It’s never happened before because the working class has never been unified nationwide before. Soybean farmers in Utah are not connected to teachers in Boston or steelworkers in Pittsburgh or auto manufacturers in Michigan or nurses in San Diego. There’s never been a singular cause that affected all of those groups of people at the same time.
If it ever could happen, it would be because the President was a colossal dipshit who fucked every aspect of the economy across the country, except that would almost certainly cause the legislature to put an end to such rampant and corrupt tyranny.
The last time people across the country organized general strike of sorts the government went into action to make a law that made it illegal for unions to organize such a thing.
And with this corrupt Congress and this idiot president and this ridiculous SCOTUS, I think it’s likely they will worm their way into making a law that makes it illegal for any citizen to strike for any reason.
Trump already illegally outlawed government unions. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was done about it.
Congress says: that’s illegal now!! Go back to work!
Why the fuck would we? Literally what could possibly convince people that the gov is going to arrest a million people for striking? Genuinely, how braindead are people that that is a concern?
I would suggest you not underestimate just how unbelievably stupid our current president is and how likely he is to actually use the United States army against its own people regardless of how legal or illegal it actually is. Not to mention his sycophantic Congress that will blithely stand by and let him do whatever the fuck he wants. This is what corruption looks like.
And its donors haven’t felt it yet. Or if they have, they’re pretty sure they can buy up the wreckage after it all fails. Like they did after every other recession and depression since the 70s.
There’s never been a singular cause that affected all of those groups of people at the same time.
The attack on Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both pretty unifying. The former had an immediate and unambiguous opponent with Imperial Japan. 9/11 took weeks and months to figure out what happened and who did it, so it didn’t have as immediate a response.
For sure, there have been events that affected all Americans in various ways, good and bad, but the context of the conversation is events that would encourage a general labor strike. The moon landing, world wars, the Great Depression, the Macarena, big things happen. I probably could have been clearer by saying that nothing in history has unified the American working class as a singular political group to use our power as a labor force to exert pressure to stop oligarchical abuses by means of a general strike, but that seems overly pedantic.
“Farmer” has come to mean the corporate owner of fields in which crops are grown, rather than the people waking up at the ass crack of dawn to tend to the fields and bring in the harvest.
“Farm workers” are now the ones doing all the labor.
Small business owners do labor too, but that doesn’t make them working class. Workers don’t own shit, but these farmers own capital and land and directly profit from their own labor rather than being forced to sell their labor on the market.
It’s a social class, defined by their relation to the means of production.
Being working class doesn’t just mean you perform work. It’s a social class defined by the relation to the means of production.
Soy farmers in the US own their fields, own their equipment, set their own hours, and directly profit from selling commodities on the market. They’re small business owners, they are not workers. Workers don’t own or control shit, they sell their labor to someone else who actually owns capital and land. Workers toil under a boss and soy farmers do not, they are their own boss.
Yeah, the guy who owns the farm that borders my yard is just some dude with a full time job. He spends a couple days driving a big tractor thing planting in the spring, and several more days in the fall driving a different big tractor thing around to harvest it. Soybeans and corn on rotation.
Farmers do plenty of work besides driving their tractor around, but class relations are defined by their relations to property and capital and profit rather than how much work they do. He owns the land, and the tractor, and reaps all the profit. He’s small business owner, and his politics probably align with other small business owners.
Yeah, there’s certainly a fair petite bourgeois population among farmers, but I think you overestimate its size. Many farmers might own the land… if it weren’t still under morgage to the bank. The tractor is almost certainly also still on loan from the dealership since the same “trade in for new, better equipment” scam is as prevalent there as it is for personal vehicles. The corn and especially soybeans aren’t something that can be sold directly at scale (farmers’ markets can only support so much) unlike dairy which you can theoretically turn to regional groceries for – you’re selling to one of a small number of processors and aggregators, and if they decide they don’t need as much as you sold them last year you’re left scrabbling for something to do with a lot of worthless product. At the end of the year, most of the profit has gone right back to the financiers rather than to the farmer themself.
The evident situation is different for a farmer than for a factory worker, but tenant farmers are proletarian, and modern commercial farming is often closer to tenant farming than it’s advertised as being. The financial systems nowdays (especially around farming) are set up to give the trappings of small business ownership, without the degree of self-determination that came with that status back when the foundational theory was being written.
You’ve basically defined all business owners as working class if they rent their storefronts or owe money to a bank.
But a small business owner that pays rents or loans is still not selling their labor to someone else. They own the full surplus value of their labor and then can use the profits they generate from their business to pay rents and loans. That’s the key difference. The fact that petite bourgeoisie are at the whims of the big bourgeoisie does not actually change the fact that their class interests align against the working class. There’s a reason farmers, like all small business owners, are so reactionary and anti-worker and anti-tax and anti-regulation and pro-business.
EDIT All that said? Your argument is actually the basis for Yanis Varoufakis’s technofeudalism theory. As he explains it, rents are triumphing over profits and so the feudalists (banks, tech firms) are able to capture business owners into loans and rents and feudal market places where they are unable to generate profits anymore. They’re still not working class, but more like wealthy landed peasantry paying taxes to their fief. That would actually open up opportunities for alliances between workers and farmers, because class antagonisms have changed.
I disagree. They’re petite bourgeoisie and their class interests are still aligned with the ruling class, and the “feudalists” are just monopoly capital, but it’s an interesting theory. I recommend reading the book, it’s not that long.
But they own their labor. They don’t have to sell their labor to someone else to access land or capital or markets.
A small business owner may derive value from their own labor but that doesn’t make them working class. The important thing is whether they own their own means of production, or they have to sell their labor and be exploited to create surplus value.
It’s never happened before because the working class has never been unified nationwide before. Soybean farmers in Utah are not connected to teachers in Boston or steelworkers in Pittsburgh or auto manufacturers in Michigan or nurses in San Diego. There’s never been a singular cause that affected all of those groups of people at the same time.
If it ever could happen, it would be because the President was a colossal dipshit who fucked every aspect of the economy across the country, except that would almost certainly cause the legislature to put an end to such rampant and corrupt tyranny.
Right?
The last time people across the country organized general strike of sorts the government went into action to make a law that made it illegal for unions to organize such a thing.
And with this corrupt Congress and this idiot president and this ridiculous SCOTUS, I think it’s likely they will worm their way into making a law that makes it illegal for any citizen to strike for any reason.
Trump already illegally outlawed government unions. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was done about it.
The people strike.
Congress says: that’s illegal now!! Go back to work!
Why the fuck would we? Literally what could possibly convince people that the gov is going to arrest a million people for striking? Genuinely, how braindead are people that that is a concern?
I would suggest you not underestimate just how unbelievably stupid our current president is and how likely he is to actually use the United States army against its own people regardless of how legal or illegal it actually is. Not to mention his sycophantic Congress that will blithely stand by and let him do whatever the fuck he wants. This is what corruption looks like.
Right?
no, the official party platform of the GOOP is “whatever Drumpf says”.
this party also controls the legislature
And its donors haven’t felt it yet. Or if they have, they’re pretty sure they can buy up the wreckage after it all fails. Like they did after every other recession and depression since the 70s.
The attack on Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both pretty unifying. The former had an immediate and unambiguous opponent with Imperial Japan. 9/11 took weeks and months to figure out what happened and who did it, so it didn’t have as immediate a response.
For sure, there have been events that affected all Americans in various ways, good and bad, but the context of the conversation is events that would encourage a general labor strike. The moon landing, world wars, the Great Depression, the Macarena, big things happen. I probably could have been clearer by saying that nothing in history has unified the American working class as a singular political group to use our power as a labor force to exert pressure to stop oligarchical abuses by means of a general strike, but that seems overly pedantic.
You think soy bean farmers are working class?
Yes, farmers do labor to produce things. That makes them workers.
“Farmer” has come to mean the corporate owner of fields in which crops are grown, rather than the people waking up at the ass crack of dawn to tend to the fields and bring in the harvest.
“Farm workers” are now the ones doing all the labor.
Small business owners do labor too, but that doesn’t make them working class. Workers don’t own shit, but these farmers own capital and land and directly profit from their own labor rather than being forced to sell their labor on the market.
It’s a social class, defined by their relation to the means of production.
I’m seriously curious, why do you imply they aren’t?
Being working class doesn’t just mean you perform work. It’s a social class defined by the relation to the means of production.
Soy farmers in the US own their fields, own their equipment, set their own hours, and directly profit from selling commodities on the market. They’re small business owners, they are not workers. Workers don’t own or control shit, they sell their labor to someone else who actually owns capital and land. Workers toil under a boss and soy farmers do not, they are their own boss.
Interesting. I can certainly see the distinction. Does that make them part of the middle class?
They’re basically small business owners.
Yeah, the guy who owns the farm that borders my yard is just some dude with a full time job. He spends a couple days driving a big tractor thing planting in the spring, and several more days in the fall driving a different big tractor thing around to harvest it. Soybeans and corn on rotation.
Farmers do plenty of work besides driving their tractor around, but class relations are defined by their relations to property and capital and profit rather than how much work they do. He owns the land, and the tractor, and reaps all the profit. He’s small business owner, and his politics probably align with other small business owners.
Yeah, there’s certainly a fair petite bourgeois population among farmers, but I think you overestimate its size. Many farmers might own the land… if it weren’t still under morgage to the bank. The tractor is almost certainly also still on loan from the dealership since the same “trade in for new, better equipment” scam is as prevalent there as it is for personal vehicles. The corn and especially soybeans aren’t something that can be sold directly at scale (farmers’ markets can only support so much) unlike dairy which you can theoretically turn to regional groceries for – you’re selling to one of a small number of processors and aggregators, and if they decide they don’t need as much as you sold them last year you’re left scrabbling for something to do with a lot of worthless product. At the end of the year, most of the profit has gone right back to the financiers rather than to the farmer themself.
The evident situation is different for a farmer than for a factory worker, but tenant farmers are proletarian, and modern commercial farming is often closer to tenant farming than it’s advertised as being. The financial systems nowdays (especially around farming) are set up to give the trappings of small business ownership, without the degree of self-determination that came with that status back when the foundational theory was being written.
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via @[email protected]
You’ve basically defined all business owners as working class if they rent their storefronts or owe money to a bank.
But a small business owner that pays rents or loans is still not selling their labor to someone else. They own the full surplus value of their labor and then can use the profits they generate from their business to pay rents and loans. That’s the key difference. The fact that petite bourgeoisie are at the whims of the big bourgeoisie does not actually change the fact that their class interests align against the working class. There’s a reason farmers, like all small business owners, are so reactionary and anti-worker and anti-tax and anti-regulation and pro-business.
EDIT All that said? Your argument is actually the basis for Yanis Varoufakis’s technofeudalism theory. As he explains it, rents are triumphing over profits and so the feudalists (banks, tech firms) are able to capture business owners into loans and rents and feudal market places where they are unable to generate profits anymore. They’re still not working class, but more like wealthy landed peasantry paying taxes to their fief. That would actually open up opportunities for alliances between workers and farmers, because class antagonisms have changed.
I disagree. They’re petite bourgeoisie and their class interests are still aligned with the ruling class, and the “feudalists” are just monopoly capital, but it’s an interesting theory. I recommend reading the book, it’s not that long.
The value these small farmers obtain is still derived from their labor. They aren’t passively owning a profit creating assets.
But they own their labor. They don’t have to sell their labor to someone else to access land or capital or markets.
A small business owner may derive value from their own labor but that doesn’t make them working class. The important thing is whether they own their own means of production, or they have to sell their labor and be exploited to create surplus value.