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barsoap@lemm.ee 22 hours agoClass instead is a social relation to ownership of the Means of Production.
And the managerial class doesn’t have that? Is it easier or harder for an MBA to get a loan to become a millionaire than it is for a worker coop? To furnish golden parachutes for themselves while leaving workers with not even the dole (heard of some nasty practices in the US, there, making people ‘quit without cause’ by bullying etc which would disqualify them from welfare).
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 21 hours ago
Is an Engineer a class? They make better money than assembly workers. The answer is no, Engineers are a substratum of the Proletariat, worthy of their own analysis, but not as distinct from the rest of the Proletariat. That’s why Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc all viewed managers as proletarian, doing a separate kind of labor, and even distinct living conditions on average, but retaining the same labor relations to the Means of Production.
barsoap@lemm.ee 21 hours ago
So you’re saying that there’s no difference in things like capital access. “Same relations” implying “no difference, nada, zilch”. I don’t find that assessment compatible with the material conditions we live under.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 21 hours ago
One proletarian has the strength of two average proletarians. Does he constitute his own distinct class, as he can leverage that for somewhat higher pay, and therefore eventually become petty bourgeois? No. Again, we can see specialized labor as a substratum, but to confuse it for a class in and of itself goes against the Marxist conception of class.
Now, if you define class as relations of hierarchy, there’s no dissonance, and we can consider managers their own class. But at that point, we have to be careful not to trip over each other’s understanding of class when discussing Marxism vs Anarchism.
barsoap@lemm.ee 21 hours ago
That’s a relationship to a crate or to barbells, not to capital or the means of production.