago

        “Not living paycheck to paycheck” and “not needing to work in order to live” are two vastly different concepts. The former is a member of the working class, the latter is a member of the bourgeoisie

        • @[email protected]
          8•5 months ago

          I think that’s totally fair. I just think those are three different categories that are meaningful enough to discuss (I.e. not totally arbitrary).

          On a broader theoretical level, I think it should be possible to live without working (I.e. you can eat cheap food, live in a cheap place, and pay for all necessary government ID’s and all) but that people don’t have a right to inheritance. Generational wealth is fundamentally inconsistent with equality and the lofty concepts that America is supposed to represent. Enforcing no inheritance law would certainly be… challenging

          Just discussion

          • @[email protected]
            3•5 months ago

            Wikipedia defines it well, with some history of the term

            The petite bourgeoisie is economically distinct from the proletariat and the Lumpenproletariat social-class strata who rely entirely on the sale of their labor-power for survival. It is also distinct from the capitalist class haute bourgeoisie (‘high’ bourgeoisie) that owns the means of production and thus can buy the labor-power of the proletariat and Lumpenproletariat to work the means of production. Although members of the petite bourgeoisie can buy the labor of others, they typically work alongside their employees, unlike the haute bourgeoisie.

            Here is another two definitions from marxist.org’s glossary of terms: https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/e.htm

            1. The class of small proprietors (for example, owners of small stores), and general handicrafts people of various types.

            This group has been disappearing since the industrial revolution, as large factories or retail outlets can produce and distribute commodities faster, better, and for a cheaper price than the small proprietors. While this class is most abundant in the least industrialized regions of the world, only dwindling remnants remain in more industrialized areas.

            These people are the foundation of the capitalist dream (aka “the American dream”): to start a small business and expand it into an empire. Much of capitalist growth and development comes from these people, while at the same time capitalism stamps out these people more and more with bigger and better industries that no small proprieter can compete against. Thus for the past few decades in the U.S., petty-bourgeois are given an enourmous variety of incentives, tax breaks, grants, loans, and ways to escape unscathed from a failed business.

            1. Also refers to the growing group of workers whose function is management of the bourgeois apparatus. These workers do not produce commodities, but instead manage the production, distribution, and/or exchange of commodities and/or services owned by their bourgeois employers.

            While these workers are a part of the working class because they receive a wage and their livelihood is dependent on that wage, they are seperated from working class consciousness because they have day-to-day control, but not ownership, over the means of production, distribution, and exchange.

            • @[email protected]
              -2•5 months ago

              Great.

              Now describe the key difference from the socialist perspective between owning a small business and owning a small business’s worth of stock in a dozen different businesses.

              • @[email protected]
                1•5 months ago

                That is so far from your original labelling of creative laborers who are under threat by AI as bourgeois. What is your point?

                  • @[email protected]
                    2•5 months ago

                    Okay chill with the smugness. The “middle class” has a number of mutually exclusive definitions so it would be helpful to clarify which you’re using.

                    VFX artists, actors, graphic designers, writers, musicians, visual artists, etc. generally sell their labor to capitalists in exchange for a wage in order to survive. This is the definition of the working class. The widgets they produce are not lumps of coal or buildings, but the specific widget produced by labor does not affect economic class.