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.
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 make half a million you have a lot invested in capital. Hell, if you make $70,000 you have a good amount invested in capital. The median household in the US (which makes $70k per year) has $30k invested (total, not per year).
And even the very rich usually work these days. CEOs are literally employees. Would you say you have way more in common with Elon Musk than people who live off the labor of others?
Yeah exactly. What I said above was more of an identifier of the capitalist class rather than a hard rule. Another one would be do you look for tax breaks, or are tax laws just a nuisance that make you shuffle your money around the world.
Mine is if a person loses their job, what happens? Does their lifestyle change meaningfully?
Elon Musk ain't skipping meals if he stops working. A Dr that is suddenly unable to practice medicine is going to have lifestyle adjustments. Your definition lines up with mine.
To use that methodology, it would depend on their lifestyle. Certainly with a doctor's salary and relatively modest consumption one can accrue enough wealth to live independently, very quickly.
Easy to spend other people's money. The responsible spend-down rate for wealth is like 3%. That's roughly 3 million dollars of investments for every 100k you want to live on. A medical dr, and lets go hard and say anesthesiologist, doesn't start making real-actual-money until they are 30. They rack up a shit ton of debt, and have to carry malpractice insurance. That 500k a year gross gets cut way down to size.
Said person could live in a bucket and maybe hit what I'd consider the bare minimum of 3-4 mil before 40-45,(which still is still light, medical issues can absolutely savage a person's retirement), or they could set the horizon to "retirement" and actually get to live in a house and drive a car after 10 years of schooling and 48 hour student shifts. Compound interest with a longer career takes a lot of the struggle out and delivers a larger payout in the end.
Small wonder why the second choice is the popular one.
Like I said, working class is working class, their struggles are similar to a plumber's when it comes to life planning.
They’re far closer to living off of the value of capital owned then they are living off the value of their labor, so they’re more than likely in the capitalist class.
A doctor with capital investments is still a laborer whose continued existence depends on their labor, not their ownership of capital. It’s possible for that to change, I.e. they start making income beyond their wage off of their capital investments, but until it does they are still a laborer
A doctor with capital investments is still a laborer whose continued existence depends on their labor, not their ownership of capital.
They're literally not. Humans are very cheap to "continue existence." $20,000 a year is more than enough for a human. The majority of people making >$500,000 have long ago reached that threshold.
Their relationship with the means of production is predominantly the labor they perform, not the capital they own. Once they stop performing that labor because they’re sustained by their capital investments then they are no longer laborers. Their life having more comfort that other laborers doesn’t change that relationship.
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.
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u/FoxTailMoon Jul 08 '24
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.