How wealthy can I get before turning into Porky?

It's easier to flesh out you enemy as a person or group of persons rather than as a relationship between people.
ence why even here we have some kind of personnalization of capital in the form of Porky.

I think that tankie is trying to communicate. >>1260157

You can have as much money as you want,as long as you do not privately hold the means of production (unless you're the only worker using said MoP)

I think you should read capital

I own a hot dog stand and employ two guys to run it when I'm not around. Therefore I am porky?

So the general consensus is it's okay to sit on top of billions upon billions buying yachts and private beaches all I want as long as I don't employ anyone?

This thread needs some Orwell.

"The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made their living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets."

small time. you won't be gulag'd for it. or maybe you will, if you are a jerk to them.

You could also become an extremely successful author, actor, musician or professional athlete.

It's not about how much wealth you have. It's about how you attained that wealth. If you attained your wealth through the exploitation of workers you're a porky. If you attained your wealth by winning the lottery, you're not.

is that text from 1984?

This is incorrect, if you're renting property you're building capital because you have property you're doing nothing. You have capital (the building you're renting) that is building capital because someone is paying to live in it.

Banks are doing a similar things, lending out money (capital) to gain more capital back.

Yep

Not always. Innovation or delivering a good product will net you a decent amount of money. If you open a restaurant and it runs very well and open a 2nd and it runs also well you can continue to build from there. Eventually you own a chain and the restaurants start paying for themselves.

The lack of reward for innovation goes hand in hand with the planned market economy from communism where there is no innovation. Under a communist system people are usually put into places according to their skill. Though there is no motivation to innovate in anything, which leads to the party deciding what needs to be innovated as part of the planned market economy. A planned market economy would only work if all factors in the economy can be accounterd for, but they can't. The planned market economy was the biggest flaw of communism.

A single person cannot operate two restaurants all on their own. Either it's running as a cooperative and frankly they're not getting rich off that even if they could still do quite well for themselves, or they're exploiting the surplus value of employees.

This. Class is not the number of zeros in your bank account. It's your relationship to the MoP.

What does this mean in a modern context, where very few people directly and individually own a machine or factory outright? Well, stock in a corporation is a form of socialized ownership. Does an individual own a sufficient "share" of the MoP, either through direct property or through these investments, that they need not rely in any form on selling their labor power? This is what defines a porky. In this sense I am using the "opposite" of the defining character of the proletarian, that is, the reliance on selling labor power to others.

There are different ways of defining "petit-bourgeoisie," but the one I find most practical is those people who extract surplus value and whose subsistence on the MoP they hold depends integrally on an input of their own labor. Say, a small business owner who is currently unable to hire someone to perform his current administrative/organizational role within the business, a technically specialized startup owner who can't currently hire a replacement for himself, etc.

Don't worry about becoming Porky, it's not your spooky moral duty to reject an opportunity to better your situation which presents itself. Engels was a porky and he was based as fuck. You're in a better position to fight for socialism the more MoP you own as bourgeois private property tbh, though you do acquire a significant conflict of interest and can't expect/anticipate others to rely on your supporting the cause. There's a distinct, non-zero chance that the entire bourgeoisie is comprised of mutually oblivious crypto-commies

You could actually make a compelling argument that A-list movie stars, professional athletes, and popular musicians are members of the proletariat, despite generally being wealthy.

Are they, though?
I view it more as a symbiotic relationship with Porky.

While lotteries in some states are a scam and the state doesn't pay out, if people get together and decide to pool money in exchange for gambling on a shit ton of money then it's fine. Just because an idea can be manipulated and used for a nefarious purpose doesn't mean the idea is inherently bad.

Most of them will make various investments and become "independently wealthy," and then continue their career as a matter of self-enrichment/fulfillment, fame-seeking, genuine enjoyment, etc. "We already have socialism for the bourgeoisie" comes to mind.

That is owning capital and also exploiting the surplus value of workers, mate.
If you are a lender you make money off of others people labour because you buy their factory and they slowly buy it back. If you rent out houses you get money simply for owning houses, not for doing labour.

This, but if you have such masses of wealth you would have to store it in a giant vault, because if you put it on the bank and get interest you engage in lending and thus exploitation via the bank.

...

What class do lawyers belong to?

By your own logic, anyone who deposit their money in a bank is a capitalist.

Kek, I had a teacher in high school who actually believed this, because your 401k has assets or something, so everyone's Captain Kirk

it's not a matter of wealth, but rather a matter of how you gained your wealt.

If, for example, you ,and perhaps a number of other people, decide to start a mine, by buying (or creating) the means of production of the mine together, working the mine yourselves and sharing equally the profits, you are technically not a porky, despite having a chance to become rich from the said profits.

If you buy/have a mine and hire some workers that you pay with a portion of the profits while the surplus goes to you, you may be on your way to become a porkie.

I mean that's how I see it.

...

youtube.com/watch?v=_1v_EcjeIkg

kore wa

Being bourgoies or proletariat is mainly defined by how much of your income comes from where. 99% of all workers have a mortgage so they lose money to exploitation, bourgoiesie have their main income be from exploitation.

Owning a $200 in stock while slaving away at a job being exploited does not make you bourgoies, but having 40 million in the bank and getting 1% interest on that makes you bourgoies, because the labour you do is probably not going to be worth 400k a year.

IE I wanted to explain a technicality that would be a major point if you are super rich but dont technically employ people or own property. Having masses of money in the bank and getting interest on it makes you an exploiter, even if the bank does it for you.

Pick one, you can't rape something dead.

They, like, do both, each at different times

>it's wealth is not an indirect indicator of class arguments again
how can one become wealthy in a capitalist society without exploiting anyone in the process?
inb4 lottery winner

1. Class is not defined by wealth but your relation to the MoP.
2. Conciousness is not solely determined by class affilation alone.

2.1 Case in point:
a) Lacking class conciousness and even trade unionist organisation of the workers.
b) Bourgeoise revolutionaries (Marx, Engels).

Yeah no, fine, it's an indirect indicator of class, like how GDP, stock prices, and unemployment are indirect indicators of "economic strength."
You can generally assume most/all people beyond certain levels of wealth are bourgies because of the ease of investing and the material incentives that basically "force" them to, but simply equating "has money" with "is a porky" conceals the mechanics of class rule and the class structure of society. So while the emphasis on "class isn't the size of your bank account" may seem overly pedantic, it's an important distinction nonetheless.

but wealth IS defined by class relations

where is the line?
ignoring wealth can lead you to enlist CEOs into proletariat

If you don't invest money in improving poor's life you already a porky. Everyone who preserves the wealth for himself is a porky. Why do you think dekulakization was a thing?

Really, read on lenin and his dekulakization and WHY it was done.

My grandfather still writes down the lottery numbers in a notebook everyday. I don't know what he does with them. I'm pretty sure he never goes back and reviews the numbers, he just has decades of lottery number notebooks somewhere.

Are you a faglord? Stalin on the contrary criticized dekulakization.

NEETS are the vanguard and true moral soviet

Fucking Holla Forums infiltrators, i swear.

Having 40 million in the bank does not make you a porky because of you keeping your money and getting interest on it in a bank though. It makes you a porky because there is no way to amass that kind of capital without exploiting your fellow citizens. The porky in the scenario is the bank who deals with your money and pays you back a small fee in order to keep up with the inflation rate.

To some degree, certainly. I'm just being "nitpicky" to be more accurate.

The line is extremely fuzzy and ill-defined. That's the whole point. It's a fluid boundary because class is based on what your wealth is doing, yeah? Different people experience different material pressures on how to use their wealth and respond differently in turn to these pressures. That's exactly why looking directly at wealth in itself isn't particularly useful, and we base our theory on class.
Amusing as it sounds, some are.

Inheritance is the big, glaring one.

No, you can't.

Proletariat sells their labour-time. Not product. One of it's defining features is replaceability - it is exactly this that allows Capitalists to exploit it.

As you might notice, A-list stars are not replaceable. You can't just fire a star and replace it with somebody from the street - even if this somebody has the same skills/qualities.

This alone should provide sufficient warning that A-list is not Proletariat and is not selling their time.

Should you take a closer look at economic relations, you'll see that - however weird this sounds - it is the fame that is the Capital (MoP, yes) of A-list. It's not just possible, but even common for a movie star to have a body double that has the same (or better) looks and skills to do their job.

At the very least, stars are Petit-Bourgeois.

Nice idealism, but big funds can often be put in the bank for interest rates higher than inflation.