The Classification Of Taxi Drivers/Nurses

[TruProl]

Hey,

I'm somebody whose quite familiar with Marxist theory but something that is perplexing me is the status of Taxicab Drivers in terms of Proletarian/Bourgeois.

From what I have read they are either Petite Bourgeois or Proletarian with my own readings leaning towards the latter but it would be interesting to see what other think.

For instance say we have two taxi drivers one rents the taxi whilst the other owns their own taxi. Would both of these be considered proletariat or would the latter be considered petite bourgeois as they technically aren't selling their labor value?

As for nurses I strongly believe they are part of the proletarian but does this extend to members of the nurses team e.g. a healthcare support worker who is lower than nurses and whose primary purpose is to serve the nurses in administration? And lastly could there be considered a difference depending on whether it's a mainstream or a special needs school? I don't believe there to be but just seeking clarification.

Sorry for the question overload but these are all questions I've been pondering on.

[adipocere]

I would consider them both proletariat. Taxi drivers would fall under teamsters and nurses are skilled labor. In the case of nurses and assistants, I consider that to be a fair example of capitalist degradation of the workplace. The assistants are cheaper to employ and easier to dispose of than nurses - that is why they exist, not to serve nurses, but to ultimately replace the menial work normally done by nurses with cheaper labor.

[RedMaterialist]

Hey,

I'm somebody whose quite familiar with Marxist theory but something that is perplexing me is the status of Taxicab Drivers in terms of Proletarian/Bourgeois.

From what I have read they are either Petite Bourgeois or Proletarian with my own readings leaning towards the latter but it would be interesting to see what other think.

For instance say we have two taxi drivers one rents the taxi whilst the other owns their own taxi. Would both of these be considered proletariat or would the latter be considered petite bourgeois as they technically aren't selling their labor value?

As for nurses I strongly believe they are part of the proletarian but does this extend to members of the nurses team e.g. a healthcare support worker who is lower than nurses and whose primary purpose is to serve the nurses in administration? And lastly could there be considered a difference depending on whether it's a mainstream or a special needs school? I don't believe there to be but just seeking clarification.

Sorry for the question overload but these are all questions I've been pondering on.

Some taxi drivers own their own cars, but they all, as far as I know, have to rely on a company-owned dispatcher network, to receive calls, etc. Some non-taxi drivers drive friends around for a small fee. Nurses and other health support workers don't own hospitals. The doctors, on the other hand, often do.

In terms of ownership of the means of production taxi-drivers could be petit-bourgeois or proletariat; nurses and health care workers would be proletariat. For some reason, in my experience, taxi-drivers are extremely conservative, at least where I live, politically, and they all would vehemently say they were full scale capitalists.

[Glitchcraft]

Someone who owns their own taxi is most likely petite bourgeois. There's possibly a lot of variables like working under a company who charges for use of the dispatch and other situations that I am unaware of. So I will go with what I know.
If a carpenter owns his own hammer and saw but still sells his labour to a home building company he is working class. He likely works on a crew that gets paychecks from a boss. That same carpenter selling his labour individually (being his own boss) to a home owner is petite bourgeois.
I used to think these were petty arbitrary classifications but it does become important when you start to have upsurges in the political consciousness of the people.

That guy that owns his own hot dog cart may seem like a worker to the rest of us but he does lack the socialized element of labour that helps make the working class a much more formidable revolutionary force. Socialized labour is that which production is divided vertically between workers. No one person makes the entire auto-mobile. It requires a certain amount of discipline and that practice of training workers to work symbiotically is one of the reasons the working class and not the petite bourgeois a revolutionary force.

Counter revolutionaries and outright fascists are commonly recruited out of the petite bourgeois layers of society. It's not to say every hot dog vendor or taxi driver is a fascist but it is important to understand where these movements draw from.

I don't know if this exactly answers your question but it seemed relevant to me, I hope it's helpful.

I have had years of experience in both aspects of work and I can say that the self employed carpenter or taxi driver is in general far more likely to be reactionary than the factory worker. Maybe they are reactionary anarchists but the self employed worker is rarely a communist.

[Thirsty Crow]

For instance say we have two taxi drivers one rents the taxi whilst the other owns their own taxi. Would both of these be considered proletariat or would the latter be considered petite bourgeois as they technically aren't selling their labor value?Neither is technically working class since they do not sell their labor power as you say (renting a cab cannot be considered selling one's labor power anymore than taking out a business credit can be), but they are neither part of the petite bourgeoisie as, and this is crucial in my opinion, they do not employ wage labor.

They are self-employed - providing services to customers as means of subsistence materials acquisition.

On the other hand, and from the example of the country where I live, taxi drivers can and indeed are workers if they're employed by a capitalist enterprise.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

Neither is technically working class since they do not sell their labor power as you say (renting a cab cannot be considered selling one's labor power anymore than taking out a business credit can be), but they are neither part of the petite bourgeoisie as, and this is crucial in my opinion, they do not employ wage labor.

They are self-employed - providing services to customers as means of subsistence materials acquisition.

On the other hand, and from the example of the country where I live, taxi drivers can and indeed are workers if they're employed by a capitalist enterprise.
I think there's some confusion between 'working class' and 'proletariat'. The proletariat is a form of the working class unique to capitalism that survives by selling its labour power. In the same way that the process of making shoes could be performed by a proletariat in a factory or an artisan cobbler in his own workshop, taxi drivers can operate on multiple and often blurred relationships with the means of production but in the greater scheme of things, as you identified, because they don't employ wage labour they are still members of a wider working class.