5 ms·
The way a word is defined by communists and the way it is defined by the rest of the world are seldom the same.
by f33d5173 1y ago
The way a word is defined by communists and the way it is defined by the rest of the world are seldom the same.
- dttze 1y agoYeah, one is right and the other is bs pushed to divide people
- closewith 1y agoThe working class is globally the class of people who must sell their labour. That includes - to a rounding error - all software developers and that is completely uncontroversial.
- SoftTalker 1y agoThis also includes doctors, lawyers, academics, managers and executives, none of whom are traditionally thought of as "working class"
- dragonwriter 1y agoThat group is, in fact, traditionally considered largely working class (proletarian, more specifically the proletarian intelligentsia, though some in that group might be middle class, again, in the traditional class analysis, petit bourgeois sense.) American popular usage defers from traditional economic role-based class analysis to be instead do income-based “class” terminology which instead of defining the middle class as the petit bourgeois who apply their own labor to their own capital in production (or otherwise have a relation to the economy which depends on both applying labor and ownership of the non-financial means of production) defines middle class as the segment around the median income, almost entirely within the traditional working class. This is a product of a deliberate effort to redefine terminology to impair working class solidarity, not some kind of accident.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoWhose tradition? Not the American working class. Despite the strong labor unions extent I think you'd be hard pressed to find marxists among them. We talk of middle and upper class precisely because we don't ascribe to the "traditional" framing of bourgeoisie v. proletariat, because running a business is actually work too, even if you own the capital. If you sit around and spend money all day we just call you an aristocrat.
- const_cast 1y agoIt doesn't, because a lot of those people do not sell their labor. Doctors sell a practice, or can anyway. As time goes on fewer and fewer do - they're being pushed out of the capitalist class to the working class. Most now work a salary for a large employer, like you or me.
- closewith 1y agoAll professions are traditionally working class.
- SoftTalker 1y agoI guess it depends on whose tradition is under discussion. In the contemporary American usage, "working class" means the trades, or factory and service work. Few people would call a physician or lawyer "working class" even though they are paid for their time (and knowledge).
- closewith 1y agoI wonder about your contemporaries. I imagine that most of them have a completely different definition to you, because you and doctors and lawyers are - to a rounding error - working class and everyone but you is aware of it.
- Noumenon72 1y agoAs someone who used to be in the actual working class (plastic factory), it's not the same at all. Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) covers the autonomy and good treatment the working class can't have. Plus just talk to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93managerial_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Daishiman 1y agoMarxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century and its vocabulary permeates all of political and economic analysis. Marxist analysis is not the same as communism.
- hollerith 1y ago>Marxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century I agree. Let's hope it will have much less impact on the 21th century.
- OKRainbowKid 1y agoAre you ignoring the rest of the comment?
- hollerith 1y agoMost professional economists IMHO would not agree that Marxism's vocabulary permeates their field. Core economic concepts are things like elasticity of demand, market equilibrium, externality, market failure, network effect, opportunity cost and comparative advantage, and AFAIK Marx and his follower had essentially no role in explaining or introducing any of those.
- tehjoker 1y agoI think if you had read Capital, you'd find many of these concepts amply addressed, usually with different terminology.
- hollerith 1y agoPlease list terms in this different terminology that are equivalents or analogs of the terms I listed, so that I can use Ctrl+F to find them in my PDF of volume one of the book.
- 1y ago