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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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chapotraphouse
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It's farcical to imagine a tony professor and a warehouse worker hold the same relationship to capital and society. If the entire powerbase of the capitalist class in human terms were just the 200,000 car dealership owners, 15,000 bank owners, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, they would be eaten overnight. There must be a broader base of support built through material conceptions and reinforced through superstructural elements or "social signifiers".
These two groups do not "have the same relationship to the means of production." one section is exploited in the main, the other is mixed and facilitates greater exploitation of others in exchange for security, comfort, and social prestige.
Where exactly is the cut off line for 'middle class' then?
White collar work is pretty thoroughly proletarianized.
I'm not here to point out a specific point of delineation; a mound of sand is not a few grains of sand even if the point where it becomes a mound is undefined. The important thing is to work to understand the structural forces on different segments of society. If the proletariat is just the proletariat, where do reactionaries arise? Where does the tendency to social chauvinism?
You correctly point out that white-collar workers are under a greater or lesser degree of exploitation at different times. Now as the empire weakens, they are going to be squeezed more. There interests vacillate but you can't see and act on that by sticking your head in the sand and declaring all workers are equivalent.
I have yet to see a revolutionary organization in my city that is not terminally white and from a substantially different labor background than the people in my city. That gap does not exist for no reason! As marxists, we must examine the problem and work to solve it. We must build a movement of the broad masses and not just the intelligentsia.