It was the system, not the individuals, all along?
[surprised pikachu face]
Serious question not trying to troll here: Isn’t everyone stuck in this hellish capitalist system part of that class?
No. Classes are determined by how you get your money and by how comfortable you are.
If you are working for a paycheck, you do not touch capital.
Ok you defined this way better than I did.
It’s not quite so black and white, though.
My spouse and I both work for a living, and we’d be in a hard spot if either of us lost our jobs. We also own 3 rental properties, and I have a military pension. We also own a farm where we raise 6 cows and enough chickens to have some eggs to sell.
So, we get most of our money from our labor, the rental properties pay for themselves most of the time but we don’t pool that with our personal money…it’s for the mortgages, taxes, maintenance and to cover for when we don’t have renters (which is almost never…weird how that happens when you aren’tcharging exploitative rents).
We sell eggs and make a small profit on those, but not enough to support ourselves…same with the beef…it’s mostly for us and family to eat (because fuck factory farming) but if we don’t have the freezer space we’ll sell the extra as well. That makes us both labor and capital… and my pension and military retirement benefits are basically as close to socialism as we’ll get in the US anytime soon, the biggest difference being I had to earn it.
The landlord side of it is the murkiest imo. You having a military pension doesn’t mean you’re in the bourgeoisie, it just means you’re getting paid for having given time from your life. Similarly, selling the surplus from your own agriculture doesn’t place you in the class of controlling capital because you aren’t using others’ labor; you’re creating something through your labor and when faced with having a surplus, are distributing your goods. Yes you sell them, but it’s not fair to criticize you for trying to offset your costs while living under a capitalist system so long as the price isn’t exorbitant.
Imo being a landlord is usually the scummiest, but if you’re charging rent at a price set to maintain the buildings and ensure that your tenants still have housing, then I don’t think you’re exploiting anyone. Imo the more profit you take from your rental properties, the more it moves out of the grey area. It sounds however like you don’t take profit or take a very minimal amount, and that you price your property so that it’s self sufficient but not much more. In that case then you aren’t really exploiting your tenants. Are they still being exploited? Yes, by the system that forces them to pay for housing. Do you have a hand in that exploitation purely by being their landlord? Yes, however if you aren’t trying to extort them for money so they have housing, then I wouldn’t say you’re exploiting them more than just owning their housing. Theres a reason that leftists tout that theres no ethical consumption under capitalism; even in trying to help people or do the right thing, you are still feeding into a system of exploitation and extortion. That doesn’t mean you still aren’t trying to do the right thing or be genuinely helpful, it just means that unless we find an alternative system then we will all continue to exploit each other and be exploited. This is why the proletariat must be unified as otherwise, we will never shake the binds of our collective oppression.
Congratulations, you’re one of an extreme few still living in the middle class.
Now realize how minority your experience is.
The definitions are tricky based on how you read them, but no. Your role in society is to perform labor (I’m assuming), and the fruits of that labor are then forfeited to those above you for a wage. Thus they have the capital and would belong to the “capitalist class.”
This also works with cops.
*and the same
The idea of there being a form Capitalism which is not corrupt is about as ill-informed as the idea that there can be a World were everybody has the same as everybody else for ever and ever (i.e. the Utopia called Communism, which is not at all the same as the political bullshit out there called thus) and for the same reason: human Greed.
For there to be Capitalism there have to be Laws (the bare minimum being Contract Law and Property Law, and if you want things like ownership of ideas then also Intellectual Property Laws, plus indirectly the whole edifice of Criminal Law to make sure that violence is not used to force some for the profit of others).
Laws have to be made and ajusted as times change as well as appropriate punishments defined; there has to be Oversight to see if Laws are abidded by or not; there has to be Judgement of people’s actions with regards to those Laws; there has to be enforcement of the punishments for breaking the Law. Lets call the people who do all this Lawmakers and Law-enforcers.
How can anybody expect that Lawmakers and Law-enforcers, at the very least when such things impact profit making, under Capitalism where “Greed is Good” and wealth is the most important measure of a man, to not serve their own personal greed first and foremost, which in such positions often means being corrupt?!
Even if magically we started with squeaky clean Lawmakers and Law-enforcers, many people outside who are not squeaky clean looking to enrich themselves would be attracted to such positions were they can sell their control of the powers of law-making and law-enforcement to the highest bidder.
It’s frankly hilarious to expect that in Capitalism everybody would be looking out for numero uno except for those responsible for making and enforcing the framework of Laws that is the only difference between Capitalism and Anarchy.
In summary: Capitalism naturally breeds corruption because to maintain and apply the very framework of rules that supports Capitalism it requires a special group of impeccably honest people not influenced by the Capitalist Spirit along with a system making sure any replacement for those people are also of the same kind, which is impossible.
lemmy.ml vibes 😬
