The boundary between classes. - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14719602
A point for thought on the topic.
All over the talk of politics specially between left and right and heck even everyday politics.
There is always a talk of classes and hatred of some classes by others and vice versa for the given class.

But 'm wondering, what is exactly the boundary between classes ?
How do you know what class the person is ?

Sure, some will talk about certain life styles for each class. But here is the point, if lets say a random person is growing in income and financial position, his or her life style isn't going to suddenly change, at best its gradual and slow over the years. same for those falling in financial status.

And in many times its not even related to financial status or even level of authority.
Sometime life style doesn't change, rather the person chooses he likes how he lives and stay like that.

For example, from personal experience, many of the people of Baalbak were poor working class or rather lower working class people back in the 70s and early 80s. Then the weed trade and the arms trades came along and many became very rich due to it and the rest had a sudden mass increase in financial status due to the new flow of wealth to the area. How ever the majority of them retained the same old simple life style just as they were before this rush.

So what is the boundary between different classes ?
If not life style ? then what is ?

Even to those who would say the relation to the means of production, that still doesn't answer many questions. People in Baalbak are still the ones growing everything and manufactoring many of the weapons sold mainly ammunitions.
Farmers in Iran have higher income than the average manager in a bussiness firm. Specially those with large inherited farming lands due to wide inflation in the markets in the recent decades.
Cattle farmers all across the middle east, or atleast the countries i spent time in, are richer than the average person and have higher income, yet they still retain very simple and poor appearing life style.
And through unions or representatives they have larger leverage on politics and regulations in their place than many others.
Yet all the above are still looked at as lower classes and workers.


So considering this, what exactly is this boundary between classes and how can you tell a person's class ?
#14719645
Class relates to how one relates to production.

Someone who is bourgeois (boss class) owns his or her means of production.

Someone who is proletariat (working class) is the means of production.

The classic example would be someone that owns a factory and hires someone to produce widgets. The person that owns the factory is the boss, he owns the means of production. The person making the widgets is working to make his boss a profit, he is working class.

This is the main friction in society.

So when you get to other things like, say, the foremen in the widget factory; or the person that owns the small shop next door that sells lunch to the proletariat; or the begger that sits outside the shop looking for a handout, you end up with the petty-bourgouise (possibly the foreman, certainly the shop owner) and the lumpenproletariat (certainly the begger).

The petty-brougousie and lumpenproletariat are not independent classes and cannot historically do too much on their own—they are caught in the dynamic between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Finally, what about the unionized bus mechanic that is doing quite well, votes Tory, and lives in a big house?

Still proletariat, even if he's not engaged with the protection of his own interests as a class.
#14719646
Finally, what about the unionized bus mechanic that is doing quite well, votes Tory, and lives in a big house?


Straight to the camps!
#14719647
So the small bussiness owners who work and direct their bussiness or the farmers who own and work their land are ?

This type of people are still stuck between classes according to this definition, because in one hand they are the bosses but in the other hand they're the ones doing the work and their relation to production is direct.
If considered through financial state they're mid to upper middle class for most cases, atleast in the mideast, Africa and Asia.
But through the lense of production, they're proletariat class due to their relation to production being not only production of goods but also
distribution. Workshops and small family based production facilities are simillar if not the same.

If considered through a political lense, those have much more political leverage than the rest, and one with simillar if not bigger size than that of upper mid or lower upper classes due to organized unions and agencies.


And there is still anther issue to come by with identifying classes.
The larger portion of the average society is made of people who have good positions, mid to high income, great political leverage and weight also through unions. But all are employees of others and do handle the production directly under the consideration that production doesn't have to be material production.
Traditionally we would say those are the proletariat, but other than the fact that they're employees, they do not fit any of the other discreptions of the proletariat class, atleast the standard one that is.

And anther case which is a very common thing, realstate development, though big companies do consist a large portion of the proccess, however the majority, atleast around here, is done by normal people usually single units at a time and through loans and market prices expectation.
So those also are both proletariat class who have direct relation to production, yet at some points start filling specifics of both working and middle classes.
#14719649
The overall picture looks more complicated in Iran but Britain has a cartoonish representation of the class system as we read in Karl Marx's texts. If you belong to the proletariat class, you own almost nothing except for your labour that you provide for your employer who owns the means of production. It was reasonable for the worldwide communist revolution to be commenced in London in the late 19th century.
#14719651
anasawad wrote:So the small bussiness owners who work and direct their bussiness or the farmers who own and work their land are ?


petty-brougousie.

In general, it's not like Marx was completely unaware of a system where a proletariat could do well in capitalism. But it's not like he would suddenly be in control of the system, or even get a lot of satisfaction out of being better off than someone in a worse circumstance elsewhere:

Marx wrote:Let us suppose the most favorable case: if productive capital grows, the demand for labour grows. It therefore increases the price of labour-power, wages.

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.
#14719659
Classes never have and never will relate to the means of production or any other Marxist non-sense.

Class refers to the amount of money one is taxed for, so you have tax classes. So people below the threshold for taxation, are the poorest, then people above the threshold say from £12,000 to £30,000 are poor but richer than then poorest, then from 30,000-60,000 and so on and forth.

Up until the modern era, the higher classes did not just have to provide taxes from their income but also soldiers, horses & ships to defend the domain, so all civilisations created specific tax classes to define who will contribute the most to the common (war) effort.
#14719660
The legal ownership versus operational control of the means of production is contentious. The shareholder class, in aggregate, may legally own the means of production but they do not actively control its operation. The financial elite may not necessarily own production at all, but they exercise strong leverage over its operation. In some cases, financial leverage may be used to wrest control of the means of production (through hostile takeovers). The very threat of takeover limits the freedom of action of the owner class, and at the extremes imposes a quasi capital/proletarian relation between finance and capital.

The central role of finance in the formation of capital makes it a strong independent force in itself - but what is its relation to the means of production?

What do we think of today when we talk about capitalists? It appears to be an operating partnership between the elites of finance and the management, who maintain some level of operational control of production. They are able to do so without necessarily maintaining a decisive ownership stake - mere ownership is a passive role assigned to shareholders.

Thus ownership is relatively stable over time, while actual control is a ferociously fought battle and its composition is in constant flux.
#14719714
Noemon wrote:Classes never have and never will relate to the means of production or any other Marxist non-sense.

Class refers to the amount of money one is taxed for, so you have tax classes


Alright, General Electric regularly pays $0 in taxes.

Meanwhile, the working poor in the same country pay extra taxes (especially if you don't have a partner to pick up half your expenses).

So I guess that one of the world's largest and most wealthy corporations is working class because it can hire billion dollar financial firms to erase its taxes; and people that can't afford to eat regularly are the upper class because they have to pay taxes.

That makes much more sense than finding a measurable qualification for these designations.

#LiberalLogic
#14719782
This is not my logic, this is the standard definition of class ever since civilisation started keeping records.

Yes several corporations are welfare queens and dependent on government handouts, as long as the government lets them get away with murder, that does not change their status, it simple means that one has an ineffective government. Also it is not just about one single tax, but the totality of tribute one pays to the coffers.

TiG wrote:So I guess that one of the world's largest and most wealthy corporations is working class because it can hire billion dollar financial firms to erase its taxes; and people that can't afford to eat regularly are the upper class because they have to pay taxes.


#desperationlogic
#14720495
Noemon wrote:Yes several corporations are welfare queens and dependent on government handouts, as long as the government lets them get away with murder, that does not change their status


So now the tax status of a person or an organization no longer determines the class status like it did a few posts ago when you wrote:

Class refers to the amount of money one is taxed for, so you have tax classes


Perhaps we can unravel the secret of how class is dependent upon taxes and how taxes have nothing to do with taxes.

Noemon wrote:Also it is not just about one single tax, but the totality of tribute one pays to the coffers.


So it's tax classes again. Which puts General Electric into working class.

It also puts the French nobels of the Ancien Regime as the working class as they didn't pay taxes, and the peasantry as the ruling class as they did pay taxes.

British nobels are traditionally working class, were briefly excluded, then working class again when they pulled EU agricultural funds out after reclassifying themselves; while
The poorest 10% of people in Britain are the ruling class.

That is, of course, until we reverse this mid-sentence and then double-down a moment later. It doesn't have to make sense as long as we aren't measuring a person'a relationship to the economy, but instead the legal whims of the most powerful classes to pay what they feel like in taxes!
#14720497
The Immortal Goon wrote:So now the tax status of a person or an organization no longer determines the class status like it did a few posts ago when you wrote:


Your logic does not follow that it does not determine the tax status, failure to extract taxes due does not mean that the legal or real person in question belongs to a lower class but that someone has failed to do their job properly.

Which puts General Electric into working class.


No it doesn't. And if you want to look at how much tax GM pays to the coffers, you should account for Sales Tax, Social Security Contributions, Tax on shareholder dividends and so on and forth, playing with the books and bringing forward old costs to escape from corporate tax does not make any point for you.

It also puts the French nobels of the Ancien Regime as the working class as they didn't pay taxes, and the peasantry as the ruling class as they did pay taxes.


This is not just false but plain ridiculous because well you know even if someone is exempt from a tax, that does not mean that his/her tax contributions are actually lower than his peasants working his fields.

If you want to argue against reality, you should do a lot better than that.

Since the very dawn of time, class has been used to define the amount of money one is taxed for and consequently the amount of privilege one enjoys in government, either through enabling direct participation(Greece & Rome), or through nobility(Middle-Ages) or through donations and campaigning(modern world).

We simplify in the modern world in upper-middle-lower classes, but we sure as hell don't confuse the worker of a software engineering company with the peasant like the Marxists do.
#14720498
I just don't see how Marxists can claim that workers that had to work 12-14 hour days, starting at the age of 6-7, and having to have whole families work to support households full of a dozen or so kids and adults have much to do with a worker in a union job making enough money to support a household.

Sure they both have the same "relation to the means of production", but their outcomes are dissimilar.
#14720509
Noemon wrote:Your logic does not follow that it does not determine the tax status, failure to extract taxes due does not mean that the legal or real person in question belongs to a lower class but that someone has failed to do their job properly.


General Electric, and their ilk, is not breaking any laws by not paying taxes. They are not legally required to do so as the laws are set up.

You could argue that there is a volksgeist separate from the law in which they should have to pay taxes, though you would also have to explain how this can reconcile with the increasing amounts of anti-tax weirdos and cry-babies in the United States that don't think anybody should have to pay taxes.

Instead, we're left with a feeling that GE should pay taxes, which is dependent upon abstract notions of moral fairness more than any kind of reality, legal or otherwise.

The second part of this was the backward implication that it was I that suggested General Electric was lower class because it did not pay taxes. Actually, it was you that suggested "tax class" was the way in which classes were distributed. I firmly reject the idea.

Noemon wrote:No it doesn't. And if you want to look at how much tax GM pays to the coffers, you should account for Sales Tax, Social Security Contributions, Tax on shareholder dividends and so on and forth, playing with the books and bringing forward old costs to escape from corporate tax does not make any point for you.


I can guarantee that most people pay a higher percentage of their money on all of these taxes than General Electric does, simply by virtue of being a corporation that exists in more places than one.

For instance, as an Oregonian I don't have to pay Sales Tax as there's a law in Oregon preventing us from doing so. In Washington State (to my north) it is illegal to charge an income tax. The result is that people that live in Vancouver (a suburb of Portland in Washington) pay virtually no taxes as they live in a place with no income tax where they file; and can shop in Oregonian stores where there is no sales tax.

This is all perfectly legal. Their price, incidentally, is that their infrastructure fucking blows—which they never cease whining about. Oregon does not expand (or well maintain) the roads that Vancouverites use to get into Oregon, and Washington refuses to pay for the bridge that they're dependent upon as they don't pay for it.

This is not a problem for General Electric and other such institutions which have their own infrastructure. Without paying taxes, perfectly legally.

Further, just because someone lives in Vancouver and they pay virtually no taxes, does not mean that they are class elites by virtue of living.

Neomon wrote:This is not just false but plain ridiculous because well you know even if someone is exempt from a tax, that does not mean that his/her tax contributions are actually lower than his peasants working his fields.

If you want to argue against reality, you should do a lot better than that.


This is a revisionist position that was popular in the 1970s among historians during the Cold War that were attempting to disprove any validity the Marxist scholars in France may have had.

As with all such revisions, it is based on some kind of reality but overstated. Here you can see later work that seeks to correct this. The tax on the nobles was relatively new, and mostly passed down for the peasants to pay:

Image

I will admit that my point in this case was stretched a little bit, but not so much that it is without merit in demonstrating the argument.
#14720512
From a Marxist sense, yes you can have boundaries defined.

But in really there are no boundaries in the wealth sense, since class is a social construct in that way, and there are just different levels of rich vs poor on a sliding scale, and any place to make a specific cut-off point from "upper class" to "middle class" etc is completely arbitrary.
#14720516
The Immortal Goon wrote:General Electric, and their ilk, is not breaking any laws by not paying taxes. They are not legally required to do so as the laws are set up.


You are making a false claim that GE is not paying any taxes. GE and her shareholders pay to the coffers of the US state huge amounts of money, a lot more than any worker does.

The second part of this was the backward implication that it was I that suggested General Electric was lower class because it did not pay taxes. Actually, it was you that suggested "tax class" was the way in which classes were distributed. I firmly reject the idea.


You can reject that the sky is blue but it still will not change it's colour. Class the way States understand class is about classifying people in categories based on their income so that the State can extract tax and distribute privilege.

I can guarantee that most people pay a higher percentage of their money on all of these taxes than General Electric does, simply by virtue of being a corporation that exists in more places than one.


Percentages don't matter at all and are completely irrelevant, they are an entirely different [moralistic] subject.

For instance, as an Oregonian I don't have to pay Sales Tax as there's a law in Oregon preventing us from doing so. In Washington State (to my north) it is illegal to charge an income tax. The result is that people that live in Vancouver (a suburb of Portland in Washington) pay virtually no taxes as they live in a place with no income tax where they file; and can shop in Oregonian stores where there is no sales tax.


I am under the impression that you are exaggerating and misrepresenting the situation by ignoring taxes on the federal level, but even if your unique case is true, an exception does not make a rule.

This is a revisionist position that was popular in the 1970s among historians during the Cold War that were attempting to disprove any validity the Marxist scholars in France may have had.


Marxist class theory never had any validity nor has any state in history used them for administrative purposes with the possible exception of the soviet union though I even doubt they did.

I will admit that my point in this case was stretched a little bit, but not so much that it is without merit in demonstrating the argument.


Your argument has no validity. It really doesn't.
#14720529
noemon wrote:Since the very dawn of time, class has been used to define the amount of money one is taxed for and consequently the amount of privilege one enjoys in government, either through enabling direct participation(Greece & Rome), or through nobility(Middle-Ages) or through donations and campaigning(modern world).


Donations and campaigning are not directly related to the amount of taxes paid.

I do agree however that big tax payers have considerable influence. Corporations in particular, and very wealthy individuals. Simply because they can threaten to "leave" and the state wants to keep them.
#14724045
The US is essentially a classless society, where since it's very inception, "none shall be placed one above the other." An Obama has no greater standing in society than Joe the Plumber. The meet as equals on the common-ground, as we ourselves have witnessed.

So here class is merely an economic factor. And there are only three - the rich, the middle, and the lower class. The rich can take a hit, lose all of their income, and much of their assets, and suffer no noticeable loss. The middle class can take a financial hit, lose all of their income, suffer some loss of assets - perhaps downgrade to a smaller house, a lower standard of living - and still live relatively well. But if the lower class takes a financial hit, they're living in a trailer park. So it's really about how well we insulate ourselves economically.

"Means of production" here is meaningless. We are sovereigns unto ourselves, government, all possessing the attributes of government - the family being the base economic unit of all society - thus labeled by our Puritan forefathers as, "family government." In America we own our labor, and in accordance with established principles of free enterprise, the "means" of production.

"Working-class" too is meaningless. In America everyone works - the banker, the lawyer, the doctor... the construction worker, we all put our pants legs up one at a time and roll off to work in the morning. And if not, then you are a "loser."

Status - community status - on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. And traditionally these stratifications, these political creations, have varied from region to region, with varied contributing factors.

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