We still have the haves and have nots and over the last forty years it has pushed the wrong direction again. Yes there's shades of grey between the two but I'm not much interested in those who thought Marxism used to apply to them but not anymore.
Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class?
- Thread starter brogdale
- Start date
That’s not what I said in any way, shape or form. I’m merely discussing the ways in which the 150 year-old theory of Marx is potentially incomplete, and needs to be supplemented by an understanding of the last 150 years’ worth of academic work in the social sciences.
To take one small but concrete example, working-class people on average behave in ways that disadvantage them as a class — things like higher smoking rates, high gambling rates and higher rates of intragroup violence all actively contribute towards preventing the working-class as a group from gaining items of social value. You need to fit that behaviour into your model — you need to explain why it happens and what the consequences are, including how these things both feed into the hierarchical structure and are fed by it. Marxism isn’t really designed for that kind of thing, other than to label such actions as epiphenomena of the wider economic relations to power. But that explanation is incomplete. It just describes how oppression is done to people, it ignores how it is reproduced by people themselves. You’re never going to have a realistic chance of overturning the social order without understanding the latter as well as the former.
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Serge Forward
Just enjoyin' my coffee.
They're not the boss but they are the enemy.
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
Gary Simons, the YouTuber and former City trader makes the point that the rich are going to continue to buy up property and this will put home ownership out of the reach of most people.
(He is a reformist but has some good insights into economics imo).
I guess people who inherit a house might be an exception to this but maybe not if you have siblings and inherit a third of a house outside the south east.
That points to an increase in the private rented sector to me. And presumably the next step is mega landlords buying up the small fish.
(He is a reformist but has some good insights into economics imo).
I guess people who inherit a house might be an exception to this but maybe not if you have siblings and inherit a third of a house outside the south east.
That points to an increase in the private rented sector to me. And presumably the next step is mega landlords buying up the small fish.
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
Regardless of whether landlords are bosses and renters are working class, anti-landlord stuff is a pretty easy thing to unite people at the sharp end.
Novara Media will flog you a “hate landlords” baseball cap to go with your “literally a communist” t-shirt.
Novara Media will flog you a “hate landlords” baseball cap to go with your “literally a communist” t-shirt.
oryx
Sitting on the bok of the day
That's bang on IMHO. Marx is (absolutely deservedly) a titanic figure on the Left and while his analysis and theories are hugely influential (again deservedly) that doesn't mean they should be unassailable, or immune from accusations of being outdated.
Elpenor
Dancing as fast as I can
I expect this to happen over the next 20 years or so (particularly if we see a house price crash), and most likely backed by a private equity firm.
ska invita
back on the other side
Obviously. Recognising that is not chapter and verse Marxism though
Where's the difference though? Keep the money flowing in through being a well behaved productive unit or you're out on your ear. Same as what the boss says.
Wasn't it that they defined exploitation as the creation of surplus value? It's central to the definition of capitalism as a distinct mode of production, it doesn't mean that other forms of wealth extraction or oppression don't co-exist.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Isn't it about how surplus value is extracted through your labour if you have a boss, and that landlords don't extract surpus value in the same way? They can increase the rent, but that's not tied to your productivity in work and it isn't surplus value. It's a different process and different relationship in the economic system.
There's probably one of those 'C>M>C x MoP - Vc + Cc / price of a cow' things that explains it somewhere.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Either I've fucked up or you don't understand me. 
Animated gifs?
Animated gifs?
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Either I've fucked up or you don't understand me.
It was in response to 'Marx overlooked it'. Sorry shit joke!
I'll leave this for others to discuss as I feel somewhat out of my depth there. I do feel that things are getting rapidly worse for the new generation of workers though but I'll leave it at that.
There can be no doubt that things are getting rapidly worse. And I don’t have an answer for it, either. At some really basic level, it has to come down to a thing that changes institutional facts. These are things that wouldn’t exist if societies didn’t conceive them — laws, finance, corporations, kings. But from the individual perspective, they are absolutely as real and concrete as air or water. As the Freemen idiots soon discover when they try to behave as if they could just wish them away. So the only way to change an institutional fact is if everybody, all at once stops believing in it. That takes a convincing enough new narrative. It takes something inspirational and inevitable. Fuck knows what though.
Yeah, I read something recently that someone here recommended (can't remember who, sorry) which is probably the basics to everyone else but was pretty new to me and made sense. That we all reproduce our own collective (I'm probably going off beam here) conditions by continuing to perform them. I guess that's why the ruling class promotes individualism. It fears collectivism from below.
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
I guess there is a point that capitalism can accommodate all kinds of living arrangements but not a fundamental challenge to the boss/worker antagonism.
It's harder to tell now because the Universal Credit roll out has mangled the statistics, but last time I looked into it - around 2014/15 - there were five million households (not people) in the UK claiming Housing Benefit, comprising of unemployed, sick & disabled people, some pensioners (about a million I think) and the low waged. This group could reasonably assumed to be the poor, as in no income or a low enough income to qualify for benefits and who are tenants, not home owners. In addition there were about 5 million households claiming working tax credits - there will be some overlap with housing benefit claimants here, but a large chunk of this group would be home owners, probably still paying mortgages on a low or lowish wage. These numbers have fallen largely because of the shift to UC and the Tax Credit system becoming less generous for better paid workers.
There's just over 21 million households of working age currently, 5.6 million of them on Universal Credit and 1.4 million Tax Credits claimants, so a third of working age households are on some kind of benefit indicating a low income and therefore pretty undeniably economically working class. I suspect the relatively well paid working class may be much lower in numbers than assumed and many would actually fall into the PB/middle class brackets - being small business owners or lower paid professionals like social workers, junior teachers etc rather than traditional working class. I'm sure we have all known a tradesperson or other person in a traditionally working class job who's raking it in but it's actually pretty far from the norm.
But what are all the people buying all the houses in London doing for a living? They can't all be Capital investments.
Raheem
Well-Known Member
I think it's actually reasonably common to be a home owner, a business owner and even to have modest investments, and still be claiming benefits. People can be well off one year and struggling the next.
Raheem
Well-Known Member
All houses are someone's capital investment.
You can't get the housing element of Universal Credit, or Housing Benefit if you're paying a mortgage anymore, you can get a repayable loan, after a year which only goes towards the interest. And benefits start being cut if you have over £6000 in assets/savings/investments and you can't claim at all if you have over £16,000.
(I see your point, there's noise in all the numbers, but I doubt there are many outright home-owners on benefits and those who are self employed but earn so little they still qualify for benefits I would argue are precarious workers rather than PB or middle class)
Raheem
Well-Known Member
And so, it would probably be better to look at just HB/UC-HB if you want a rough figure as to how many people there are with low incomes and no significant assets.
Athos
Well-Known Member
I'm not sure that's true. 'Capital' isn't a synonym for 'property'; it's property that's used in production (through being worked on by labour). That said, I do think ownership of property which could be used as capital puts someone closer to the bourgeoisie than workers. But the majority of homeowners don't have sufficient equity that they'd be better off by selling their home and investing the proceeds, given they'd still have housing costs. Obviously, having equity in a home gives people a different stake in the economy, but, as long as they still have to sell their labour to survive, I'm unconvinced that it's as fundamental as some seem to think.
That's why I went back to 2014/15 to look at HB, which back then was about five million households. Skimming the latest UC stats they say 68% of claims include the housing element, so about 3.8 million. I can't be bothered to look at how many current legacy Housing Benefit claims there are because that involves using the impenetrable DWP's Stat-Xplore tool (presumably the spreadsheets and text summaries they used to publish made it too easy to look up information). But I'd guess the total number on housing related benefits hasn't moved much from the 5 million or so in 2015.
A380
How do I change this 'custom title' thing then?
I can’t believe we are working towards a definition of working class that includes ‘must be in receipt of state benefits’ that’s almost as batshit as the ‘bucket ownership theory’.
Just read Capital..it’s not actually that hard to get your head round it. Once you have read it and understood it then, and only then, start arguing how Marx is out of date…
Just read Capital..it’s not actually that hard to get your head round it. Once you have read it and understood it then, and only then, start arguing how Marx is out of date…
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