If one paycheck is all that stands between half of the people and homelessness, can it really be called the “middle” class?
There was an article with a pretty compelling argument a while ago that basically said the true poverty line in the US is over 100.000$/year family income (when you look at what that number was originally supposed to measure). Below that you’re getting fucked left and right.
Every dollar a family earns between 40k and 100k makes them poorer, because it triggers benefit losses (like health care & child care) that exceed income gains.
So what the US reports as “the middle class” are actually the working poor
I was reading Michael Roberts’ blog the other day, and he pointed out something similar. The official calculations for inflation significantly understate it for various reasons. However, if you look at actual labor hours needed to cover the essentials of life, and you use the median income amount from 1950 (for the US), then that number comes out about $102k per year. Said another way, for a standard of living based on real life, to have the standard of the median American in 1950, you would need to earn over $100k today. But if you take that 1950 median income and just adjust it for official inflation, you only get to like $42k.
So I learned it this way:
Upper Class - can live a luxurious life without working at all, and even have domestic employees etc.
Middle Class - can live comfortably but only if they work
Lower class - cannot live comfortably even if they work, and can very easily end up homeless (no social safety net)
The dude who taught me this was my Sociology of Work teacher over twenty years ago.
This isn’t particularly helpful, though, as it doesn’t explain why these classes exist. Class traditionally refers to how we engage with societal production and distribution, like wage laborers, business owners, sole proprietors, artisans, etc. By focusing on the outcomes of this class distinctions, you obscure the mechanisms by which they persist and are reinforced.
Class traditionally
It only refers to how we engage with societal production in a handful of belief systems such as Marxism. These are different from how Anthropologists view class which is different from how sociologists view class and all of the above are different from how many older societies viewed class.
Marxism did not invent that class previously meant things like “serf, lord, slave, merchant, etc,” this was something Marx just used that everyone else was using. Marx developed class struggle further by developing dialectical and historical materialism, but did not invent this conception of class.
Marx overly focused on one criteria to describe class. It’s ok to accept ownership/working classes as a useful tool for understanding the world but other systems also offer useful lessons for understanding the world in different ways and contexts.
Marxism does not limit one’s understanding purely to production and distribution, though, I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Domenico Losurdo’s Class Struggle is a good read.
It’s helpful to divorce class from simple material wealth, and return to how we engage with production and distribution. The true “middle class” is the small business owner, in reality most people are working class.
Been waiting over a year!
My dudes, you have nothing to lose but your Chains.
So, workers of the world need to unite?
Hence why some of the US simply CAN’T protest. If they miss a single pay check-- or get fired for missing work-- they’re fucked. Insurance is also tired to work.
Financial slavery
Fuck it. Chips on the table, china taking over america would be a net positive at this point. I’ve never bought into the “country bad because ideology different” bullshit we’re fed here in the us. As I can see from here, just about any other large nation assuming control would bring me everything I ask my government for as a default.
Please, president Xi, the Statesian public yearns for liberation
Maybe the Chinese proletariat can launch a concurrent revolution to overthrow Xi.
Why would they do that? Over 90% of Chinese citizens support their government.
I didn’t seriously consider that they would just like I wouldn’t seriously consider White Americans in the 1950’s launching a revolution. China has high propaganda and they’re at the part of both industrialization and capitalism where average people see benefit from both.
China isn’t capitalist, nor is it an imperialist settler colony that gave 1950s white Statesians a better life. It’s a socialist country, the large firms and key industries are overwhelmingly publicly owned and the working classes are in charge of the state. A revolution would be devastating for the Chinese working classes.
China isn’t capitalist
That’s delusional
the working classes are in charge of the state
The party is in charge of the state. The working class have vanishingly little power.
A revolution would be devastating for the Chinese working classes.
That’s what the Ruling Class in every country says. Can’t let everyday people get too uppity
The CPC is a working class party, not a class in itself. In the PRC, public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, private ownership is relegated to the small and medium firms, which are about half sole proprietorships anyways.
The idea that the party is a distinct class and the idea that an economy where public ownership is principle is somehow capitalist both are contradictory to Marx and common sense, so I’m not sure where you’re coming from.
A revolution would result in bleak reaction and capitalists in charge of the state, this is the opposite of what the working class wants in China.
It’s genuinely sad to see people who have been so traumatized by living in an epicenter of capitalist profiteering, gaslighting propaganda, and government violence that they can’t imagine a society that doesn’t work that way. You think this is a normal way for a government to be, and you think the smart thing to do is assume everyone is like the US.
Trading late stage capitalism for mid stage capitalism and a pre-existing merger of state and corporate power doesn’t sound like a permanent fix. Also, deposing a strongman in favor a system that has reestablished it’s leadership as a strongman is not an improvement.
China is socialist, the large firms and key industries are publicly owned and the working class is in control of the state. They don’t have a “strongman,” just because Xi gets re-elected. Stability is good if public support is high.
They have a Strongman because Xi went to great efforts to sideline people or policies that served as a check to his power. Something that would have been unthinkable in China at any point after Mao and before Xi.
Do you have an example? The anti-corruption campaigns are immensely popular among the public in China, and they support the government.
Just years of reading. That you bring up the anti-corruption campaign means you’re at least familiar with allegations that Xi unevenly applied the campaign against his political opponents. As a side not, I’ll say the anti-corruption campaigns in China are definitely popular and also one clear situation where improvements in computer technology made a major advance in society and peoples quality of life. Corruption of low level officials was hard to root out when the people would be making complaints to other corrupt low level officials and risking retaliation in the process. Computer technology helped bypass that.
So I still don’t see any evidence of Xi being a “strongman,” but instead an extremely popular and influential leader.
You’re whole persona is pushing the party line and pushing back against any dissent. I didn’t expect you to see any evidence.
is xi santa now?
I’m not in/from the US. I haven’t been one paycheck away from homelessness since I was a student.
Enough savings to last half a year without income has always been a rule of thumb.
I go with 10 year rule of thumb
