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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

Collapsing all identities into labour and capitalists is a nice Marxist rhetorical move. But it makes no sense at all. People move freely into becoming labourers and capital owners. There are managers who kinda fit in the middle. There are CEO's who have to answer to the Board.

Marx tried but failed in his effort to collapse identities into two buckets.

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> People move freely into becoming labourers and capital owners.

Really? How would that happen? Maybe with a small loan of a million dollars...

Okay, I'd like to move into capital ownership, please. Can you point me in the direction of large enough quantities of capital I can freely obtain?

Y combinator

I'm sorry to break it to you, but they neither give it away for nothing, nor do they give it to anyone. That's not my definition of "freely".

ok fair i meant freely in a different way. but you get my point..

The argument is that there isn't true class mobility because the theoretical ways to move upwards are in practice unattainable for most people. The way of getting capital you describe is essentially "have the existing capital owners subsidize you", which handwaves away the difficulty of getting that to happen. What portion of venture capital funding goes to people who aren't already from above average socioeconomic backgrounds?

Getting "the existing capital owners to subsidize you" isn't unattainable either, though, even if rare. If 90% comes from the middle or upper classes [1], 10% must come from the lower class, which isn't favorable to a "unattainable" goal, "just" hard.

[1] https://www.kauffman.org/reports/the-anatomy-of-an-entrepren...

I think you might have misinterpreted what I meant (which in fairness was phrased somewhat ambiguously). It's attainable for some people, but "most people" as a block can't do it; the amount of capital available for them is not large enough for a majority of people to become capital owners in any meaningful way. My point isn't that it's impossible for an individual, but that when there's a fairly low upper limit on how many people are allowed to move between being a worker and being a capital owner, it's at best misleading to refer to say "people freely move" between the two. A small subset of people do, but in general, no, people do not.

A better term might be "ambiguous". There are multiple ways of reading the expression "freely" here. Some may see it as "it's really trivial to do it", or "it's hard, but it's doable", or "it's legal to do it", for example. Some class systems don't have any legal way of moving up, at all.

They were explicitly saying that categorizing them separately "makes no sense". If it's hard but doable or legal to do it, that would not be a reasonable explanation for saying that the distinction doesn't make sense. Either it's trivial to do it, or there is some legitimate difference between the two groups, and having words for it makes perfect sense.

I can easily melt ice into water, but for most solids, that's very hard for me to do. It still makes sense for me to categorize ice as a solid though, rather than saying that there's no reason to categorize it separately from other liquids.

Sorry for the late response, just read this.

Their original complaint wasn't about defining these groups (one can debate that classes are supposed to be more rigid than this), but the "collapse of all indenties" into these two buckets - which material dialectics calls for. It's a criticism specific towards Marxism and its notion of "no war but class war".

A common but boring example: if you max out your 401k each year, it is likely that your investment returns will eventually be larger than your salary, allowing you to stop working if you want.

That wouldn't make you a billionaire or anything, but it would make you someone who primarily relies on capital rather than labor for income. Your economic interests would align much closer to a billionaire than to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck.

"Common" is doing some heavy lifting there. You're still talking about the top 2-3% of earners (roughly, 10m 401k-maxers out of 350m Americans, based on data from Vanguard and napkin math).

> People move freely into becoming labourers and capital owners

What? How do I freely become a capital owner? Do people just... give you large amounts of capital? That sure sounds nice and good for you, but for the rest of us, your post is kind of nonsensical.

> Marx tried but failed in his effort to collapse identities into two buckets.

I don't think you know what "collapse" means. If anything, "separate" would be the word here?

> How do I freely become a capital owner? Do people just... give you large amounts of capital?

Depending of how you define some words, one could say that. Loans aren't particularly easy to get, have string attached, but they are available and can come from just about anywhere. Or you can just be lucky and have made a series of good investments. Unlikely, but possible. You don't need the party's approval to control capital so, for some, that counts as "freely".

> I don't think you know what "collapse" means. If anything, "separate" would be the word here?

They probably meant "collapse" in similar sense to wave collapse: collapsing the indeterminate sets of identities into two discrete and reduced ones.

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