Class Ambiguity

What class do the following people belong to?

1. Independent service providers with no employee of their own (eg bookshop owners, computer repairmen, commission artists)
2. Highly educated and skilled professionals (eg lawyers, physicians)
3. Rank-and-file managers (eg HR dept employees)
4. Top-level managers (eg CEOs)

1. Petit-bourgeois, proletariat, proletariat (we are cultural creatures, art always has been and always will be part of being human)
2. Both are proletariat assuming they do not own the firms at which they're employed
3. I don't know what those are
4. Class traitors, like cops but much wealthier

1. petite-bourg
2. proles
3. proles
4. if they are hired by shareholders proles. if they own their own shares, bourg.

How can someone be a petit-bourgeois while not hiring any employee?

So a manager, even a CEO can actually be a prole? Even though they represent the interests of the company and enforce its policies?

1. Petite-bourgeoisie
2. I once saw that classified as non-productive labour by one of the OG Marxposters. Generally applied to de-facto Service Industries related to the superstructure rather than the material reproduction of daily life.
Does NOT apply to false "service industries" like retail, cashiers, waiters, who are just a more elaborate form of manufacturing, often artisanal and handicrafted, but still manufacturing.
3. Labour aristocrats. (still technically proletariat)
4. Labour aristocrats.

these are literally hiring employees
okay, I'd say this are proles actually.

yes, but 99% of the time they are shareholders so I'd just call them bourg.

You can't be a prole if you get income from anywhere other than wages, or something resembling wages.
If you're selling finished goods and services in the open market you're a either a peasant, a craftsman or a petite-bourg. And the former two are in the tendency of vanishing obviously, as they are leftover from pre-capitalist productive relations.

Sure, some do — which make them petit-bourgeois. But I'm thinking of small bookshops with one person managing the entire business all by themselves.

But they don't get any surplus value extracted from them, do they?

(Assuming you're the same poster)
What if you don't have a secure wage, but still survive by selling your labor?
How does a computer repairer differ from a day laborer? How is an artist that lives off commissions (which involve selling labor) not a prole?

What the hell is this?

by that deffinition Über employees aren’t prols.

Let's give this a try.

Proles if not trying to expand

Depends on the prestige of their work. For example E-Doc lawyers and Street Clinic Docs would be proles

STEMs more than anything.

Porkies generally though it would be tougher if you asked about nobility instead.

lmao the so-called "Marxist" (most marxists would screech in horror if they knew marx used the term middle-class) definitions of class weenies here use are such pathetic abstractions. Just lacking ownership of capital tells you fucking nothing about how people are going to act out in society if some of it's richest members take in a salary.

What's the class of, say, the owner of an e-sports team, like Andrey "Reynad" Yanyuk? On one hand, he doesn't really control the means to produce anything whatsoever, but on the other hand, he does pay his teams wages and shit. But then again, he does get his money through buying other people's stuff, slapping his logo on it, and selling it again at a higher price, so he's not really "exploiting" anyone but dumbass consumers willing to pay extra money for things because his logo is on it, and Marxist analysis doesn't really talk about exploitation of consumers.

You're not selling your labour, you're selling your produce. You're the equivalent of a medieval craftsman, or in modern terms, a petite-bourg. You could say you're still exploited because you still have to discipline yourself through the law of value in order to survive in a market economy, kind of like co-ops. But you're not having your surplus extracted, you're exploiting yourself.

No, actually they're full-on bourg. There is no point in softening my words when the entire post was about hard-definitions.

How does debt interact with class? If someone owns property and makes money through extracting surplus value but has enough debt that the money they make off non-wage sources isn't enough to pay the debt (or even is exactly equal), does that make them suddenly proletarian?

Why not just keep it simple: Capitalists are net-exploiters of surplus value, while proles are having the surplus value of their labor net-exploited. (While ignoring for now the added conditions of imperialism)

This is one of those places where I think an Energy Theory of Value would work better. You can explain value in terms of joules and other form of physical work, while also making better sense of 'dead labor' and related concepts.

This is a pretty interesting point that I've never seen raised before. There are a lot of problems with the way class is described here.
For example: What about a 'prole' living in Luxemburg or Qatar, who isn't an owner of the means of production, but nevertheless makes much than the socially necessary labor time would allow under a labor voucher system? I.e. profiting from western imperialism or - in the case of Qatar - outright slavery?
Would they be a prole? Petite-bourgeois? Bourgeois? Where do you draw the line? If I am 'prole' that makes a $100,000 when a worker in another country would earn just 1/100th of that, am I still a 'prole'?

If you don't own property which provides you with the capital that obviates the necessity of work then you're a prole, regardless of how much or how little you make.

This technical classification does not in any conceivable way confer or imply a necessary identification with or support for this or that class. What's more important than what class you or someone currently might be classified into is one's regard for the existence of the class system. Richard D Wolff for example has authored several books, the royalties from which, say, provide him with such income that he no longer has to gain employment to acquire his necessaries. You could indeed identify this individual as bourgeois or specifically petite-bourgeois, but that doesn't really have any bearing on the nature or validity of his work, such that it is.

You can argue all day about the taxonomy of one's social station, but we live in times where you have severely exploited proles that consider themselves Capitalists and would violently work to prevent the supplanting of that system, and the very well-to-do that would violently support the abolition of the class system and all which that entails. At the end of the day it doesn't matter if they're a "prole" or a "bourgeois," what matters is what side of the barricades they're on.

I think when you get down to it it's not really the case that people either "capital" or are "capitaled". That's totally fine, IMO; it's possible to recognize the inherent injustice, inefficiency, and alienation produced by a society that allows "capitaling" and want therefore to end it without saying anything about the "proletariat" "winning" against the "bourgeoisie".

read Weber, Ehrenreich and Bourdieu you sub 80 Autism Level tankie fucks

Ah yes, to be a true proletarian computer repairman or artist you must go out of your way to convince someone to start a business so they can exploit your work, or else you're exploiting others by doing all of the work yourself. This was Marx's dream.

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