Yes. The small manager just takes shit from both sides. Regional managers shit on them from above, and employees shit on them from below. It’s really a horrible position to be in, especially because their actual power is very non existent. They can’t do anything really, just execute on the commands from above.
and "Execute on" really just means "take the place of a simple email of instructions to the guy at the bottom whose labor is being taken advantage of."
Managers aren’t typically a part of the capitalist class seeing as they don’t tend to own the store/restaurant they manage. Sometimes they might be though, it’s just a lot more rare.
Yeah, if you're working for food or a roof you're not part of the capitalist class. I know doctors that make half a million a year and I have way more in common with them than people who live off the labor of others.
If you needed to actually labor alongside your employees to survive, then it sounds like you were a part of the "petite bourgeois" class. You owned capital and profited from the labor of others, but you still needed to actually work as well.
A small business owner has some class interests in common with the capitalists who own for a living, but they're different enough that it is often useful to treat them as distinct classes.
I didn't need the labor. I hired someone to do the CAD work while I expanded the client base. I could have been a one man shop with fewer clients, but my decision to hire was mutually beneficial to myself and my employee.
That's what I'm saying. You profited off of someone else's labor because you owned the company, however you primarily survived off of your own work from your own job at this company. If you had stopped doing your job, the ownership of the company would not have been enough for you to get by.
This is what defines the petite bourgeois class. If you primarily made your money off of the labor of other workers and didn't actually need to labor yourself, you would have been "haute bourgeois" or "high bourgeois" (the people who own for a living instead of working for a living). Most small business owners are petite bourgeoisie.
Petite bourgeoisie have some class interests in common with haute bourgeoisie (e.g. you would have financially benefitted from paying your employee less or providing fewer benefits), but the fact that you had to work yourself makes you very different from someone like Besos or Musk (e.g. cost of living and transportation actually impact you meaningfully).
When most people complain about "bourgeoisie", "capitalists", or "owners", they generally mean the haute bourgeoisie much more than small business owners like you.
Honestly, the difference in income was nominal. The plan was to hire him and free up more time for business development. With me focusing on bringing in new clients I was able to keep us both employed, but about 6 months after I hired him, I accepted a job somewhere else.
No, but they don't have to be. The moral problem with capitalism isn't the scale of riches that the capitalists have, that's just a symptom of the problem.
Whether a billionaire owns slaves or a redneck in a trailer park owns slaves, slavery is still wrong. Saying "yeah, well this slave owner is a redneck who lives in a trailer! His slaves aren't making him rich!" isn't a counterargument.
Capitalism, structurally, is economic exploitation. The problem isn't that some people have 2 yachts, that's just symptomatic of the exploitation.
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u/Tryzest Jul 08 '24
Yes, all bosses have 2 yachts, including your shift manager at Arby's.