[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]GreySkull wrote:
There is no middle class. This is a term that has no basis in reality, It does not matter if you earn 15 million a year or 5 thousand a year, if you generate surplus value you are working class.
[/quote]
…According to the addled Marxist model you apparently use in assigning meaning to words you speak and hear.
Thing is, I use a different model. And it’s a lot simpler (simpler, in this case, being an antonym of “more simplistic”): There is a poorest person in the United States, a richest person in the United States, and a person whose financial circumstances put her squarely between them. If your bank account and material quality of life resemble one of these three archetypes more than either of the other two, you belong to, respectively, the lower, upper, or middle class. If you’re sort of in between two of them, you belong to either the lower-middle or the upper-middle class.
Here’s the important part, in the form of a question: Can you prove that my definition is wrong, and yours is right? Objectively, I mean.
Because if you can’t, then you’ll have to go back and qualify almost everything you wrote in your original post in this thread.[/quote]
Of course I can prive it is wrong, you seem to think class is about money, it is not. It is about your relation to the productive forces in society. If I make 10 million as an actor that does not put me in the bourgoisie, it puts me in the working class because my reltaion to the productive forces is a worker on a film who recieves a wage, but that film makes millions more, thus rendering the people who take in the film profits the benefactors of my surplus value, same with the script writer etc.
And for all those who seem to think this is somehow a communist stance, this is the basic foundation of capitalism, I make a buisness, I hire people and I render surplus value from their labour to make profit. I mean if you read anything by Friedman or Smith or any of the best (my personal opinion) writers advocating a free market.
All agree with that basic tennant of marxism, they only have differing semantics on how to adress that fact.
You can say capitalism is about rendering surplus value from the workers and still be in favour of it, see it as beneficial to the progress of society and man, but can anyone disprove the mechanism of wage labour and the surplus value it gleams?
I mean shit even the biggest free market thinkers can’t agree on what constitutes a free market and what does not, the classical economists all thought unregulated markets were the shit, then the second wave argued inherent lack of freedom without regulation because of what they viewed as the inherent natrue of the capitalist system to create monopolies and influence.
For example I think Cantillon argued that it was for this inherent reason why unregulated markets were not free because of monopoly inherent. While Smith and people like Milton would whole heartedly disagree.
