How America's Car Recovery Explains the U.S. Economy

[Popular Front of Judea]

We are entering into a very different economic landscape. Theory -- and rhetoric -- from the 60's is not going to be of much use where we are going.

But this time, cars are leading houses, thanks to a surprising source: older Americans. "[Demand] is coming from an increased buying rate of people over 55," McAlinden said, "which is scary because we don't have a lot of repeat sales left in us."

Young people are essentially locked out of the car market, just as they have been locked out of the housing market -- and the labor market. Average vehicle prices are as high as ever, but wages are low, and unemployment for young people has typically been twice as high as for the overall population. There is also evidence that cars have fallen from their cultural perch, squeezed by urbanization among young people and the growth of a new, expensive, social, mobile technology -- the smartphone.

Young vs. old might not be the most important binary for car companies. That would be rich vs. poor. The U.S. is beginning to look like the aristocratic auto market we're used to seeing in Europe, McAlinden said, where the top 25 percent buys most of the new cars and the bottom 75 percent only buys old and used. "Seventy-five percent of households here are relying on used cars, thinking 'I hope that rich guy is done,'" he said.

Plutocracy in the car market isn't unique, but rather illustrative. There is “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” three Citigroup analysts concluded in the heart of the real estate boom in 2005. Instead, we have the rich and the rest. As Don Peck wrote in his summer 2011 cover story for The Atlantic, for many industries, "the rest" just don't matter.

All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns.

The last two years have done nothing to make those Citigroup economists look anything less than prophetic. Middle-income jobs (like, say, auto-parts workers) made up 60 percent of jobs lost in the recession, but lower-wage occupations have accounted for about 60 percent of jobs gained the recovery. The auto recovery, like the U.S. recovery, is built on a fragile assumption: The rich can be rich enough for the rest of us.

Overdrive: How America's Amazing Car Recovery Explains the U.S. Economy | Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2013/09/overdrive-how-americas-amazing-car-recovery-explains-the-us-economy/279413/)

[Zulu]

That's right, because we live in ultra-imperialism now. Therefore the theory and rhetoric adequate to these days is somewhere between Jehu & the 3rd-worldists.

[Popular Front of Judea]

that's right, because we live in ultra-imperialism now. Therefore the theory and rhetoric adequate to these days is somewhere between jehu & the 3rd-worldists.

wtf?

[Zulu]

wtf?

What WTF?

Haven't I told you so (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2656612&postcount=110) quite recently?

I mean, this marvelous piece marvelously supports my point #2 about why the automobile is such a decisive, class-defining means of production. I owe you a thank you for it, BTW.

[#FF0000]

That's right, because we live in ultra-imperialism now. Therefore the theory and rhetoric adequate to these days is somewhere between Jehu & the 3rd-worldists.

Haha, oh holy shit this dope is still around.

[Zulu]

Haha, oh holy shit this dope is still around.

Chauvinistic liberal! Imperialist lackey!!!

[Jimmie Higgins]

The Modness:

OK, don't get personal - general warning.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I mean, this marvelous piece marvelously supports my point #2 about why the automobile is such a decisive, class-defining means of production. I owe you a thank you for it, BTW.I don't think the fact of 90% of the population having collectivly as much wealth as 1% bolsters your argument at all.

I have a pasta maker - pasta is a commodity, does that make me a capitalist? Really you need to distinguish between means of production and means of re-production. US workers get cars to take them to their wage-jobs.

It's amazing how 3rd worldist arguments and right-wing capitalist arguments are basically identical except they moralize from opposite directions. Owning a home or a car may make workers feel middle class, capitalist politicians may argue it makes them middle class, but the relationship to production tells a different class story. For a car to be a means of production it would need to be used in a small privite shipping operation or taxi operation. Workers with cars can not legally do either of these things, there are costs involved and regulations basically to ensure that personal transportation can not be used as a means of production just like having a BBQ does not make someone a legal resturant owner, pouring drinks at a party does not make someone's appartment a legal pub, doing your laundry does not make your appartment a laundramat.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

People, Zulu is an ardent Malthusian and argued that people who drove cars for work were capitalists. He's a marcellite third-worldist crackpot, don't bother with his anti-marxist infowars shit.

[Zulu]

people who drove cars for work were capitalists

Hey, where did I say that? I say that such people are petty bourgeois, and that's a completely different class.

Of course, in the mind of any random two-bit leftist there are only two classes: "capital" & "labor" (which are not classes at all, BTW, but factors of production), and cars are capital, so... I guess, if I'm not allowed to have the petty bourgeois class in my analysis, then yeah, car owners got to be "capitalists".



I have a pasta maker - pasta is a commodity, does that make me a capitalist?

Pasta maker is obviously a means of production but obviously not a decisive one. Therefore you might own a pasta maker and still be a proletarian. However, you can't own a car and be a proletarian at the same time, because car is a decisive means of production, which decides that its owners are petty bourgeois (not capitalists - see above). For more on the difference between the "decisive" and "indecisive" means of production, as well as some more on what a "wage" that allows one to buy decisive means of production, such as cars, actually is, I refer you to my latest comment in the 3rd-worldist economics topic (http://www.revleft.com/vb/third-worldist-economics-t182096/index.html). So long as you haven't succeeded in unraveling the purported inaccuracy of the 3rd-worldist standpoint on the wages, you can't use somebody's wage-laborer status to prove that the person(s) in question is "worker(s)" (as in "proletarian"), because that's precisely what is being questioned: is that "wage" really a wage? But that's really a discussion for another topic, as this one here is about cars and the fact that they have such an important role to play in modern imperialism.




3rd worldist arguments and right-wing capitalist arguments are basically identical except they moralize from opposite directions.

I, for one, don't "moralize" from any direction. And neither am I a 3rd-worldist, because I have yet to figure out what the general line on some particular issues (such as "right of nations to self determination" and some others) among them is, before I can safely say that 3rd-worldism is the way to go. But pointing out that somebody's arguments are identical to those of "right-wing capitalist" (so we do have "left-wing capitalists" who are somehow infinitely better than the "right-wing capitalists", I suppose, and that's just brilliant!) gets you nowhere, because some of the arguments employed by the "right-wing capitalists" may actually be true. Because some of them didn't get to be so rich by being idiots... In any case, you must look at the argument itself, not at the people who support it. Otherwise, the next time you're going to go to bathroom, think twice, because Hitler used to do that too, you know... ;)


For a car to be a means of production it would need to be used in
No, a car doesn't need anything to be a means of production, because it's its "birthright", so to say. Saying what you say, nevermind it's so widespread a delusion, is subjective idealism. And from the Marxist PoV, car industry is "Department I" and nuff said.

[#FF0000]

Therefore you might own a pasta maker and still be a proletarian. However, you can't own a car and be a proletarian at the same time, because car is a decisive means of production

lmao lmao lmao zulu does not know what the "means of production" or what "owning the means of production" entails holy shit.

[Zulu]

lmao lmao lmao zulu does not know what the "means of production" or what "owning the means of production" entails holy shit.

Wanna laugh off some more ass? Here you go.

You saw that chimp on TV using a stone to crack that coconut open? That stone's a tool, therefore means of production! It greatly improves the chimp's productivity of labor, as it increases the output of cracked coconuts per unit of labor time.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I lost my car because I couldn't pay the insurance and then got pulled over. So I was middle class one day and a prol the next?

What about the so-called "Moble homeless"? Tons of homeless live out of cars.



In 2001, officials in Lynnwood, Wash., a suburb of Seattle, passed an ordinance imposing penalties of 90 days in jail or fines of up to $1,000 against people caught living in their cars.

Peter Van Giesen, a code enforcement officer for the town, said that up to 20 cars a night were found with people parking near a park where there were complaints of people using the bushes as a restroom.

"Most of these people were trying to find work," Mr. Van Giesen said.


So many undocumented and migratory immigrants in the US are not prols for the most part?



So then Democratic Assemblyman Luis Alejo, with Cedillo's blessing, introduced AB60 granting driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants provided the licenses have special language stamped on them stating that the ID is only good for driving and not for anything else. Last week, both houses of the California legislature approved the bill. And Gov. Jerry Brown issued a statement indicating he would sign it (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/13/us-usa-immigration-california-idUSBRE98C0OQ20130913).
About 2 million people in California are expected to qualify for driver's licenses, if the bill becomes law.2 million petty bourgie undocumented immigrants? Some of them are most likely middle class professionals and whatnot, but in Oakland the vast majority of undocuments immigrant drivers are working-class, making a wage, driving to their jobs or migrating from job to job. When I went to court a few years ago a huge chunk of the cases were Latino immigrants who had to have translators and were in court for driving without a license or insurance.


But pointing out that somebody's arguments are identical to those of "right-wing capitalist" (so we do have "left-wing capitalists" who are somehow infinitely better than the "right-wing capitalists", I suppose, and that's just brilliant!) gets you nowhere, because some arguments employed by the "right-wing capitalists" may actually be true. Because some of them didn't get to be so rich by being idiots... In any case, you must look at the argument itself, not at the people who support it. Otherwise, the next time you're going to go to bathroom, think twice, because Hitler used to do that too, you know... http://www.revleft.com/vb/americas-car-recovery-t183167/images/smilies/wink3.pngWe are talking about how we understand the nature of class... and if you find yourself agreeing with people who believe that there is no class struggle, that capitalism works for everyone... well, it should at least raise some concern - but yes, doesn't mean they are wrong. However in this case from a "marxist POV" you and pro-capitalists are wrong. Class in Marxism is not defined by personal posessions, wages, the level of reforms a society has, etc... it is determined by relations and if someone has no way of supporting themselves other than selling their labor, they are most likely prols. Your formulation that prols are defined by "nothing to loose" is a rediculous bastardization of marx - he meant that they ultimately have no stake in the system, everyone has something to loose, that's why workers are often afraid to strike because in the short-term loosing a job is "something to loose" loosing an appartment is "something to loose", etc. Conditions on the surface (wages, reforms, etc) change constantly for workers in capitalism, this is why understanding the relations helps cut through the ups and downs and transitions.

In most places in the US, people need cars because of the way urban and suburban spaces have been structured along the interests of profit. At one point US urban administrations decided that rather than increase public transportation (which would have been mostly paid for by taxes on businesses at that point) that this responcibility of social-reproduction (i.e. transporting labor to sites of labor) would be privitized and pushed onto the workers themselves through private transportation. A car to get to work and buy food etc, is no more a means of production than eating breakfast so you don't pass out on a shift, having shoes, etc. It is an expense that people pay for so they can work so they can pay for it... i.e. most people have cars to live to work and work to live.

The irony of your argument is that here in Oakland (and many cities), gentrification is leading to a lifestyle where young urban professionals have centrally located appartments and condos and bike to work whereas more obviously working class people are pushed further and further out of job-centers and must have cars to find work.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Wanna laugh off some more ass? Here you go.

You saw that chimp on TV using a stone to crack that coconut open? That stone's a tool, therefore means of production! It greatly improves the chimp's productivity of labor, as it increases the output of cracked coconuts per the unit of labor time.

If a chimp drove a car over a nut to open it, then it would be a means of production. If a chimp drove a car to go to the head chimp who owned all the nuts and then sold his labor-power in exchange for one opened nut, then the car is not a means of production.

Again, if someone has a stove and uses it to feed themselves and their family it is a means of "reproduction" - making yourself able to function as a worker. If someone uses a stove in a resturant, then it part of the means of production.

Do people in the US who own cars have it for use value or to create different exchange value?

[#FF0000]

Wanna laugh off some more ass? Here you go.

You saw that chimp on TV using a stone to crack that coconut open? That stone's a tool, therefore means of production! It greatly improves the chimp's productivity of labor, as it increases the output of cracked coconuts per the unit of labor time.

So then there exists not a single proletarian, since all tools are means of production, and thus every human, being apes that use tools, is petite-bourgeois, using your reasoning.

But that isn't what we're talking about when we talk about seizing the means of production. We aren't talking about collectivizing every car, computer, sewing machine, stove, knitting needle and toolshed. We're talking about collectivizing the factories, the farms, the mines, etc. etc. The critical difference here is that the latter are made up of tools organized to produce on a massive scale to increase capital.

But, what's most absurd here is that a sewing machine or a pasta maker actually produces something. Cars do not. Cars get you from point A to point B, at cost to you. It's, if anything, a time and labor saving device. If owning or using a car makes you petit-bourgeois, then so does using a washing machine, a stove, a sink with soap, practically anything.

And finally, I'm really curious as to Zulu's class background. It's none of my business, but it sure would be interesting to know that about the person who's trying to tell me the other temp workers who slave in a warehouse for poverty wages aren't proletarians because they have shitty cars to make the 45 minute drive to and from with.

[Zulu]

I lost my car because I couldn't pay the insurance and then got pulled over. So I was middle class one day and a prol the next?

Short answer: yes.




What about the so-called "Moble homeless"? Tons of homeless live out of cars.

That's yet another reason to consider the automobile a decisive means of production that hallmarks the petty bourgeois in distinction from the proletarian. I think, the guy who first suggested "let's make "homes on wheels"" was actually Cpt. Obvious his glorious self.

Also, I suspect, you need to read something about the "conditions on the surface" of life of the European proletarian of the 19th century, just to better understand what all those Marx's writings mean. And if you're going to say "yes, but this it 21st and the proletariat has changed accordingly", you're wrong, because the proletariat has remained the same all this time, it's just that it's now in the 3rd world mostly. ("Core" and "periphery" are actually better terms, than "1st" and "3rd world".)





Your formulation that prols are defined by "nothing to loose" is a rediculous bastardization of marx - he meant that they ultimately have no stake in the system, everyone has something to loose, that's why workers are often afraid to strike because in the short-term loosing a job is "something to loose" loosing an appartment is "something to loose", etc.

Proletarians are not supposed to own their apartments either, and en masse they actually don't. They live in slums and barracks and dormitories and "pod-hotels" and what not, and the only thing they are afraid of losing is life. And that's just the way it happens in the 3rd world: you begin organizing for a strike and they just kill you. No moralizing here though, just a fact of life.




When I went to court a few years ago a huge chunk of the cases were Latino immigrants who had to have translators and were in court for driving without a license or insurance.
And this particular bit is supposed to prove what exactly? BTW, I believe that in the 3rd-worldist economics thread some guy shared his observations about the Latino immigrants and said they largely are a pretty reactionary bunch even by American standards, all too happy to cut themselves their piece of the pie of the surplus value which the imperialistic juggernaut of the USA had so conveniently arranged to be transfered from other geographical locations.




Class in Marxism is not defined by personal posessions, wages, the level of reforms a society has, etc... it is determined by relations

By relations to the means of production. You are a proletarian only if you don't own means of production. "But what about all those stoves and brooms?" Nothing. They are not decisive means of production and ownership of them may be justifiably neglected. Owning of cars cannot be neglected, because they are decisive means of production. Why? Because, among other things, see the OP.



you find yourself agreeing with people who believe that there is no class struggle
I don't find myself agreeing with such people. But I also don't find myself agreeing with people who think there are only two classes. I think the class struggle is a tad more complex than "capital vs. labor". You see, there is no doubt, the petty bourgeoisie feels mighty oppressed by the capitalists. And, having more free time and finance and education and everything else on its hands, than the proletariat, it is able to pronounce its struggle better than the latter. And even tries to appropriate Marxism for its own ends.




if someone has no way of supporting themselves other than selling their labor, they are most likely prols
And car owners do have such a way. Transportation of payloads. Which, most likely, got at least some, if not all of those un-driver-licensed Latinos in trouble. But that trouble is not an attestment of their proletarian status, it's just competition from the bigger movers).





In most places in the US, people need cars because of the way urban and suburban spaces have been structured along the interests of profit.
And in the 1st place those spaces began to be structured in this way because too many people had already become petty bourgeois by buying that decisive means of production we're talking about. The process which was facilitated by the massive value transfer to the US during and immediately after the WW2.




The irony of your argument is that here in Oakland (and many cities), gentrification is leading to a lifestyle where young urban professionals have centrally located appartments and condos and bike to work whereas more obviously working class people are pushed further and further out of job-centers and must have cars to find work.
I admit, the irony is there, yet the percentage of those yuppies not owning cars is negligent, so most of them still fit in my formal definition of the petty bourgeois class. And those few that don't own cars, despite their high income, are potentially better material for social revolution than the "Marxists", who think a bulldozer somehow ceases to be a means of production if it is bought by some eccentric millionaire for the purpose of personal amusement.

Let's make this clear: you can't (as in: there is absolute mathematical impossibility) have a revolution of a mass of machine-owning individuals, no matter how much "wage-workery" that mass is. They simply will never support the agenda of elimination of private property, until they have been deprived of such property completely and forever (thus ceasing to be a mass of machine-owning individuals and becoming a proletarian mass).





Again, if someone has a stove and uses it to feed themselves and their family it is a means of "reproduction" - making yourself able to function as a worker. If someone uses a stove in a resturant, then it part of the means of production.
And again, this is total subjectivist idealist bullshit. The food is the means of subsistence (what you call "reproduction"), and a stove is the means of production of that food. It doesn't matter, like, at all, where that stove is: in somebody's private house, or in a restaurant, or on fucking Mars - awaiting some cosmonauts to drop by and start cooking.





Do people in the US who own cars have it for use value or to create different exchange value?
You've actually answered that question yourself: they use it to create different exchange value. Of their labor power. Mind you: not to restore or "reproduce" the labor power, but to amp up its capitalization, so that they could "make" the weekly wage of the 3rd world (real proletarian) worker in a couple of hours and call it a day, which is possible for the sole reason of the massively inequivalent exchange in the process of the world trade. Therefore, if a "socialist" revolution by those working drivers somehow could occur in the US, and private ownership of "businesses" was abolished, it would simply mean a transformation of the US into a fascistoid imperialist mega-corporation owned collectively by the people of those worker drivers and maintaining the "high standard of living" or even "better standard of living" for the "99%-ers" by the exactly same relentless exploitation of the proletariat in the periphery of the ultra-imperialist system as takes place today. Of course, since the US already is a fascistoid imperialist mega-corporation, the "owned collectively by the people" part is superficial, and the described transformation is unnecessary, and anyway it has no basis in the current mode of production, therefore such a "socialist revolution" cannot occur.


.

[Zulu]

So then there exists not a single proletarian, since all tools are means of production, and thus every human, being apes that use tools, is petite-bourgeois, using your reasoning.

First, chimps don't own their means of production, obviously. Secondly, there are plenty of wage workers the 3rd world who indeed own quite little above just the clothes they wear. And thirdly, and most importantly, see what I say about the decisive and not decisive means of production.



that isn't what we're talking about when we talk about seizing the means of production. We aren't talking about collectivizing every car, computer, sewing machine, stove, knitting needle and toolshed. We're talking about collectivizing the factories, the farms, the mines, etc. etc. The critical difference here is that the latter are made up of tools organized to produce on a massive scale to increase capital.
Well, too bad, but you can't have one without the other. After the factories are collectivized, you will have to give up all those privately owned cars, or there will be restoration of capitalism.



a sewing machine or a pasta maker actually produces something.
Oh really :confused:

I though they didn't...




Cars do not.

Karl Marx:
"Men and goods travel together with the means of transportation, and their traveling, this locomotion, constitutes the process of production effected by these means."
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch01.htm#4




I'm really curious as to Zulu's class background.
I don't own a car at this time. Possibly, I will, at some point in the future. But at that point I won't pretend to be a prole, nor will I feel bad about not being a prole. Frederic Engels was a capitalist & nuff said.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Having labor power makes someone petty-bougeois? Then the proletariet does not exist anywhere!

I mean seriously, one day I had a car, the next day I had the same shitty job, appartment and debts... but no car. And that's what makes me a prol?

What if I play a car-racing video game... is that false consiousness?

[Zulu]

one day I had a car, the next day I had the same shitty job, appartment and debts... but no car. And that's what makes me a prol?

I repeat, short answer is: yes.

But since when Marxism's been about each particular individual's sad little story? Marxism is about the classes of people. And in today's world the petty bourgeois class is best defined as "the people who own a lot of shit, including cars". Because the car is such a vehicle of the capitalist mode of production at its imperialist stage.

But OK, you don't like this, go on trying to achieve nirvana by incessant repetition of "capital vs. labor" mantras.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Also, I suspect, you need to read something about the "conditions on the surface" of life of the European proletarian of the 19th century, just to better understand what all those Marx's writings mean.Well if you take Engle's writting on the conditions of the working class in England I think you'd find that he describes how the native prols lived much better than Irish immigrant prols. Divisions always exist in the conditions and limited material posessions of the working class. In the US in neoliberalism, the ruling class has actually been able to convince some low-wage workers that their real enemy are those high-paid workers who have pensions. Of course where did a lot of those benifits come from? Past class struggles so that the lowest paid workers like dockworkers could go from trying to get day labor to having some stability and security. If low wage workers in the US fight, what happens? Then they might win some better wages and so on - and be able to afford cars maybe! Workers in China have seen massive relative wage increases - much higher in the rate than US workers where wages have stagnated. If Chineese workers continue to struggle, what happens? They win better wages and so on. All of these gains are only temporary and unsustainable ultimately in capitalism, but this is the nature of class struggle: they try and take as much from us as they can, we try and win back as much as we can.



And if you're going to say "yes, but this it 21st and the proletariat has changed accordingly", you're wrong, because the proletariat has remained the same all this time, it's just that it's now in the 3rd world mostly. ("Core" and "periphery" are actually better terms, than "1st" and "3rd world".)
First I think you have a shockingly flat and stereotypical view of the so-called third world - you seem to think everyone lives like a Brazillian street-kid. No workers may have less, but possessions are not what make a proletariet, their relationship to how society produces things is the determining factor. Everything else isn't unconsaquential - reforms can lead to some conservativism, there are competitions sometimes between groups of prols, not all prols face the same conditions - but the fundamental thing and the thing that makes ALL prols a potentially revolutionay class under capitalism is that for them to advance as a class requires confronting the interests of capitalism. For Chineese workers to have a better overall condition, they need to fight their exploitation; for low-wage US workers, it's the same; for high-paid non-managing, non-professional US workers, it's the same. The chains are different, in the US it tends to be debt, but they are still chains.


And this particular bit is supposed to prove what exactly? BTW, I believe that in the 3rd-worldist economics thread some guy shared his observations about the Latino immigrants and said they largely are a pretty reactionary bunch even by American standards, all too happy to cut themselves their piece of the pie of the surplus value which the imperialistic juggernaut of the USA had so conveniently arranged to be transfered from other geographical locations.Meh, quazi-racist crap if you ask me. I live in an area which is mostly Mexican and Salvadorian 1st generation and there's no more or less conservativism or pro-capitalism than in other populations. There's divisions like with any group of workers: some Mexicans look down on rural and more indigenous Mexicans; some Mexicans and Salvadorians were part of radical or revolutionary movements. This is annecdotal mind you. But you do see a whole lot of Che and Zapata shirts and when I did propaganda work in my neighborhood during the Immigrant Rights movement. I've met some old Stalinists who had almost racist attitudes towards immigrants to the US - I think they just can't imagine why anyone would make so much effort to be part of an Empire. But they aren't coming here for US imperialism, they are coming for jobs - workers follow jobs in capitalism because they have to sell their labor-power and capitalist production doesn't cater to our wishes, we have to accomodate to their demands.


By relations to the means of production. You are a proletarian only if you don't own means of production. "But what about all those stoves and brooms?" Nothing. They are not decisive means of production and ownership of them may be justifiably neglected. Owning of cars cannot be neglected, because they are decisive means of production. Why? Because, among other things, see the OP.You're just making up wierd demarcations based on I guess your attitude towards certian personal possessions.


I don't find myself agreeing with such people. But I also don't find myself agreeing with people who think there are only two classes. I think the class struggle is a tad more complex than "capital vs. labor". You see, there is no doubt, the petty bourgeoisie feels mighty oppressed by the capitalists. And, having more free time and finance and education and everything else on its hands, than the proletariat, it is able to pronounce its struggle better than the latter. And even tries to appropriate Marxism for its own ends.There's no question in my mind that there is a petit-bourgoise. But I don't define them by their material posessions or personal wealth. If someone is making and selling jewlery in their appartment to support themselves, their relations of production are "petit-bourgeois" because they control what they make, the conditions of their work (to an extent), have a level of autonomy and in so far as they can support themselves through their craft-efforts, they have an interest in making sure that production in run through privite ownership and the market.

Where I think may be the actual source of your views is that in the US, petit-bourgoise IDEAs and IDEOLOGY hold a lot of sway over the US working class. Work-hard and get ahead. This is a middle class notion because for them it works to an extent. For a high-paid factory worker, he/she works as hard as the boss and the production pace demand. If he/she works harder, maybe they get recognized maybe even a bonus, but that's the extent - they haven't increased their wages by the proportion of work they put in - in fact, they have probably just screwed the whole production line over because the boss will say, well Sally made 20 widgets in an hour, so there's no reason you can't always do that.

US workers have been won to more middle class ideas since the 60s or so because of a lack of political alternatives (often due to repression, but also due to reformism). European workers who have higher benifits, better living standards, and work less, tend to at least have some class consiousness in comparison to US workers - this is due to different conditions and historical circumstances that created different conditions in class struggle. Conversly, people in Colombia might have similar material possessions as someone, but consiousness and combativeness and conditions for class struggle might be completely different.


And car owners do have such a way. Transportation of payloads. Which, most likely, got at least some, if not all of those un-driver-licensed Latinos in trouble. But that trouble is not an attestment of their proletarian status, it's just competition from the bigger movers).Again, if you are transporting goods, then yes, it is a means of production and so if you own a big-rig, then you are probably more like petit-bourgoise. If a company owns that truck and you drive it, then you are a prol... even if you drive a different car to get to the depot to pick up the big-rig... even if you make more or the same as the guy who owns his own rig.


I admit, the irony is there, yet the percentage of those yuppies not owning cars is negligent, so most of them still fit in my formal definition of the petty bourgeois class. And those few that don't own cars, despite their high income, are potentially better material for social revolution than the "Marxists", who think a bulldozer somehow ceases to be a means of production if it is bought by some eccentric millionaire for the purpose of personal amusement.Well a millionarire who rides a bulldozer for fun... that would be more like a luxury item. I mean a yaht could potentially be rented, but if it's just being used for personal enjoyment, then in that function it's not really the same as "ownership of the means of production".


Therefore, if a "socialist" revolution by those working drivers somehow could occur in the US, and private ownership of "businesses" was abolished, it would simply mean a transformation of the US into a fascistoid imperialist mega-corporation owned collectively by the people of those worker drivers and maintaining the "high standard of living" or even "better standard of living" for the "99%-ers" by the exactly same relentless exploitation of the proletariat in the periphery of the ultra-imperialist system as takes place today. Of course, since the US already is a fascistoid imperialist mega-corporation, the "owned collectively by the people" part is superficial, and the described transformation is unnecessary, and anyway it has no basis in the current mode of production, therefore such a "socialist revolution" cannot occur.

I don't think we're talking about revolution or socialism in the same way if you think that workers would just incoporate together and continue interacting in the world market in the same way. First, I don't think there could be sustainable "socialism in one country". Second, at this point I doubt that US workers would be the first country to have a revolution in a larger wave of revolutions - more likely it would begin somewhere else... but conditions change and maybe the re-shoring schemes that the US ruling class are doing now along with austerity will produce a new militant generation in the US. But at any rate if a revolution would happen to occour in the US, it would probably automatically result in revolutions in many other places because of the way US business and military is so dominant in the world - it would be quite a big domino to fall and shock-waves would spread throughout the world because of it.

[argeiphontes]

Because the car is such a vehicle of the capitalist mode of production at its imperialist stage.

But OK, you don't like this, go on trying to achieve nirvana by incessant repetition of "capital vs. labor" mantras.

Capital vs. labor is why we're here, right? Because one class is being exploited by the other?

Sure, a car can signify bourgeois status. I saw a Maserati last week and I doubt it was driven by a proletarian. But that doesn't make it a means of production unless, like others have said, it's a taxi or something. (In this case it was a psychological crutch I think ;))

If anything, a car, in its use as a means of transportation to work, is another way for capitalists to push responsibility for social reproduction onto the proletariat. Instead of building their own transportation system to bring workers to their workplaces, with all the costs associated with that, those costs can be shoved onto the rest of society for either the taxpayer or the individual to bear. (And since car companies made a concerted effort to destroy public transportation in the U.S., we're left with a system of roads where the prole has to provide his own transportation and take the costs of going to his or her own workplace out of his paycheck, without even the support of the broader tax base that would be used to fund public transit.)

In it's use as means of transporting things from store to home, it's also a subsidy in a way. If Walmart can benefit from the efficiencies of having one giant store in the burbs instead of a local branch within walking distance of me, I am the one paying to transport those goods from the store to my home instead of Walmart. Prices can look even smaller that way, just like when society has to pay Walmart employee's health care costs. Maybe it's more efficient overall, maybe not. But in reality I don't care since Walmart is capturing all the benefits from this "efficiency".

I think that *by definition*, something is only capital if it's used to produce commodities for profit. If a millionaire takes a 747, an Amtrak train, and a taxi, out of use and puts them in his yard so he can drive them around for fun, they aren't capital anymore. It's not just the thing itself, but how it's used. A car does allow you sell your labor power in the labor market in areas without public transit, but selling labor power isn't a capitalist act, in fact it's anti-profit since you're not paid the full value of the things you produce.

YMMV ;)

[Thirsty Crow]

If anything, a car, in its use as a means of transportation to work, is another way for capitalists to push responsibility for social reproduction onto the proletariat.
I can't stress enough how accurate this view is, especially in light of, quite frankly, idiotic statements about cars as capital (sure, you can use your car as a taxi, but the "capital status" depends on actual and not potential use).
I think that this can e seen very easily in relation to urban planning and state of affairs in public infrastructure in many cities (also the relation between the city periphery and center, not to speak of more isolated little towns and villages). For instance, here where I live, one of the largest investments with consequences relevant for this was not of a new network of public transport, but of an underground garage in the closest city center.

[Popular Front of Judea]

So I wonder just when does ones transportation choice turn into a means of production according to Comrade Zulu. Is it when you ride to work on a bicycle that you own? How about if you attach a motor to to this bicycle? Add another wheel? Attach a windshield and cowling?

http://i.imgur.com/SJdRlby.jpg

Is it when you add a fourth wheel that it becomes a means of production? Just when does the fall from grace happen?

Enlighten us Comrade Zulu.

[#FF0000]

First, chimps don't own their means of production, obviously.

Sure. No concept of ownership among chimps.


Secondly, there are plenty of wage workers the 3rd world who indeed own quite little above just the clothes they wear.Anyone can improvise a tool, dogg.


And thirdly, and most importantly, see what I say about the decisive and not decisive means of production.

Yeah I saw your arbitrary categorizing of "means of production" and it wasn't particularly interesting bruhbruh.


Oh really :confused:

I though they didn't...
They do (when you apply human labor, obviously)



Karl Marx:
"Men and goods travel together with the means of transportation, and their traveling, this locomotion, constitutes the process of production effected by these means."
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch01.htm#4He's talking about the transportation industry/infrastructural capital, not individual means of transport. And even if we ignore that and take your "cars are a means of production" line at face value and give you everything else, you're still wrong when you say owning a car means one is not a proletarian. That car gets a worker to and from work every day, and so is technically a factor in production as well, but that doesn't mean the worker who owns the car isn't a proletarian because the value created in this process is still controlled by their boss. The might own the car but they don't own the product the car brings them to work to create.

Also: what's the verdict on bicycles i am dying to know.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Next time I ride around in my (unemployed and technically homeless) friend's 1987 Ford Taurus, I'm going to think of this thread and laugh.

[#FF0000]

cars might as well be mcmansions what are you talkin about

[Paul Pott]

Hell, I delivered pizzas for years - using my own car. I guess I was being a capitalist that whole time, instead of selling my labor power.

[Zulu]

He's talking about the transportation industry/infrastructural capital, not individual means of transport.
And car is not an "individual means of transport" in the same way as, say, a horse is (Ever hear of proles owning horses back in the 19th tho? Me not.), because cars need, in the very least, petroleum industry and roads (but actually a lot more than that). Cars aren't self-sufficient products, but are elements of that transportation industry Marx is talking about around that quote. Marx himself could not make comments on automobiles for obvious reasons, but August Bebel, for instance, unequivocally suggested (http://marxists.org/archive/bebel/1879/woman-socialism/ch21.htm#s8) that after the revolution "river and ocean vessels, street-cars, automobile cars and trucks, air-ships and flying machines, and whatever all the institutions and vehicles serving traffic and communication may be called, will have become social property". But of course, a century of imperial propaganda later almost nobody remains able to see the reason for that.

And anyway the quoted Marx's sentence applies even to horses as means of transportation. They may not be part of a branch of industry, but that only means the locomotion they are used to produce is produced not capitalistically, but in the framework of natural economy, or maybe even simple commodity production. It still is the same process of production of the same good, same use-value.





That car gets a worker to and from work every day, and so is technically a factor in production as well, but that doesn't mean the worker who owns the car isn't a proletarian because the value created in this process is still controlled by their boss. The might own the car but they don't own the product the car brings them to work to create
How so? The product a car driver produces is locomotion, or units of transportation, ton-kilometers. It is consumed the moment it is produced, therefore nobody can rob a producer of ton-kilometers of their value.




what's the verdict on bicycles i am dying to know.
Bicycles-schmeicycles! Are they means of production? Of course, they are. Are they decisive, do they turn you into a petty bourgeois? No.



Hell, I delivered pizzas for years - using my own car. I guess I was being a capitalist that whole time, instead of selling my labor power.

Not capitalist but petty bourgeois, almost in completely classical sense of the word. You didn't sell you labor power, you sold the commodity of locomotion which you produced in the manner of self-employed handicraftsman.

Funny how those in denial here talk about "workers" driving their own cars to their wage-work at a factory, and you come and subvert their argument by providing a nice example of how any of those "workers" can easily give up the job at the factory and start make a living out of their car.

[Zulu]

when does ones transportation choice turn into a means of production
The moment it is produced. All means of transport are means of production, because transportation is a productive process.

The question you want to ask is: when a means of transport becomes a decisive means of production, the one that turns you into a petty bourgeois the moment you own it?

One part of me suggests that any motorized vehicle is such decisive a means of production. Therefore a bicycle with attached homemade combustion engine qualifies for decisiveness. The difference is that a mere bicycle is powered individually by the person riding it, but a motorized bicycle is powered by the society as a whole via the social production of fuel. Same story for battery powered vehicles.

However, another part of me cuts them some slack, because there are other considerations. First and foremost there is the one underscored by the article you cited in the OP, namely, the car manufacturing industry is the main drive of the imperialist economy. All other branches of industry are dependent on it even if very much indirectly. And neither the backyard motorization of bicycles nor even motorcycle manufacturing enterprises add/detract much to/from the automobile manufacturing industry's status of the nexus of imperialist economy.

Also, unlike all sorts of bikes, cars can be used not only for transportation but for shelter. The amount of payload you can move by car also pawns that of the bikes. Cars can generally serve as collaterals for secured bank loans.

Bottomline, the "passenger car" should be considered as the class defining property of the petty bourgeoisie.

As for the vehicle on you picture, IDK, if the World Bank counts it (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.VEH.PCAR.P3?order=wbapi_data_value_2010+wbapi_d ata_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc) as one of those 5 passenger cars per 1000 capita in the Gambia, but I'm pretty sure its owner is not a proletarian there. And you do understand that any particular example of some ridiculous vehicle which looks like "something in between" a car and a bike, only serves the "exclusion confirming the rule", don't you?

Naturally, when we draw a line between two social classes, each consisting of billions of people, a couple of hundred million are bound to happen to be on the very line itself, but is that a reason not to draw the line? I guess, it is - for those who stand for class collaboration, if you catch my drift...

I've also took a look at the other thread about the so called "precariat" presumed to be the lowest class by some bourgeois book writers... The word caught my curiosity, so I googled it, and, oh crap, part of this "precariat" are none other than shopkeepers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_British_Class_Survey#Precariat)! I mean, what more of a classically petty bourgeois occupation one can have in life than owning a shop? Doesn't that clearly prove that whatever is above that in that picture is mostly petty bourgeois also? Sure, their position is precarious, but hey, this is capitalism, competition and all, even capitalists jump off skyscrapers once in a while... So, forgive me or not for being so cold, but the plight and precariousness in life of some car owners does not exempt them from the petty bourgeois class.

[Zulu]

Capital vs. labor is why we're here, right? Because one class is being exploited by the other?
I repeat myself: "capital" and "labor" are not classes. They are factors of production. The class struggle is a tad more complex than "capital vs. labor". There are more than just two classes in society, and I posit, that the petty bourgeoisie is almost as much important for the capitalism, as the "main classes" of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The petty bourgeoisie feels mighty oppressed by the bourgeoisie. And, having more free time and finance and education and everything else on its hands, than the proletariat, it is able to pronounce its struggle better than the latter. And even tries to appropriate Marxism for its own ends.




If anything, a car, in its use as a means of transportation to work, is another way for capitalists to push responsibility for social reproduction onto the proletariat. Instead of building their own transportation system to bring workers to their workplaces, with all the costs associated with that, those costs can be shoved onto the rest of society for either the taxpayer or the individual to bear.
I can't stress enough how accurate this view is
And I can't stress enough how ridiculous this notion of "responsibility for social reproduction" being "pushed" around society is. Are we on some bourgeois TV show or are we talking Marxism here? Because in Marxism, social reproduction is a process, in which all members of society are involved in this or that capacity, according to their class position. So, if the car owners are so "pushed with responsibility" (actually, just with commodities, the "responsibility" to consume the surplus value extracted from the proletariat, so that the capitalists could accumulate more capital via realization of that surplus value), that happens in accordance with their class position, which is different from those who aren't shoved that "responsibility" down their throats, and remain just same good old plain "irresponsible" wage-slaves.



(And since car companies made a concerted effort to destroy public transportation in the U.S., we're left with a system of roads where the prole has to provide his own transportation and take the costs of going to his or her own workplace out of his paycheck, without even the support of the broader tax base that would be used to fund public transit.)
In it's use as means of transporting things from store to home, it's also a subsidy in a way. If Walmart can benefit from the efficiencies of having one giant store in the burbs instead of a local branch within walking distance of me, I am the one paying to transport those goods from the store to my home instead of Walmart. Prices can look even smaller that way, just like when society has to pay Walmart employee's health care costs. Maybe it's more efficient overall, maybe not. But in reality I don't care since Walmart is capturing all the benefits from this "efficiency".
For instance, here where I live, one of the largest investments with consequences relevant for this was not of a new network of public transport, but of an underground garage in the closest city center.
I think that this can e seen very easily in relation to urban planning and state of affairs in public infrastructure in many cities (also the relation between the city periphery and center, not to speak of more isolated little towns and villages).
And I repeat myself again: in the 1st place those spaces began to be structured in this way because too many people had already become petty bourgeois by buying that decisive means of production we're talking about. The process which was facilitated by the massive value transfer to the US during and immediately after the WW2.

This is how it all began:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7-m3FEm5VA

And this is what it has come to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv0Fjk9D968

And here is an overall good article on the subject, despite the fact that the author completely overlooks the "car is a means of production" angle:

http://www.copenhagenize.com/2009/11/social-ideology-of-motorcar.html

And here is a cherry to top this pie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess's_paradox

This is quite an important cherry on the pie though, as it seems to be a mathematical proof to the idea that cars keep capitalism going through the inefficiency of the anarchistic production of locomotion by private car owners.



I think that *by definition*, something is only capital if it's used to produce commodities for profit. If a millionaire takes a 747, an Amtrak train, and a taxi, out of use and puts them in his yard so he can drive them around for fun, they aren't capital anymore. It's not just the thing itself, but how it's used. A car does allow you sell your labor power in the labor market in areas without public transit, but selling labor power isn't a capitalist act, in fact it's anti-profit since you're not paid the full value of the things you produce.


idiotic statements about cars as capital (sure, you can use your car as a taxi, but the "capital status" depends on actual and not potential use).
We could argue the point if capital can be idle, but I suggest right away that you think of cars as capital like of minority shares in some joint stock company. Shares are capital (can't be anything else by definition) and not idle so long as the company is active, but their holders can decide nothing about the course of that activity - even as that activity might continuously lead to losses of capitalization, while some top managers rip off the minority shareholders by insider trading and so on. Same story with cars: they are not decisive as capital.

So, it's something like this: a car is a decisive means of production because it is capital (unlike a broom or a stove, which are indecisive means of production, because they are not capital); but car is not decisive capital. That's why car owners qualify as petty bourgeois, but not as capitalists.

[Zulu]

Well if you take Engle's writting on the conditions of the working class in England I think you'd find that he describes how the native prols lived much better than Irish immigrant prols.
And in the same writings Engels said that's why the English proles were loosing their prole character and were lost as revolutionaries, presumably until the competition from the rising German and American industry would eliminate the monopoly of the British industry making the British bourgeoisie squeeze all workers available to it dry again. Indeed, exactly that happened and the English workers did regain some of the proletarian character through the dip in their standards of living briefly around the WW1 and even began building some revolutionary spirit up again. However, that trend was arrested completely after the WW2 when real competition between national bourgeoisies was mostly done away with. Nowadays there is no longer a "foreign capitalism" to cause a new round of squeezing dry the privileged petty bourgeois workers of the 1st world (because it's ultra-imperialism, and the whole world is like one nation now). What may cause such a dry-squeezing is the falling rate of profit, but there is also the contradictory force of the need of the capitalist class to have somebody buying up all those shitty iPads and cars, to maintain the turnover of capital. This contradiction means that the dry-squeezing will occur very gradually, and the petty bourgeois workers will cling to all sorts of old illusions to the end while being proletarized.




the ruling class has actually been able to convince some low-wage workers that their real enemy are those high-paid workers who have pensions.
Wait, wasn't the high-waged worker aristocracy (even before it became fully petty bourgeois) always a bunch of strike breakers? Opportunism in the worker movement and revisionism in Marxism took place way before the bourgeoisie figured out how to play this by the book.




Of course where did a lot of those benifits come from? Past class struggles so that the lowest paid workers like dockworkers could go from trying to get day labor to having some stability and security.
These benefits may have been realized as desirable by the bourgeoisie as sort of a bone to throw to the workers - and in fact uplift them to the petty bourgeois class - to expand the consumer market for the produce of their capitalist industry. But as to where those benefits come from, the answer is quite different. They come from the surplus value extracted from the overexploited 3rd world workers, the real proletariat of the modern world.




If Chineese workers continue to struggle, what happens? They win better wages and so on.That depends on the numerical growth of the proletariat outside of China.



workers may have less, but possessions are not what make a proletariet, their relationship to how society produces things is the determining factor.

Right. Thats why an occasional (however rare) proletarian may have more of "possessions" than some of the petty bourgeois car owners, but it's the relation of that car owner to how society produces the good of locomotion that determines the car owner's petty bourgeois status.




I've met some old Stalinists who had almost racist attitudes towards immigrants to the US - I think they just can't imagine why anyone would make so much effort to be part of an Empire.
And I bet that's about how that old Stalinist guy from T-shirts would would think of them too. It actually pretty much looks to me like Guevara may be counted as the first Marxist 3rd-worldist, at least he became one after his visit to the USSR.




But they aren't coming here for US imperialism, they are coming for jobs

In other words, they do come there to participate in imperialism in some subjectively better capacity, than they can hope to at home. I, personally, don't blame them, I think nothing can be done about it right now, but every conscious commie (if he is conscious and commie, of course) has to stop wasting time on account of them.




You're just making up wierd demarcations based on I guess your attitude towards certian personal possessions.
So... what about the OP? Aren't cars special? Aren't they what keeps capitalism going?




There's no question in my mind that there is a petit-bourgoise. But I don't define them by their material posessions or personal wealth.
And you have a weird idea that I do. But I repeat: cars can be quite cheap, especially used ones, yet any car owner counts as petty bourgeois because he produces ton-kilometers using the means of production he owns! That's not what proletarians do. Proletarians have to buy all the ton-kilometers they consume from somebody else, because they don't own means to produce them themselves.




US workers have been won to more middle class ideas since the 60s or so because of a lack of political alternatives (often due to repression, but also due to reformism).
And why all that is so? Because proletarian revolutionary ideology cannot survive in areas so densely populated by the petty bourgeoisie.




if you own a big-rig, then you are probably more like petit-bourgoise.

No, it's not like "probably more like petty-borgeoisie". It's petty bourgeoisie hands down 100% classical textbook example case.



If a company owns that truck and you drive it, then you are a prol...Right...



even if you drive a different car to get to the depot to pick up the big-rig
Wrong. What you do when driving your own car from home do depot is the same thing as what happens when you drive your employer's car from depot to somewhere, but this time it's your own car.




but conditions change and maybe the re-shoring schemes that the US ruling class are doing now along with austerity will produce a new militant generation in the US.
Well, maybe, in 30 or 40 or 50 years, if there is a new generation of people in the US who have grown up never touching the wheel of their daddy's ride, it'll be ready to learn some Marxist revolutionary stuff. However, those who have grown up in the petty bourgeois "car culture" will never endorse it. All they'll demand will be a return to the good old days, when the surplus value from the 3rd world was turned into cars they could own. The hard time I'm having here just getting my quite simple point across (let alone convincing anybody) is kind of proof of that.

[cyu]

If employees have taken over their place of work and are currently ignoring the capitalist, and you take up arms to help them defend themselves, then more power to you. However, if you discourage others from helping, simply for reasons like "No, you can't help because you come from the suburbs" - then I'd suspect you of being a pro-capitalist plant.

[Thirsty Crow]

I
And I can't stress enough how ridiculous this notion of "responsibility for social reproduction" being "pushed" around society is. Are we on some bourgeois TV show or are we talking Marxism here?It's quite ironic that a person claiming car ownership is tantamount to ownership of the means of production should mention Marxism.

Let's see what is so ridiculous about this assertion.



Because in Marxism, social reproduction is a process, in which all members of society are involved in this or that capacity, according to their class position.
Which would be fine if it were not for a misunderstanding of the use of the term social reproduction.
Namely, we're talking about the social reproduction of labor, of the working class. In this sense, when the whole grid of urban planning and mass production of cars comes into picture, it's clear that the costs of this facet of social reproduction are in fact being pushed onto the working class (compare the complementary drop in public transport infrastructure and investments into it), which is similar to the slashing of the welfare state and its institutions.


So, if the car owners are so "pushed with responsibility" (actually, just with commodities, the "responsibility" to consume the surplus value extracted from the proletariat, so that the capitalists could accumulate more capital via realization of that surplus value), that happens in accordance with their class position, which is different from those who aren't shoved that "responsibility" down their throats, and remain just same good old plain "irresponsible" wage-slaves.
You're not even making any sense. Know what, come back when you'll be able to produce a coherent argument, and we can talk then (this is just a rephrase of the gibberish about car ownership as ownership of the means of production; and do note that individual wage workers consume as well the surplus value produced either by themselves or by other workers).

And ditch this cheap trick of referring to "responsibility". The contention is that the responsibility to bear the costs of the social reproduction of the working class is shoved onto workers en masse. I know it's tempting to try to score easy points in this way, but try not to misunderstand everything that is being said here.


So, it's something like this: a car is a decisive means of production because it is capital (unlike a broom or a stove, which are indecisive means of production, because they are not capital); but car is not decisive capital. That's why car owners qualify as petty bourgeois, but not as capitalists.The analogy between shares and cars is absolutely ridiculous.

Shares are sums of money which bears profit due to operations which the small share holder has no control over. Sure, that's capital, though in the case of a small shareholder, it acts as nothing more than a supplement to the basic wage (suppose she is a worker). And it would be ridiculous as well to consider that person a petite bourgeois.

On the other hand, you merely claim that cars are capital. Which is bullshit. Show me how cars are operated as to produce profit, via exploitation of labor power or in some other way.

But I can help you with that. You can't show that since it is totally divorced from reality. Cars are a personal transport device and aren't used as capital unless one were to open a transport enterprise or a taxi service.

[Zulu]

I'd suspect you of being a pro-capitalist plant.

OK, here is the deal: there is proletariat, petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie. And in the struggle between the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie it is actually in the interests of the proletariat that bourgeoisie should win and completely crush the petty bourgeoisie. Then the proletariat can fight it out with the bourgeoisie once and for all. But so long as the petty bourgeoisie exists, it will always spawn new bourgeoisie eventually.

This is what happened in the USSR and the PRC. Although socialist revolutions there occurred in the 1st place because petty bourgeoisie was very weak there, it was the petty bourgeoisie that pushed both countries back to the "capitalist road", and the proletariat could not deal with it ruthlessly enough and in fact had to put up with its grouth, because of the capitalist menace from abroad. In other countries socialist revolutions failed or never even started because of the dense petty bourgeois element, which forms mass support for fascism, especially when faced with the prospect of a private property-abolishing revolution.

Ultra-imperialism is bound to eventually solve the problem of "SiOC vs. encirclement", since after some point in the near future any socialist revolution would mean a global civil war to the end, after which no such thing as capitalist encirclement might remain. But to win this global civil war the Reds will require that the petty bourgeoisie has been weakened to the utmost degree, so that the bourgeoisie cannot have massive support fueled by some fascist ideology. So I repeat: if the bourgeoisie wishes to destroy its own buffer against the wrath of the world proletariat, let 'em.



Sure, that's capital, though in the case of a small shareholder, it acts as nothing more than a supplement to the basic wage (suppose she is a worker). And it would be ridiculous as well to consider that person a petite bourgeois.

Yeah-yeah, proletarian shareholders, I get it, moving along now...

[Thirsty Crow]

O
Yeah-yeah, proletarian shareholders, I get it, moving along now...
You don't get jack shit.

Let's take an example of a friend of mine. Wage worker (national oil company), wage a bit below the average, but owns a tiny sum of shares. Gets about 3-4% of the annual wage sum from it.

Oh hell yeah. Petite bourgeois, no doubt.

[Zulu]

He's got a car?

[Thirsty Crow]

He's got a car?
:lol::lol::lol:

Oh that's precious. Yeah, he's got a car. It would make it a bit difficult to commute without any public transport to his place of work, 15 miles from his home (oh no horror he even owns the house; indecisive capital right here; when he's at work, his wife too, and their kid at childcare, he can rent it out to porn movies companies)

[Zulu]

he's got a carqed.

[Paul Pott]

Not capitalist but petty bourgeois, almost in completely classical sense of the word. You didn't sell you labor power, you sold the commodity of locomotion which you produced in the manner of self-employed handicraftsman.

Complete and utter rubbish. If I didn't sell my labor power, then neither does a waiter.


Funny how those in denial here talk about "workers" driving their own cars to their wage-work at a factory, and you come and subvert their argument by providing a nice example of how any of those "workers" can easily give up the job at the factory and start make a living out of their car.

Any worker can give up their job anywhere and try to sell fruit or something out of a cart. That's what millions upon millions of urban unemployed do in the third world that you idealize so much. The ability to engage in accumulation does not change the fact that a worker is selling their labor power.

[Creative Destruction]

I repeat, short answer is: yes.

But since when Marxism's been about each particular individual's sad little story? Marxism is about the classes of people. And in today's world the petty bourgeois class is best defined as "the people who own a lot of shit, including cars". Because the car is such a vehicle of the capitalist mode of production at its imperialist stage.

But OK, you don't like this, go on trying to achieve nirvana by incessant repetition of "capital vs. labor" mantras.

doesn't this constitute a labor aristocracy, rather than moving the proletariat into the petit-bourgeois?

[Yuppie Grinder]

Am I bougie for owning legs I use to get to and from my below minimum wage job as a waiter?

[Paul Pott]

Am I bougie for owning legs I use to get to and from my below minimum wage job as a waiter?

I'm sure he will say "but legs aren't capital!" or something like that.

[Popular Front of Judea]

I'm sure he will say "but legs aren't capital!" or something like that.

But by @Zulu's logic roller skates are.

[Zulu]

If I didn't sell my labor power, then neither does a waiter.
Only don't tell me you weren't paid depending on the number of deliveries you made... Which still is not very much relevant, since your car is still your private means of production. It's the same as if that car belonged to that pizza joint, and you co-owned it via holding a package of shares priced as much as your car.

A waiter does not use his own heavy machinery to get his wage. He still is a petty bourgeois though, if he drives his own car to the restaurant he works at.



sell fruit or something out of a cart. That's what millions upon millions of urban unemployed do in the third world
If that's their own fruit, then they are peasants. If that's somebody else's fruit, then proles.



does not change the fact that a worker is selling their labor power.A proletarian is not just anybody who sells his labor power, it's somebody who has absolutely no other option but to sell his labor power, because they don't own anything they could use to make any other commodity, and don't receive any rent. Workers in the 1st world are mostly not proletarians because they own means of production (cars), and receive the imperial rent, disguised as wages but betrayed by the fact that those wages are significantly higher than the average market price of labor power in the world. This rent is almost always codified in the form of "minimum wage" legislation by the bourgeois state and it is what enables them to buy those cars.



doesn't this constitute a labor aristocracy, rather than moving the proletariat into the petit-bourgeois?
"Labor aristocracy" is a convenient way to handwave the stuff I'm talking about if you want to be a little less chauvinistic and admit there is something to it. But I bet if I came forward with the assertion like "any worker owing a car is labor aristocracy", the righteous indignation would have been just as vehement here. Because it would mean the same thing: trying to woo the car owning workers into a private property abolishing revolution is absolutely futile.

You see, this is actually the explanation why the Left is completely bankrupt ideologically and politically. They say they hate capitalism but supposedly try to rally to the cause of its destruction people who in fact love capitalism, because it gives them means of production in private property. Which means the leftists either simply don't know what they are doing (they are idiots), or they bullshit others and (possibly) themselves that they hate capitalism (they are hypocrites).

[Zulu]

But by @Zulu's logic roller skates are.

Not really. At least not until they publish an article titled "How America's Amazing Roller Skates Recovery Explains the U.S. Economy".

[Creative Destruction]

You see, this is actually the explanation why the Left is completely bankrupt ideologically and politically. They say they hate capitalism but supposedly try to rally to the cause of its destruction people who in fact love capitalism, because it gives them means of production in private property. Which means the leftists either simply don't know what they are doing (they are idiots), or they bullshit others and (possibly) themselves that they hate capitalism (they are hypocrites).

this paragraph makes me think that Zulu is a capitalist troll.

[Zulu]

this paragraph makes me think that Zulu is a capitalist troll.

Truth often is quite trolltastic, my friend.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-9ahnhu8koeM/Uh8oqVzigmI/AAAAAAAAABM/K1S2AezYctk/Stalin-U-MAD-BRO.jpg

Although, if I were going for lulz here, I'd mimic the most leftists' ignorance of the existence of such class as the petty bourgeoisie, and indeed argued that car owners are capitalists.

[Thirsty Crow]

Although, if I were going for lulz here, I'd mimic the most leftists' ignorance of the existence of such class as the petty bourgeoisie, and indeed argued that car owners are capitalists.
And the petite bourgeoisie aren't capitalists?

[Zulu]

And the petite bourgeoisie aren't capitalists?

No.

[Thirsty Crow]

No.
Then you're using the term "capitalist" in a very odd way.

[Zulu]

Then you're using the term "capitalist" in a very odd way.

I'm using it as a synonym with the term "bourgeoisie", which is a completely different social class from petty bourgeoisie.

Actually, fucking read fucking "Manifesto". You might fucking learn something:



In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.

In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois régime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism.

http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm

[Paul Pott]

The whole idea that workers in the "first world" are petit-bourgeois because they own cars is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Third worldism must have discovered the art of self parody.

[#FF0000]

And car is not an "individual means of transport" in the same way as, say, a horse is (Ever hear of proles owning horses back in the 19th tho? Me not)

Horses aren't mass-produced commodities in the same way cars are. They aren't equivalent.


because cars need, in the very least, petroleum industry and roads (but actually a lot more than that). Cars aren't self-sufficient products, but are elements of that transportation industry Marx is talking about around that quote.

Nothing is a "self-sufficient" product. Bicycles need infrastructure to be used and maintained. Stoves and appliances need socially produced fuel.


Marx himself could not make comments on automobiles for obvious reasons, but August Bebel, for instance, unequivocally suggested (http://marxists.org/archive/bebel/1879/woman-socialism/ch21.htm#s8) that after the revolution "river and ocean vessels, street-cars, automobile cars and trucks, air-ships and flying machines, and whatever all the institutions and vehicles serving traffic and communication may be called, will have become social property".

He suggested that in 1910, just after the first mass-produced automobile was introduced, but still before it was affordable. Automobiles were not commodities that people who worked for a wage could afford in his time.


But of course, a century of imperial propaganda later almost nobody remains able to see the reason for that.

Actually that's probably because people can be broke as fuck and still own a car, and may need a car depending on where they live (it's actually illegal to walk or bike on the roads that lead to where most of the jobs are -- they're considered "highways")


How so? The product a car driver produces is locomotion, or units of transportation, ton-kilometers. It is consumed the moment it is produced, therefore nobody can rob a producer of ton-kilometers of their value.

So producing anything by yourself, even if it's only for use and not for trade, can potentially make one petite-bourgeois? Does using a gas stove to cook a meal make you petite-bourgeois? Or have you decided that gas stoves aren't "decisive".


Not capitalist but petty bourgeois

The Petite-bourgeoisie are capitalists.


almost in completely classical sense of the word. You didn't sell you labor power, you sold the commodity of locomotion which you produced in the manner of self-employed handicraftsman.

This only comes close to working if you used the car to transport goods or other people, and even then, not even. How you get to work doesn't matter to the boss and has no impact on the terms of your employment or pay as long as you get there.


Funny how those in denial here talk about "workers" driving their own cars to their wage-work at a factory, and you come and subvert their argument by providing a nice example of how any of those "workers" can easily give up the job at the factory and start make a living out of their car.

So your boss making you use or buy your own tools or safety equipment for work makes you petty-bourgeois? Are temp workers petite-bourgeois too because of their status as "independent contractors"?

[Zulu]

Automobiles were not commodities that people who worked for a wage could afford in his time.
That's because petty bourgeoisie mostly didn't work for a wage in his time.




people can be broke as fuck and still own a car,
people may be broke as fuck and still own a factory



Or have you decided that gas stoves aren't "decisive".
Yes.




The Petite-bourgeoisie are capitalists.
No they ain't. Bourgeoisie are capitalists, and the petty bourgeoisie is not bourgeoisie.




So your boss making you use or buy your own tools or safety equipment for work makes you petty-bourgeois? Are temp workers petite-bourgeois too because of their status as "independent contractors"?It certainly brings that flavor to my social relationship with the boss, but again, simple tools are not decisive; heavy machinery with engines, on the other hand, is, so boss making me buy a car and upping my wage accordingly certainly makes me petty bourgeois.

[#FF0000]

That's because petty bourgeoisie mostly didn't work for a wage in his time.

The petite-bourgeois do not work for wages.


No they ain't. Bourgeoisie are capitalists, and the petty bourgeoisie is not bourgeoisie.Petite-bourgeois are capitalist. People who own small businesses are capitalists.



It certainly brings that flavor to my social relationship with the boss, but again, simple tools are not decisive; heavy machinery with engines, on the other hand, is, so boss making me buy a car and upping my wage accordingly certainly makes me petty bourgeois.lmao this kid thinks they pay pizza delivery drivers a premium for having to use their own cars. what an actual fool. They don't even cover your gas costs, dude.

[cyu]

Was is your class "analysis" of Engels? If another Engles-type were to appear, what would you propose be done about him?

[Thirsty Crow]

I'm using it as a synonym with the term "bourgeoisie", which is a completely different social class from petty bourgeoisie.

Actually, fucking read fucking "Manifesto". You might fucking learn something:

Oh yeah, you got me there. Never read it.

To explain it briefly, what differentiates the class of the small capitalist (literal translation of the French term; following the distinction citoyen-bourgeois, in English, citizen-capitalist) is: a) that they, as an individual, also work, but employ wage labor and direct capital and b) the mentioned danger of proletarianization due to competition

Now, what does this competition refer to in the Manifesto if not the competition of large and small capitals?

[Jimmie Higgins]

A proletarian is not just anybody who sells his labor power, it's somebody who has absolutely no other option but to sell his labor power, because they don't own anything they could use to make any other commodity, and don't receive any rent. Workers in the 1st world are mostly not proletarians because they own means of production (cars), and receive the imperial rent, disguised as wages but betrayed by the fact that those wages are significantly higher than the average market price of labor power in the world.Workers in the first world who are able to attain homes or cars, by and large these days do so and are in debt as a result. If there is an effect of car ownership, moreso homeownership (imo), on tieing workers to the capitalist system it really only exists on two levels: one as a sort of striving for mobility (this is how the right-wing paints it: be a good worker and play by the rules and you will be rewarded with what many workers see as making it - stability in the form of a home); and secondly, more concretely, in the forms of debts and obligations which do what -- result in an increased dependance on wage-work to make payments.

The costs and expectations of social reproduction - what it takes to maintain - are subjective and varry from place to place and time to time. The more fundamental thing for capital is not how much stuff a worker does or does not have, but that, as you said, they have no choice but to sell their labor to survive. So debts, house and car payments are actually part of what ensures that people will compete for wages. Sure some people, if they live in an urban area with public transportation, might choose to live more austerly (even more are forced to due to larger economic pressures) and rent an appartment or take public transportation, but really for many workers this is a question of access to credit and long-term verses short-term expenses.

In the sense you talk of cars, personal possession, they are mearly a means of transportation, not a means of production - having a car does not mean a worker can support themselves. Even if they illegally turned it into a Taxi, one taxi probably could not be a sustatinable petit-bourgeois enterprise. As far as "imperial rents" well this one is not as absurd of an argument, but I think it is equally wrong. First, assuming that workers in the imperial countries had material benifit from imperialism (I don't think this is the case historically, but for the sake of argument...) workers have zero input or control over this wealth and even in this argument, they would be passive recipientes at best. Secondly, if this were true, then we'd expect to see US workers having much much higher social wages and reforms than countries with much less powerful imperialist ruling classes. Instead we see that relative to other first world countries, US workers produce more with less wages and social reforms. So I think historically it's much more consistant that the relative level of class militancy in a country has a larger impact on how much influence over the surplus a working class has than how powerful their ruling class is.


This rent is almost always codified in the form of "minimum wage" legislation by the bourgeois state and it is what enables them to buy those cars.And yet over the last generation we have seen that US imperial influence has greatly expanded, US production has increased, US capitalist profits have increased; while US minimum wages have stagnated, overall working class wages have decreased when adjusted for costs of living.


trying to woo the car owning workers into a private property abolishing revolution is absolutely futile.Absurd. Workers have cars for it's use value - transportation, not for exchange value (unless they own a shop and fix up old cars and flip them for a profit for a living). A revolution would not seek to eliminate "use value" of things, but expand them to more and more people, using the massive surplusses of capitalism along democratic and cooperative lines. If a revolutionary movement said, we are going to elimiate your ability to make money with your car as illegal taxi services, but we will also eliminate the banks that you make your car payments to, who owns your house, which keeps you working to pay off debts... I'm pretty sure that any working class person who drives a car would find that to be a fantastic alternative to the prestent state of things.


You see, this is actually the explanation why the Left is completely bankrupt ideologically and politically. They say they hate capitalism but supposedly try to rally to the cause of its destruction people who in fact love capitalism, because it gives them means of production in private property.No one here argues that owners of fleets of Taxis or Limo services have an interest in abolishing privite productive property. We are arguing that means of reproduction for workers is just the way they maintain and reproduce their relation as wage-laborers in capitalism, it is not a "means of production". Workers who own cars can not support themselves with their car... it only helps them transport themselves to jobs.

And while some workers have been ideologically convinced to support capitalism, I think by and large more have been convinced that it is their only short-term option and this is the source of a lot of passivity and demoralization. I doubt any third-worlist would argue that black people in the US have an interest in the system and yet, where are the prison or "ghetto" riots and resistance? How beat down workers are is one part of the equation of class struggle, but not even the main one, hegemony, repression, internal class divisions/oppression and organization and so on also play a huge part in how able or willing workers are to organize and resist.

[Zulu]

Workers in the first world who are able to attain homes or cars, by and large these days do so and are in debt as a result.
That's very touching, but the fact that they have access to bank loans (that is, to finance capital) is yet another clear distinction between them and true proletarians.




The costs and expectations of social reproduction - what it takes to maintain - are subjective and varry from place to place and time to time. The more fundamental thing for capital is not how much stuff a worker does or does not have, but that, as you said, they have no choice but to sell their labor to survive. So debts, house and car payments are actually part of what ensures that people will compete for wages.
Nice spinning, but you won't fool me. The proletarian has no choice, or rather has a "no choice" choice. He either sells his labor power or starves to death. The car-owning mortgage-ridden worker does have a choice: give up those little amenities and settle for unemployment benefits, food stamps and part time jobs, or compete for access to the better imperial rent. Most of the unemployed in the 1st world can live better than proletarians in the 3rd world (if they aren't drunkards or junkies or something)!



In the sense you talk of cars, personal possession, they are mearly a means of transportation, not a means of production
Transportation is production.




if this were true, then we'd expect to see US workers having much much higher social wages and reforms than countries with much less powerful imperialist ruling classes. Instead we see that relative to other first world countries, US workers produce more with less wages and social reforms. So I think historically it's much more consistant that the relative level of class militancy in a country has a larger impact on how much influence over the surplus a working class has than how powerful their ruling class is.
First of all, it's a big question, if the US workers produce more with less, because too many wage-jobs in the US and Europe are completely unproductive which is yet another argument to support the 3rd-worldist-like views, and discredit all your arguments about social reproduction. Because engaging it all those rather pointless activities to gain access to credit very much looks like some stupid petty bourgeois way of passing leisure time... Anyway, in some European countries, such as Germany and France the workforce seems to be employed more productively overall. So let's say, US workers on average work more hours for lesser wages.

But then again, this is irrelevant because it's the imperial petty bourgeois workers you're talking about. The surplus they gain control of is not produced in the 1st world at all. It is produced in the 3rd world, then transferred to the 1st world via world trade, then the Western European petty bourgeoisie gets relatively larger share of it than the American petty bourgeoisie. Makes perfect sense, that the American capitalists are stronger relative to their European counterparts (as they were spared not only the class militancy, but also the the havoc the 2 world wars wrought on the European capital). That's why the Western European workers were able to solicit even better conditions form themselves in the course of their elevation to the petty bourgeois class position.




Workers have cars for it's use value - transportation
Use-value of cars is not that of transportation. Use-value of cars is that of the means of production of transportation. The use-value a private car owner consumes when he drives his car is the same use-value that a guy riding a bus consumes, but private car owner produces that use-value himself, and the bus passenger buys it on the market (he doesn't buy a piece of a bus).




we will also eliminate the banks that you make your car payments to, who owns your house, which keeps you working to pay off debts... I'm pretty sure that any working class person who drives a car would find that to be a fantastic alternative to the prestent state of things.
Problem is the elimination of private debt of its residents might very quickly put the US out of the imperialist business, leading to all the horrors of socialism: rationing (including that of fuel for those cars), compulsory labor, etc. And I'm not sure even all of those Salvadorans with Guevara t-shirts are ready for this, let alone the WASPs, which is still the majority demographic.




I doubt any third-worlist would argue that black people in the US have an interest in the system
Never mind there are pretty affluent (as well as simply car owning) colored people in the US, nobody says there are no proles in the 1st world at all. But there a too few of them. One sixth to a quarter of the population at the most. In such an overwhelmingly petty bourgeois environment the proletarian ideology simply cannot take root.

[Zulu]

Oh yeah, you got me there. Never read it.

To explain it briefly, what differentiates the class of the small capitalist (literal translation of the French term; following the distinction citoyen-bourgeois, in English, citizen-capitalist) is: a) that they, as an individual, also work, but employ wage labor and direct capital and b) the mentioned danger of proletarianization due to competition

Now, what does this competition refer to in the Manifesto if not the competition of large and small capitals?

Whatever the linguistics, it only means that "small capitalists" are not "capitalists". Marx is crystal clear about it.

The key here is that it's a different class from the bourgeoisie - which seems impossible to register with some. Of course, I do make a little step forward here from the literal text of the "Manifesto", as I consider the process of "replacement" of the petty bourgeoisie by the "overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen" and even car owning industrial workers to be that very process of continuous "renewal" of this "supplementary" class of "small capitalists", their "small capitals" being their cars. But this step is much shorter than the leap you guys do by considering a combustion engine with attached wheels packing at least half a hundred horsepowers a means of subsistence and "reproduction of labor power".

And yeah, competition between "capital" and "small capital" is all right, but there is also competition between a "small capital" and another "small capital", which also drives some "small capitalists" out of their cozy driver seats.



Was is your class "analysis" of Engels? If another Engles-type were to appear, what would you propose be done about him?
Is this a question for me? Engels was a capitalist, everybody knows that. Lenin was a landlord and Dzerzhinsky's family even had a coat of arms. Stalin, Trotsky and Mao were peasants, until they became professional revolutionaries and thus "declassed elements". Guevara was petty bourgeois. Nothing of this presents any problem in my eyes.

What does present a problem is that some (too many, actually) petty bourgeois people seem to be kind of shy about their class status and bend the theory to be able to count as proles... or they might have even less commendable motives.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Nice spinning, but you won't fool me.I'm not trying to fool you, I'm trying to reason with you and argue against these absurd formulations.


The proletarian has no choice, or rather has a "no choice" choice. He either sells his labor power or starves to death. The car-owning mortgage-ridden worker does have a choice: give up those little amenities and settle for unemployment benefits, food stamps and part time jobs, or compete for access to the better imperial rent. Most of the unemployed in the 1st world can live better than proletarians in the 3rd world (if they aren't drunkards or junkies or something)!This is just an outright reactionary argument. First, in the US benifits, despite the right-wing propaganda, do not adaquately support someone with the costs of living and lack of healthcare access and so on. Second these have been slashed for 30 years - the same time the US has greatly expanded it's influence and imperial power.

Malthusian indeed. Maybe there are some Irish babies for you to eat and cure the Irish masses of their self-inflicted poverty.


Use-value of cars is not that of transportation. Use-value of cars is that of the means of production of transportation. The use-value a private car owner consumes when he drives his car is the same use-value that a guy riding a bus consumes, but private car owner produces that use-value himself, and the bus passenger buys it on the market (he doesn't buy a piece of a bus).So when water is privitized, then everyone who pays for water is now a shareholder in utilities? Cars are a privitized transportation system, they have no exchange value when used to transport people to their jobs, people sell their cars at a loss, the credit needed to get a car to get a job mearly ties people to needing wage labor.


Problem is the elimination of private debt of its residents might very quickly put the US out of the imperialist business, leading to all the horrors of socialism: rationing (including that of fuel for those cars), compulsory labor, etc. And I'm not sure even all of those Salvadorans with Guevara t-shirts are ready for this, let alone the WASPs, which is still the majority demographic.Yeah I think this is the kernal of any 3rd worldist sentiment left today. Since socialism in one country is not possible and for a national liberation government to be able to develop and compete on the world market, they need to continue some kind of exploitation and so they try and sell a kind of "austerity-socialism" as if socialism is equality in poverty and toil, not equality in power and worker's control of production. These arguments, then act as an apology and explaination for the failures of national liberation "socialist" regimes.

Your apparent misanthropic malthusian assumptions aside, capitalism has produced surplusses that could improve everyone's lives tomorrow if the realtions of that wealth and the power that goes with it were on a different basis. Maybe this means not everyone in the world gets a car (I think that would be incredibly inefficient - it would be like if they designed an electrical system where everyone had their own power plant rather than being able to access a grid and use electricity as needed) but instead we save labor and materials by creating new communities where you can easily get to work and consumption and serives. Things don't work that way now because capitalist community developers can make more money by building on cheap undeveloped land outside of production and population centers. This creates the material need for a "car culture" among workers because capitalism has developed spacially based on land values and profits, not our convinience or wants. Or maybe workers will decide that with a fraction of the labor and materials and energy, better rail and public transporation systems would be better. But the point is, that "socialism" is not that everyone just has consumer abundance, but that everyone has power in shaping our communities and deciding how and what we use and do. Frankly if you told most people in the US they could work a third of the hours, not have to rush in a commute, have health care, have their own dwelling that can't be taken away... giving up cars would be a no-brainer. As it is under capitalism... if you read the article in the OP... cars are rationed and taken away from people as it is.


Never mind there are pretty affluent (as well as simply car owning) colored people in the US, nobody says there are no proles in the 1st world at all.Colored has been considered a racial slur since about the late-60s FYI.


But there a too few of them. One sixth to a quarter of the population at the most. In such an overwhelmingly petty bourgeois environment the proletarian ideology simply cannot take root.The petit-bourgoise has been dominent in terms of popular ideology but they are not the dominant class - the US actually has less small businesses than 16 other capitalist countries. The US middle class is bigger in terms of professionals, but if we take the classic Marxist definitions of class, the US petit-bourgoise (people who are small owners of profit-making propery, or have management positions with some autonomy or control of underlings) it's no more than 15-20% of the US population - about 60% support themselves on wages. 40% of the US control .2% of the wealth in the US, so taken as a whole vast numbers of the population have no economic weight.

Your arguments are so absurd that you have to create bizzare markers of class and drastically redefine tradditional marxist understandings of classes and class relations in order to make the square a circle.

[Zulu]

I'm trying to reason with you and argue against these absurd formulations.
Arguments that cars are means of reproduction of labor power are not reasonable no matter how you spin it. What about helicopters? What if next generation of US workers massively lived in villas and used choppers to get to their workplaces, were paid wages like $30K a month but still were in debt to banks, etc... because "such are the costs and expectations of social reproduction"???



Malthusian indeed. Maybe there are some Irish babies for you to eat and cure the Irish masses of their self-inflicted poverty.
Oh, moralizing, aren't we? Well, let me moralize back a little: right now hundreds of thousands of textile workers in Bangladesh are striking, their main demand being to increase their wages 250% - to $100 a month. And you're whining your car owning americans have poor access to healthcare? What a joke.




So when water is privitized, then everyone who pays for water is now a shareholder in utilities?
If water utilities are privatized and somebody buys a piece of those utilities, then yes. But keep you shirt on about the tap in your private house. Technically it is utilities and means of production and all, but - not decisive! Because the water tap industry is not what keeps the world imperialism going. Cars are.




Yeah I think this is the kernal of any 3rd worldist sentiment left today. Since socialism in one country is not possible and for a national liberation government to be able to develop and compete on the world market, they need to continue some kind of exploitation and so they try and sell a kind of "austerity-socialism" as if socialism is equality in poverty and toil, not equality in power and worker's control of production. These arguments, then act as an apology and explaination for the failures of national liberation "socialist" regimes.
I, for one, consider national liberation ideas complete and total bullshit as of 1970s (approx. time of the inauguration, so to say, of ultra-imperialism). But as far as world socialist revolution is concerned, yes, it would have quite the vibe of equality in poverty for the majority of the 1st-worlders.




Things don't work that way now because capitalist community developers can make more money by building on cheap undeveloped land outside of production and population centers. This creates the material need for a "car culture" among workers because capitalism has developed spacially based on land values and profits, not our convinience or wants.
And I repeat again, as much as this may seem a "chicken and egg" question, that "urban sprawl" is a consequence of the "car culture", not its cause. And the cause of the car culture is the imperial rent, which massively turned the 1st world proletariat into petty bourgeoisie.




But the point is, that "socialism" is not that everyone just has consumer abundance but that everyone has power in shaping our communities and deciding how and what we use and do.
No, under socialism those who oppose abolition of private property don't have power in shaping communities and deciding what to do.




cars are rationed and taken away from people as it is.
Really? I must have missed something there. A quote, anybody?




Colored has been considered a racial slur since about the late-60s FYI.
And "black" is a slur in my 1st language (although designating people from the Middle East, Central Asia, and, ironically, Caucasus.) So pardon me. BTW, isn't "latino" also kind of slurish, the politically correct term being "hispanic"?

That said, I think this "political correctness" stuff is a bourgeois thing and an encroachment on the freedom of speech but in the end it's not so bad, because it paves way for all the other encroachments on bourgeois freedoms. ;)




classic Marxist definitions of class, the US petit-bourgoise (people who are small owners of profit-making propery
The 1st world workers cash in the profits (surplus value) extracted by imperialists from the proletariat in the 3rd world. Whether they do it consciously and voluntary, or just flow on with the system is irrelevant. Cars are not so much a "profit-making property", as they are "profit-realizing property", but that is, I repeat, a far lesser redefinition of classical Marxism, than considering certain machines to be means of consumption.




40% of the US control .2% of the wealth in the US, so taken as a whole vast numbers of the population have no economic weight.
It would only mean that some part of the petty bourgeoisie "has no economic weight" and is on the verge of proletarization. But not proletarized yet.

However, your assertion that they "have no economic weight" is quite inaccurate. Because a person who has assets priced $300K and got $280K of debt (negative assets) obviously has a lot more of "economic weight" than a person who has $25K of assets and no debt, but the latter person is considered "controlling more wealth". Sure, the 40% controlling only .2% seems a pretty dazzling math, but what about the lowest 20%? You can't find their separate figure so easily, because it's in the negative! Which makes you question the relevance of this method... Once you think of it, that poor homeless guy sleeping in his means of production is wealthier, than a guy living in a mansion with a couple of Ferraris in the garage, because the latter's guy business venture is bankrupt. See? These wealth distribution charts have even less connection to the reality of class composition of society, that those "costs of lifestyle" arguments.

Also, fun fact: some of those in the lowest 40% (and even the lowest 20%) own $10K+ in stock (profit making property right there), while about the same portion of the top 1% doesn't own stock at all (which puts at least some of these uber-wealthy people in the shoes of wage-working proletarians, I guess).

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html (see Table 6b, near the middle)

So, I suppose, it would be slightly better if you looked at the income inequality, instead of the wealth inequality (although that would be just as un-Marxist). That way the lowest 40% get to control ~10% of income, and that certainly doesn't look so bad, not like .2% anyway...

And finally you need to get out of this box of the country-by-country methodology, which was justified in the 18th century political economy, but as of now has become pure cretinism. There is no such thing as "national economy" in this world anymore. So no more "US working class". The economy is global, and social classes are global, you won't understand anything what's going on until you look at things in this way.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Oh, moralizing, aren't we? Well, let me moralize back a little: right now hundreds of thousands of textile workers in Bangladesh are striking, their main demand being to increase their wages 250% - to $100 a month. And you're whining your car owning americans have poor access to healthcare? What a joke.Why are these counterposed? Both are a struggle over who in capitalist realtions influences more - the bosses or the workers. Different social and local conditions create different demands. Class struggle doesn't come from crude emmiseration, emmiseration is an outcome of the more fundamental conflict where the exploiters try and gain as much of the surplus as possible and workers try and defend against that as much as possible. Because of the way capitalism is structured, even in one enterprise there are serious divisions among different sectors of workers and this is often due to the legacy of past stuggles, sucesses and failures of workers to win concessions. When grocery baggers in California went on strike, the bosses created divisions among them and promised to conceede to some in exchange for screwing over others and creating a tiered workforce. Are some of the baggers petit-bourgoise and others prols because of this -- no.

For modern capitalism the global division of labor is a responce to more flexible capital in the neoliberal era. Low-wage factory work goes hand in hand with skilled labor domestically in the third world and abroad in the first world, it's all part of the modern capitalist system and can't be seen in isolation. To argue that first world wage-workers are petit bourgeois professionals would imply to me that they manage other workers or have autonomy. Neither of these things are true for US workers. So it seems to me that your only cheiteria for this is wage payment and personal "stuff" consumption. But by this chreiteria, a factory worker in the US in 1930 is a proletarian but in 1960 they are middle class despite no fundamental change in their relations to production. Furthermore, a auto-worker in the US would be petit-bourgeois right now, but a shop-owner in the US who makes less or a business owner in the thrid world who makes a lot less are proletarians!

It makes no sense from the revolutionary marxist understanding of class and has a lot more similarities to capitalist presnetation of class.


Technically it is utilities and means of production and all, but - not decisive!Electriacal workers and water workers could shut down all industry in a region... it's pretty decisive and central for modern production.

Because the water tap industry is not what keeps the world imperialism going. Cars are.The car industry is not the cause of world imperialism anymore than the tea-trade was for British imperialism... competition for profits and so if the capitalists felt they could make more money in water-trade than in auto, then they would and will. Not to mention that today in parts of Latin America, Palistine/Isreael, and India, control over water is directly linked with imperialism and IMF privitization schemes.


I, for one, consider national liberation ideas complete and total bullshit as of 1970s (approx. time of the inauguration, so to say, of ultra-imperialism). But as far as world socialist revolution is concerned, yes, it would have quite the vibe of equality in poverty for the majority of the 1st-worlders.Well I think this is wrong. Socialism is more about worker's control than equal consumption. A revolution and likely economic crisis that might cause the revolution will cause massive material problems and shortages and wants anywhere a revolution happens. But by putting production into our own hands, we not only control the massive surplus of capitalism, we also control what happens with it and how it is used and this would be much more motivating than some consumer stuff.


And "black" is a slur in my 1st language (although designating people from the Middle East, Central Asia, and, ironically, Caucasus.) So pardon me.Did you think that US prisons are filled with Central Asians when you were talking about "colored" people in the US?


BTW, isn't "latino" also kind of slurish, the politically correct term being "hispanic"?In California Latino is the main term and "hispanic" (i.e. "like-spanish") is considered rude - however on the East Coast I hear that this is not the case. But being from Califonia and having family from Mexico, I kinda cringe when people say "hispanic" like when academic people say "Queer" I have to kinda seperate it from the connotation it had when I was growing up.


The 1st world workers cash in the profits (surplus value) extracted by imperialists from the proletariat in the 3rd world. Whether they do it consciously and voluntary, or just flow on with the system is irrelevant. Cars are not so much a "profit-making property", as they are "profit-realizing property", but that is, I repeat, a far lesser redefinition of classical Marxism, than considering certain machines to be means of consumption.Means of consumption is no term I used. I said cars are part of social reproduction in the US because it would be difficult in most places due to the way the cities have developed and the way public transportation has been defunded to get around and go to work. So it is like cloths and food and a home... it is part of how the workforce in the US resupplys itself. It is only symbolically connected to the idea of class mobility, but car ownership does not change a worker's relationship to production.



So, I suppose, it would be slightly better if you looked at the income inequality, instead of the wealth inequality (although that would be just as un-Marxist). That way the lowest 40% get to control ~10% of income, and that certainly doesn't look so bad, not like .2% anyway...
This distinction is important for the arguement about "means of social reproduction". If workers get 10% of income, but then at the end of the day have a fraction of a percent of the wealth of the country, what does that mean? It means that most of the income that goes to workers just goes right back out in debt and rents and car payments and food. Wages go towards reproducing that labor and returning them to work the next day, not to accumulation and profits.

[synthesis]

A short compendium of hilarious statements from Zulu in this thread:


Pasta maker is obviously a means of production but obviously not a decisive one. Therefore you might own a pasta maker and still be a proletarian.


You saw that chimp on TV using a stone to crack that coconut open? That stone's a tool, therefore means of production! It greatly improves the chimp's productivity of labor, as it increases the output of cracked coconuts per unit of labor time.


The food is the means of subsistence (what you call "reproduction"), and a stove is the means of production of that food. It doesn't matter, like, at all, where that stove is: in somebody's private house, or in a restaurant, or on fucking Mars - awaiting some cosmonauts to drop by and start cooking.


First, chimps don't own their means of production, obviously.


The question you want to ask is: when a means of transport becomes a decisive means of production, the one that turns you into a petty bourgeois the moment you own it?

One part of me suggests that any motorized vehicle is such decisive a means of production. Therefore a bicycle with attached homemade combustion engine qualifies for decisiveness.


In other words, [low-wage Latino immigrants] do come [to the U.S.] to participate in imperialism in some subjectively better capacity, than they can hope to at home. I, personally, don't blame them, I think nothing can be done about it right now, but every conscious commie (if he is conscious and commie, of course) has to stop wasting time on account of them.


A waiter does not use his own heavy machinery to get his wage. He still is a petty bourgeois though, if he drives his own car to the restaurant he works at.


Although, if I were going for lulz here, I'd mimic the most leftists' ignorance of the existence of such class as the petty bourgeoisie, and indeed argued that car owners are capitalists.

(As if the term "petit bourgeois" didn't get thrown around here like mashed potatoes in a food fight.)


people may be broke as fuck and still own a factory


That's very touching, but the fact that they have access to bank loans (that is, to finance capital) is yet another clear distinction between them and true proletarians.


And you're whining your car owning americans have poor access to healthcare? What a joke.


But keep you shirt on about the tap [water] in your private house. Technically it is utilities and means of production and all, but - not decisive! Because the water tap industry is not what keeps the world imperialism going. Cars are.

I can't remember the last time I was this entertained while writing a post. If this guy's a troll, you have to at least give him points for dedication.

[Jimmie Higgins]

If this guy's a troll, you have to at least give him points for dedication.I wouldn't think a troll would have that much patience... but then again I've seen it on here before.

I think it's just more likely that they've been won to these arguments but since this view doesn't really fit the contemporary situation in the world, upholding these views requires some pretty big leaps.

I mean, I could see how some of these arugments when they began to be developed made a sort of impressionistic sense in the post-war Keynsian world. All sorts of revolutionaries were responding to a decline in (and repression of) more militant parts of the worker's movement in the older capitalist countries (declaring the working class as no longer the revolutionary class or declaring that the prolitariet no longer existed, etc) on the one hand and a wave of impressive revolutions in the so-called third world on the other. In the US there was a "guns and butter" keynsianism in which the ruling class did try and make the argument that US imperialism meant continued gains for workers without much struggle needed. But that social situation ended 40 years ago! And even then, it wasn't that first world worker's were actually benifiting from imperialism in the US, it was that the US was able to buy a little labor-peace because they were expanding and profiting so much. At the height of keynsianism when US auto-workers were producing at the lowest rate of exploitation ever, US big auto was still hugely profitable. This changed without wages going down because as profit rates fell, companies in the US used speed-ups and technology to reduce workforces and increase exploitation and yet this provoked strikes and shop-floor actions and so on... all when workers were relativly making much more than they do now and had a whole lot more control over shop conditions, breaks and so on.

So now we've had 30 years of neoliberalism and US imperialism has expanded, profitability has expanded, but workers in the US are exploited more than they were in the post-war era. What has all this imperialism meant now for US workers? As much inequality now as in the guilded age, more people in prison than were held in slavery! So I honestly don't know how anyone can really still hold a view that kinda made sense, but only superficially and in the context of one period of capitalism.

Maybe they get their analysis of life for first world workers from American TV shows like "Modern Family" where everyone makes lots of money, enjoys tons of consumer options, has free-time, can support a family on one income, and never seems to actually have to go to work!

[ChrisK]

Only don't tell me you weren't paid depending on the number of deliveries you made... Which still is not very much relevant, since your car is still your private means of production. It's the same as if that car belonged to that pizza joint, and you co-owned it via holding a package of shares priced as much as your car.

As a current pizza delivery driver I can honestly tell you that I do not get paid based on the number of deliveries I take. I make minimum wage.

Here is the thing, even though the car is mine, I do not own the means of production in this case. If I did, then I should be compensated for the value that the pizza gains by my contribution to its distribution. Not only am I not, but the company makes money off of my car; insofar as a car can be considered a means of production, they have stolen the means of production from me.

Also, if I use my car to start making money as my own private means of production, I would be driven straight back into the working class. Take this example, I paint a taxi logo on my car and start hauling people around. I am now competing with all of the taxi companies in the area, which offer good rates and will take less time to pick-up due to having more cars in their fleet. Very quickly, I would run out of money and be forced to start selling my labor to gain access to the means of production. Thus, I am forced to sell my labor in order to make a living since I really have no alternative. Thus, by your very definition, I am working class.

[Zulu]

Why are these counterposed? Both are a struggle over who in capitalist realtions influences more - the bosses or the workers.
Or the petty bourgeoisie. American car owning workers are petty bourgeoisie, that's why they are counterposed to the Bangladeshi proletariat.




Different social and local conditions create different demands.
I get it, give 'em them helocopters!




Class struggle doesn't come from crude emmiseration, emmiseration is an outcome of the more fundamental conflict where the exploiters try and gain as much of the surplus as possible and workers try and defend against that as much as possible.Right, and that's just what the petty bourgeois exploiters do when they struggle against the bourgeois exploiters: they try to gain as much surplus, extracted from the proletariat in the 3rd world, as possible for themselves.




Low-wage factory work goes hand in hand with skilled labor
And the "skilled labor" is not so much about actual skills, as about the amount of constant capital employed per laborer, and when that constant capital is partially owned by the laborer himself, (as is in the case of car owners), you've got a petty bourgeois laborer.




in the third world and abroad in the first world, it's all part of the modern capitalist system and can't be seen in isolation.
Bravo! Now stop looking at the "US working class" in isolation and look at it from the perspective of the global ultra-imperialism.




To argue that first world wage-workers are petit bourgeois professionals would imply to me that they manage other workers or have autonomy.Not necessarily. It's enough that they cash in the surplus extracted from the proletariat, and are thus net exploiters. Likewise stock brokers and financial oligarchs do not employ any productive workforce directly; does that mean they aren't capitalists? Hardly. On the contrary, in modern capitalism they dominate over the owners of industrial enterprises.




a factory worker in the US in 1930 is a proletarian but in 1960 they are middle class despite no fundamental change in their relations to production.
Buying a car is fundamental enough.




Furthermore, a auto-worker in the US would be petit-bourgeois right now, but a shop-owner in the US who makes less or a business owner in the thrid world who makes a lot less are proletarians! A business owner who makes less than a factory worker is petty bourgeois just the same, if he owns a car, which is overwhelmingly the case of small business owners in the 1st world, no matter how rundown their business is. The the small business owners in the 3rd world, who don't own a car, like those street vendors and whatnot, can be easily counted as peasants or declassed elements. No problem there at all.




It makes no sense from the revolutionary marxist understanding of class and has a lot more similarities to capitalist presnetation of class.
That only seems so to you because you are unable to flush the imperial propaganda of "car culture" out of your head and accept the fact that car is a means of production. What really makes no sense from the PoV of revolutionary Marxism is the idea that machine owning workers can somehow be a revolutionary force. It makes some sense though from the standpoint of the opportunistic revisionist reformism-only social democratic "Marxism" of Bernstein, Kautsky, Brezhnev, you name it, that dumps the idea of revolution in the first place. Your notion of the class struggle as principally some kind of merry tug'o'war between the "workers and bosses" fits in there nicely.




Means of consumption is no term I used. I said cars are part of social reproduction in the US
And that's the great revision of Marxism right here, the one that is necessary to present the helicopter owning wage-workers as proletarians. In Marxism all the goods (distributed/circulating as commodities under capitalism) are divided into means of production and means of consumption. Means of consumption include means of subsistence and luxury goods. The end. And the term "social reproduction" designates the process of (well, IDK even how else to say it) the social reproduction in its entirety, and it includes but is not limited the the reproduction of labor power. Consumption of luxury goods by the bourgeoisie is just as indispensable a part of the social reproduction of the bourgeois society as are the extraction of surplus value from the proletariat and the productive consumption of cars by the petty bourgeoisie.




car ownership does not change a worker's relationship to production.
It does.

I repeat for the last time: even if a car owning worker does not use his car in the process of production he participates in while inside the factory, he does use his car as means of production outside the factory. BTW, from this it's clear why between two workers doing exactly the same jobs but with one of them commuting by bus and the other by his own car, the car owner might feel more exploited - he works a couple of hours a day more!

Now, you might want to say: "Wait a minute, so that carless worker counts as a prole in your books, but what about all that talk about cashing in the surplus value extracted from the proletariat in 3rd world? Aren't they both supposed to be such net exploiters?" To that, I can only remind you that when the classes in question number in billions there are bound to be exceptions. Some fraction of the world petty bourgeoisie doesn't own cars, as well as there might be but a few people who produce more new value than they consume yet somehow got to own a car*. Yet, overall it is the mass of roughly a billion households owning private cars that constitutes the class of petty bourgeoisie in today's world.

* The majority of the 1st world workers don't fit this description: when they are employed as productive labor (which is not very often), they produce high value goods, sure, but that is achieved via the transfer of value from the constant capital, with only a tiniest fraction of new value being added to it. Productivity of labor is no magic, remember. It's just a relation of output to labor time, and most of the value in the output in the 1st world comes from the past labor, accumulated as capital.

Now, although I understand that this latter angle it totally shocking news to you, but I feel it gets a bit away from cars and into the more general problems, and as far as cars are concerned, we've been running in circles for a while now. So I think, I'm done here.

[Misericordia]

This thread is exactly why I post on RevLeft so very rarely. Jesus Christ what a stupid argument.

[Zulu]

As a current pizza delivery driver I can honestly tell you that I do not get paid based on the number of deliveries I take. I make minimum wage.
Well, that only says something about how high is that minimum wage, wherever you are from, since it allows you to compensate for fuel, car maintenance and on top of that make it worth your while. Where I'm from, minimum wage is a joke, and pizza delivery drivers get paid at least in part (bigger part) per the number of deliveries, plus they get a little bonus if they put the firm's logo on their cars.



Not only am I not, but the company makes money off of my car
Lol, you've just contradicted yourself. So the firm does make profit of your car, so it is means of production even by the contorted definition that it's means of production (and capital) only if it makes profit. But you said it is your car, not the company's! So, no matter how ugly and unfair this might look, you own this means of production, and they've stolen not your means of production but the profit you feel entitled to. You get ripped off, just as the minority shareholders in my earlier comparison.





Also, if I use my car to start making money as my own private means of production, I would be driven straight back into the working class. Take this example, I paint a taxi logo on my car and start hauling people around. I am now competing with all of the taxi companies in the area, which offer good rates and will take less time to pick-up due to having more cars in their fleet. Very quickly, I would run out of money and be forced to start selling my labor to gain access to the means of production. Thus, I am forced to sell my labor in order to make a living since I really have no alternative. Thus, by your very definition, I am working class.
All that is true and obvious. But you're a working class (=proletarian) only after you've found yourself in the street with empty pockets selling your labor power. Labor power and nothing else. On your pizza delivery job it may also be said that you both sell your labor power and rent out your car to the company. Even as these two deals are probably wrapped into one, I suppose they at least asked you if you had a car, when you applied for the job.

[ChrisK]

Well, that only says something about how high is that minimum wage, wherever you are from, since it allows you to compensate for fuel, car maintenance and on top of that make it worth your while. Where I'm from, minimum wage is a joke, and pizza delivery drivers get paid at least in part (bigger part) per the number of deliveries, plus they get a little bonus if they put the firm's logo on their cars.

$9.19 is a pittance.


Lol, you've just contradicted yourself. So the firm does make profit of your car, so it is means of production even by the contorted definition that it's means of production (and capital) only if it makes profit. But you said it is your car, not the company's! So, no matter how ugly and unfair this might look, you own this means of production, and they've stolen not your means of production but the profit you feel entitled to. You get ripped off, just as the minority shareholders in my earlier comparison.

You apparently don't know what an "even if" argument is. I'm saying that even if the car is a means of production, the company makes the profit from the car, not me. Which means that I disagree with your definition, but your very definition fails on the face of it.

Also, the profit I feel entitled to is equivalent to the amount of exchange-value that I add to the commodity that I am not paid for.


All that is true and obvious. But you're a working class (=proletarian) only after you've found yourself in the street with empty pockets selling your labor power. Labor power and nothing else. On your pizza delivery job it may also be said that you both sell your labor power and rent out your car to the company. Even as these two deals are probably wrapped into one, I suppose they at least asked you if you had a car, when you applied for the job.

Well I'm at a loss. If you seriously believe this stuff you must have been dropped on your head as an infant.

[Per Levy]

But you're a working class (=proletarian) only after you've found yourself in the street with empty pockets selling your labor power. Labor power and nothing else.

you know, if you go by this definition of what working class/proletarian is than you dont have many proles in the world, even in most of the third world workers have a roof over their head, maybe a bad roof but they do have a roof over their head and also a few things you just need to live, ergo they own things too.

you are even more "hardcore" then the usual third-worldists.

[Popular Front of Judea]

you know, if you go by this definition of what working class/proletarian is than you dont have many proles in the world, even in most of the third world workers have a roof over their head, maybe a bad roof but they do have a roof over their head and also a few things you just need to live, ergo they own things too.

you are even more "hardcore" then the usual third-worldists.

Other words and phrases beside "hardcore" do come to mind ...

[Thirsty Crow]

Other words and phrases beside "hardcore" do come to mind ...
Like, how the hell did this user managed to avoid the ban hammer?

[Popular Front of Judea]

Like, how the hell did this user managed to avoid the ban hammer?

No need to do that. Think of him as a teachable moment. "How many fallacies can you spot in this paragraph?"

[Thirsty Crow]

No need to do that. Think of him as a teachable moment. "How many fallacies can you spot in this paragraph?"Yeah, what I meant was, restriction. Since that's what happens to third-worldists around here. Still it would be a valuable teaching lesseon. Fallacies can be spotted in OI as well.

[cyu]

some (too many, actually) petty bourgeois people seem to be kind of shy about their class status and bend the theory to be able to count as proles... or they might have even less commendable motives.


Why would they want to be seen as proles (however you define it)? In your revolution, do proles deserve a special status, and people with landlord fathers deserve prison sentences? What are the worse motives you speak of?

I love it when capitalists tell the class of people who have to work for a living that they are not working class.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule