One Rule for the Rich: heir to TetraPak empire gets off possessing 52g of Coke!

[Delroy Booth]

Dunno if I want to get into a discussion about class , but it depends on your definitions in the end. In purely Marxist terms, most of us on here are working class with a tiny bit of bourgeoise thrown in if we have mortgages or pension funds.

I've got neither but I do have a degree. However it is from Salford uni so it's not like it's been of any use to me in the labour market. Infact it's probably been a massive hindrance

 

[Mr.Bishie]

Who's rich on this thread? Anyone?

So some rich bird put enough chang up her conk & licked enough rocks to poison & small village?

Who gives a fuck.

 

[grit]

Who's rich on this thread? Anyone?

So some rich bird put enough chang up her conk & licked enough rocks to poison & small village?

Who gives a fuck.

I'm rich and a coke head,

 

[savoloysam]

I'm minted like a lamb chop.

 

[Mr.Bishie]

I'm rich and a coke head,

Share your wealth!!!

 

[revol68]

he is middle class. But because he's broke he's a prole.

please show your working out.

 

[grit]

Share your wealth!!!

I do, with the farmers of Peru and Bolivia

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I've got neither but I do have a degree. However it is from Salford uni so it's not like it's been of any use to me in the labour market. Infact it's probably been a massive hindrance

Purely Marxist terms don't really work any more, tbf. The bloke I bought my lunch from today is bourgeois in the sense that he owns a small business and sells stuff. But he probably doesn't earn much, and certainly earns less than a lot of the people he serves who are employees selling their labour.

Most of us are a mix of different aspects.

 

[Mr.Bishie]

I do, with the farmers of Peru and Bolivia

 

[goldenecitrone]

Anybody who has the time and the inclination to have read all of Das Capital must be middle class. Working class people have got far more important things to be getting on with.

 

[grit]

Anybody who has the time and the inclination to have read all of Das Capital must be middle class. Working class people have got far more important things to be getting on with.

Love it

 

[discokermit]

Anybody who has the time and the inclination to have read all of Das Capital must be middle class. Working class people have got far more important things to be getting on with.

rubbish.

 

[Mr.Bishie]

rubbish.

It's not. Who gives a fuck about that shit?

 

[Citizen66]

please show your working out.

It's your mindset. You mentioned that the deceased wasn't as terrible as some of the rich because their money wasn't going into 'cycles of exploitation'.

When I pointed out that their money pretty much was going into that you threw a hissy fit and got really defensive about it. Now, I'm no expert but my experience of that happening has always been as a result of middle class liberals who think they're left wing getting the arse when asked to examine their own role in exploitation in order to seek decadence. Then you had the gall to respond by calling me a liberal. Fucking classic it was.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

lots of people who take drugs don't like to think about where they have come from, tbf.

 

[love detective]

Yep.

The point is to hate capital, not individual capitalists. If you get off on hating individuals, you're not in this for the politics but because of some unsavory psychological flaw. As usual Marx put it best, in the Preface to Capital:

"To prevent possible misunderstandings, let me say this. I do not by any means depict the figures of the capitalist and the landowner in rosy colours. But persons are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests.... My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you would-be tumbril pilots.

Relying on others for your knowledge of Marx again Professor

And you should also be aware that Marx was quite clear that his analysis was that of roles played not of, and about, individuals ...The preface to volume 1 of capital for instance says:-

"here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them".

Feel free to use anything else that you pick up from here though, you'll eventually get up to a passable/average standard through learning from others who have a better grasp of it than you.

Although I would say you should show a little more courtesy and appreciation than you have done of late to those of us who take the time to teach you about this kind of stuff.

I'm prepared to let you off with this however, as I realise that as you go through this difficult period of dealing with the horrible and devastatingly potent combination of unrequited love & jealousy, it's pity & understanding that you require at this moment and not ridicule and belittlement.

 

[Fedayn]

Anybody who has the time and the inclination to have read all of Das Capital must be middle class. Working class people have got far more important things to be getting on with.

Yeah, I mean, reading, that's not any good or even important is it?!

 

[Delroy Booth]

Purely Marxist terms don't really work any more, tbf. The bloke I bought my lunch from today is bourgeois in the sense that he owns a small business and sells stuff. But he probably doesn't earn much, and certainly earns less than a lot of the people he serves who are employees selling their labour.

Most of us are a mix of different aspects.

Nah there's a lot more to Marx than just like the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto. If you read Capital (which I'm middle class enough to have done, and smug enough to make a point of mentioning) it goes into a lot more detail than just "bourgeois vs proletariat" once you get into the nitty gritty of it. But a lot of that has been buried under years of shit, vulgar, marxist dogma.

And yeah I had to write like a really arsey wankerish reply to an article on LiverpoolAF blog a few days ago who were making this really crude marxist view of class, that like it doesn't matter how much you earn it matters what your relationship is to the productive base of the economy. But by that logic, Wayne Rooney is proletarian, even though he's earning £120k as he's an employee of Manchester United, whereas my self-employed mate who gets £6-7k a year is technically petit bourgeosis. I feel like a prick for doing it too, coz the person's probably young and the point they're trying to make it worthy, but there ya go.

Generally this is something I hear most from like SWP members who are teachers or social workers, who are at pains to point out that they're really working class too, by Marx's definition. Which yeah, is technically true, coz after all middle-class just means working-class but slightly better off in a lot of cases. But the implication, that someone who's on £30k a year in a comfortable white collar job is suffering the same kind of marginalization, deprivation and so on as those on the dole or struggling on minimum wage jobs is fucking laughable.

 

[Citizen66]

lots of people who take drugs don't like to think about where they have come from, tbf.

We're not talking about thinking about it. We're talking about me agreeing with a point that revol made but pointing out that his last point wasn't consistent with the general thrust of his post.

 

[ViolentPanda]

The 'politics of envy' too! True colours shining through...

Dwyer bullshit bingo!

 

[littlebabyjesus]

But the implication, that someone who's on £30k a year in a comfortable white collar job is suffering the same kind of marginalization, deprivation and so on as those on the dole or struggling on minimum wage jobs is fucking laughable.

I totally agree. However, a skilled worker in a relatively secure factory job, or a train driver, say, is also not suffering that kind of marginalisation. Also, these things are probably far more fluid now than they have been in the past. I had a m/c upbringing but spent quite a few years either on the dole or in very badly paid work. Now, I'm in what would be described as a m/c job. People move up and down in these things - and I would say that in the last 50 years or so, there has been quite a bit of coming together: the 'insecure middle classes', of which I would say that I currently am a member, have grown enormously.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I think it's more the taking glee in the idea of a women's body being left to rot for aweek after a drug overdose, simply because she was rich.

I mean if it was Thatcher or someone like that you could see through a bit of hyperbole, but just some random rich person no one had heard of before they died, nah, that's pretty shitty.

To be fair, it was a random rich person who had married the descendent of the inventor of the world's most fiendish torture device.

 

[grit]

So really, what Marx was saying doesn't seen to map neatly to the modern world?

Whod a thunk it!

 

[ViolentPanda]

Burn him.

That's hardly fair.

If he is middle-class, wouldn't it be kinder to marinate him in a rough red wine, then toast him slowly over a juniper wood fire, basting him with a blend of olive oil, herbs and human fat, and finally honey-glazing him for the last 25 minutes of toasting?

 

[ViolentPanda]

Relying on others for your knowledge of Marx again Professor

Surely "associate professor"?

 

[Greebo]

lots of people who take drugs don't like to think about where they have come from, tbf.

I can think of at least one vegan orthorexic ecofreak who quite happily shoved as much coke cut with fuck knows what up his nose every week or so. Plank by name, plank by nature.

 

[Delroy Booth]

I totally agree. However, a skilled worker in a relatively secure factory job, or a train driver, say, is also not suffering that kind of marginalisation. Also, these things are probably far more fluid now than they have been in the past. I had a m/c upbringing but spent quite a few years either on the dole or in very badly paid work. Now, I'm in what would be described as a m/c job. People move up and down in these things - and I would say that in the last 50 years or so, there has been quite a bit of coming together: the 'insecure middle classes', of which I would say that I currently am a member, have grown enormously.

Yeah I know what you mean, totally. When I was a kid my family was pretty much working class, council house, free school meals, all the rest of it, then parents got better jobs and a mortgage and gradually Tony Blair made them middle-class so by the time i was 16 I was relatively comfortable and middle-class. Went to uni, graduated the year the Tories came to power, with a million young people unemployed and any prospect of me getting a masters or continuing my studies killed stone dead by tripling uni fee's, and slowly ever since I've been getting rammed back whence I came, culminating today where I'm just an absolute lumpen scumbag. I can't imagine my kids being in any way middle-class, put it that way.

There's also a contextual difference when I didn't notice 'til I'd started going out to London and stuff as I got older, which was I'd assumed by my late teens that I was a priviliged middle-class scumbag, with all the guilt that comes with it, until I spent some time in places like Shoreditch and one or two of the more gentrified boroughs in London, and fuck me, being middle-class from a small village up north is a very different thing to being middle-class from that sort of environment. Not just economically, but culturally and socially too. Weird experience that, on the one hand I got a perverse sense of pride from knowing that I wasn't as priviliged as I might've thought I was when I was still parochial and naive, but on the other hand there was a nagging feeling of disappointment that I didn't have the same sort of middle-class status as I thought I had. Weird how that sort of sly snobbery and status anxiety can creep in in such a short space of time.

 

[ViolentPanda]

So really, what Marx was saying doesn't seen to map neatly to the modern world?

Whod a thunk it!

Has anyone claimed that it does?

 

[pinkmonkey]

That's hardly fair.

If he is middle-class, wouldn't it be kinder to marinate him in a rough red wine, then toast him slowly over a juniper wood fire, basting him with a blend of olive oil, herbs and human fat, and finally honey-glazing him for the last 25 minutes of toasting?

Get Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall to do it? Then eat his nuts, possibly?

 

[ViolentPanda]

I can think of at least one vegan orthorexic ecofreak who quite happily shoved as much coke cut with fuck knows what up his nose every week or so. Plank by name, plank by nature.

A cunt is a cunt is a cunt.