As in: Which makes the most sense from their PoV, ethics aside.
“Middle class” is a social class (like “upper class” and “lower class”), not an economic class (like “working class” and “ruling class”).
If you think having a nice car makes you closer to the ruling class than the working class, you’ve internalized the mind control and it doesn’t matter what you pick, you’re a threat.
Middle class is a fabrication designed to make the working poor think they’re better off than they really are.
Everyone that sells their time to make a living is part of the same class. Everyone that makes their money through appreciation of capital is a different class.
Look at a graph of wealth distribution. The difference between any two points in the lower 99% is barely noticable, when compared to what the top 1 and even .001% have access to.
The middle class still works to make a living. So they are part of the working class.
There is no middle class, there is only working class and the parasitic class.
People who have to work a job to live are workers.
Every other abled bodied person who lives without contributing doesn’t need to be around.
The “middle class” is just the working class with debt. In class struggle terms, its not “rich vs poor”, it’s “owners vs workers”. If you have to work to support yourself, that tells you all you need to know.
That’s a really good way of putting it. We have the wealthy, the poor, and the poor who’ve been given scraps by the wealthy and are complicit in protecting them. The “middle class” believe they can gain more in scraps than they can by revolution. And so it continues.
I have relatives that own their house as well as a few rental properties, but they also work normal jobs, they get the new iPhone (or sometimes Samsung Phone) every year, they rarely use public transit, always drive their cars. I’m assuming they have health insurance as well. And I also heard they have other investments besides rental income (as in stocks)
Now I don’t know if they need to work, but they definitely have enough rental income to get by even if they lose their jobs.
Idk what class that is supposed to be.
“they have health insurance”. It is a given in quite a few countries. No link to being wealthy. Driving your car is not about being wealthy, dependant low wage workers have to drive to go to the factory too.
The stability of the owner class comes from the lack of necessity to labour to have spending money. You can be a wage worker like Emmanuel Macron, president of France with a current wage of net 8k€ ; but he just sold his wife inherited house for 3m€, when they got it for 1m€ (1.5m after the tax bureau caught him for under-valuating it). This is not working class.
Sounds to me like petite bourgeoise. Wannabe owner class
Does it matter? These are just concepts. Marxists would tell you theyre petit-bourgeoisie. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie
Ultimately, supporting the working class helps everyone.
I think an easier interpretation than the “owners vs workers” in this day and age is, are they billionaires. If you’re not a billionaire or close to it, you should be on the side of the working class.
The billionaires that make up only 1% of the population ans own nearly half the wealth of the entire world are the problem.
$10M and up would probably qualify. Below that, people would still need to work to maintain what they have with some measure of comfort and dealing with risk, inflation. Above that, they should be able to be self sustaining without working for a paycheque.
You don’t need to be a billionaire… 10 million plus is sufficient to never have to work again if you are not absolute degenerate and know how to manage money.
100 million if you have to cosplay being “rich”
1 million is commonly agreed upon in the FIRE community as the number to hit to have a confortable retirement in perpetuity. Following the 4% rule, you could withdrawal $40k each year to live off of and would almost certainly not run out of money before you die, even accounting for inflation.
That number doesn’t math… Unless you also have a paid off house.
Why not? I lived on about 20k last year. I live in a camper van most of the time, so no rent for me. But even paying (imo, a rather exorbitant) $1000/mo for a studio, you are still only at 32k per year.
You CAN do it but that sucks. 40k a year is not enough money unless you’re happy to live like you’re poor, but just don’t have to go to work every day.
Financially independent, sure. But I don’t plan to retire to sitting in my van reading a library book eating rice and beans until I give up the ghost, you know? Color me entitled, but I think we can draw the hypothetical lines a little higher than you have set them for you.
Honestly you can just remove the ambiguity and put the number right at 1 billion dollars of net worth. Up to that point is obscenely wealthy, but a billion is the line that guarantees the majority of your wealth came directly from the exploitation of the masses.
You can’t ethically make a billion dollars as an individual when the working class sees 1/10,000th of that in a year as doing fairly well in most areas.
Ethically, the bar is much, much lower. By the time you have $25M net, you had to have exploited someone to get there and you’d have the clout to make at least local politics bend in your favour.
Eh… There’s definitely ways to obtain that much without exploitation, although rare.
Chill out, dude. Somebody’s gotta fund your revolution.
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Theyre landlords so yes, they basically are
Buncha people in here still don’t get how this works…
When I bought my current home, I rented out my previous home to friends of friends. They covered the payments on that house until they were in a situation where they could get a loan to buy it from me. There were no yachts or caviar for me during those years.
Renting out one or two homes doesn’t make someone “owner class”.
but they definitely have enough rental income to get by even if they lose their jobs.
You had them cover your other mortgage. These people can coast off of rent money. You are not the same.
“My uncle Greg is one of the good ones” yeah yeah I’ve heard it before, go read some theory
Theory and practice are the same in theory, but in practice, they are different.
You must be right, because generalizations are always 100% accurate.
I think the line is when the primary bread winner is your tenant. Covering costs of mortgage only is a nice thing to do, profiting off of them beyond the mortgage is exploitation. That’s the difference, your assertion at the end is highly dependent on how they choose the rates for said houses and whether they profit off the work of others in that transaction.
The middle class isn’t real. You are either working class or owner class. Anything else is just there to divide the working class in a forever class war with the owner class.
It depends, how do they feel about guillotines?
This has always been my thought. As someone who is living a comfortable life, some would consider me as well-off or rich. Regardless, I am not private security rich, so would be an easy target at the start of the uprising.
Hence, ethics aside, it’s in my best interest to keep the ‘workers’ happy.
If you don’t know, you don’t have enough rich friends.
The middle class is a fabrication. It’s an income bracket created by capitalism, not a true analysis of one’s association to the means of production and labor. It’s “real” in the sense that many people identify themselves to it, but it’s not real in a Marxist sense.
A vast majority of people in the middle class are the proletariat. Some of the people in the middle class are petite bourgeois.
Edit: I think your question is a good one, simply because so many people do see themselves as part of this Middle Class first before they think of themselves as workers or business owners, but I think that’s a sign of effective capitalist propaganda meant to distract the workers from their relationship to labor. The Middle Class largely is made up of people who need to be reeducated to understand that they are part of the proletariat and the bourgeois have been robbing them for centuries.
The lower classes, because “real” capitalism grows from the bottom and trickle down is discredited nonsense, and we work so are working class too. There is no benefit to supporting those who don’t need it. Buying from small local shops and employee owned outfits, and if you are a business owner, paying well and giving employees ownership stake and profit sharing, that at least moves the needle in the right direction.
AFA self interest, middle class has more to gain by the poor becoming middle class, than by the rich getting richer.
In the book 1984, one of the characters postulates that in any system of government there are 3 groups. The unwashed masses comprising 90% of people, the elite who are better than everyone else making up 1% of people, and a middle buffer of 9% of people. The buffer is used by the elite to keep the unwashed masses from uprising. Anyone from the 90% who looks like they might be trouble for the 1% gets to be in the 9%. They get treated a bit better in exchange for defending the status quo. Perhaps if they defend it hard enough they can be given a spot among the 1%!
I believe the argument made by this character is supposed to be flawed, but it ends up being pretty believable. The “middle class” would be the buffer zone of people who defend the status quo in exchange for slightly better treatment by the 1% than the average person gets.
The Upper class would be the buffer.
The 1% richest hold 50% of all the wealth. If we’re being reasonable, everyone vs them is probably more than enough.
