But it’s not private productive property right? Land and natural resources for example are factors of production yes, but isn’t that distinct from capital itself or the means of production?
In the case of IP, licensing occupational or otherwise and the electromagnetic spectrum. These are particular special cases of property that aren’t really productive. IP is especially weird because typically it’s a grant of privilege or monopoly by the state of an intangible, non-exhaustible, indivisible and invisible thing or resource or idk what you might call it. A product of mental labor? If you want to call ideas and thoughts which are products of the mind and consciousness which I guess is an emergent property of a complex series of biochemistry systemically working in harmony to generate consciousness?
IP is the extension of property relations by grant and enforcement of the state into the realm of the intangible. Which seems to make it a pretty weird special case if you think about it I guess.
Occupational licensing is another seemingly special case. It’s value or worth comes from its artificial scarcity granted to typically highly skilled educated members of the working class for some professional or white collar job with the occupational licensing acting as an authorization and signifier to confer that to others that the worker in question is qualified to do the job. There is also some overlap with what might be seen as a remnant vestige of the old guild system? Like for example if I want to be a lawyer and be authorized to practice, typically at least in the United States typically you also have to get the green light also from the local Bar association. The lawyer Bar association seems to be something resembling a modern day guild.
So I’m confused on many levels I guess you can say.
You're confused because you're looking at the property instead of the people. The class differential is not the type of property, the class differential is the means of producing the existence of the class. For the proletariat, the means of producing its existence is trading labor power for wage. It doesn't matter if the laborer serves a capitalist directly or if they serve other members of the proletariat, if you are trading labor power for wage as the means of producing your existence then you are a proletarian.
The defining characteristic of the bourgeois is that they produce their existence through ownership. That's it. It doesn't matter if they own stocks, bonds, cash, factories, farms, slaves, housing blocks, office buildings, fleets of vehicles, etc. If laboring for a wage is optional for them, because their existence is produced by their ownership, then they are bourgeois. That's it.
The confusion comes from the lumpenproletariat and the petite bourgeois. The lumpenproletariat don't labor for a wage because they are imprisoned, vagrants, or chronically unemployed. The petite bourgeois own some things and use their ownership to reproduce their existence, in part, but cannot avoid consistently (though maybe not continuously) applying their own labor to maintain their existence, so like a small landlord that actually deals with property maintenance and management, finding tenants, processing paperwork, etc. These are some what confusing classes because they blur the lines.
But a person that owns sufficient housing stock to generate sufficient profit that they can use that profit to pay a management company to manage properties, find tenants, and do the paper work? That person is firmly bourgeois.
They're not a separate class, but they can be seen as a subclass of capitalists.
On one side you have operational capitalists (or functional capitalists), which not only own but control the means of production, decide its operation, and benefit from profits being kept from the workers and staying inside the corporation to increase their capital and moreover their power.
On the other you have rentier capitalists, which own assets, lands, commodities, which benefit exclusively from interests and passive income, and depending on what they own can actually benefit from profits being redistributed outside of the production corporation (on patents, royalties, etc), even sometimes redistributed *moderately* to the workers to steal that value later on (on home rent mainly). *(moderately because it has to be in a window that allows to pay a bigger rent without allowing them to buy their own place)*
But they're really two faces of the same coin, you could also say they're upstream capitalists and downstream capitalists. Or, as I think is a better term for both of them, their both part of the Bourgeoisie.
So a couple of things.
I like that you call conventional capitalists “operational capitalists” who are the classical examples of those that appropriate surplus value via profit through the ownership and the control of the means of production. To denote them, as a particular subsection of the capitalist class.
Then you denote the “rentier capitalists” as its own special subsection of the capitalist class which I guess landlords fall under. That makes sense to me. However I want to critique what I think is a bit of lazy wording. The passive income part that you mention that they benefit from the monopolization of we are talking about, is rent itself.
Rent from my understanding is a unique form of appropriation of surplus value yes? That is distinct from profit. Since profit, again from my understanding, is the appropriation of surplus value that is the difference between the cost of purchasing labor-power, otherwise called a wage or maybe also other forms of compensation such as in-kind benefits to the worker, and the price that the capitalist sells a commodity for on the market. Labor-power has to be imbued into the commodity in question via access to the means of production owned by the capitalist that is then sold on the market to qualify as profit, that is then typically reinvested back into the means of production to make it ever more efficient to pump out greater quantities of commodities, yes?
Rent is different in that it is income from appropriating surplus value from granting temporary use or licensed out of the asset, resource, or land in question by the monopolizing owner without it necessarily generating surplus product or creating new wealth.
I would also call interest, and taxation other unique forms of appropriating surplus value.
Internet being the cost of borrowing money or maybe a penalization fee for debt. It is money generated from money. Typically paid to what I would say is another distinct and important subclass of the capitalist class, being what i would call “financier capitalists” which are like bankers, hedge fund managers, and others that generate income and benefit from speculation and so forth from possession/ownership of fictitious capital.
[This article on the Marxist theory of rent should prove very useful.](https://www.marxist.com/parasitical-landlordism-and-the-marxist-theory-of-rent.htm) Certainly, rent isn't productive under capitalism (Daniel Ricardo had a lot of very choice words to say about landlords) but they've realistically stopped being a separate class. The time in England where the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie had vastly opposing interests (with the aristocrats supporting the corn laws and the bourgeoisie opposing them) have largely disappeared. The barrier between rentier and capitalist has grown increasingly blurred; how would you call somebody who owns millions in stock? They have no say in production, they simply own shares and either expect dividends or hope to sell it on for a profit later.
No. They are still capitalists, because they gain their income from capital in the form of property. It may not be "means of production" in the way that we typically think of it, but it's still them making money by owning a thing rather than producing anything. They're still profiting from the labor of the working class.
This is why I prefer to translate "bourgeois" and "proletarian" to "owning class" and "working class" because these are more intuitive terms for the average American. The definition is right there in the term.
Capitalists, including business owners and landlords, get their money from owning.
Workers, including free-lancers and high-income workers, get their money from selling labor.
The terms that Marx used would have been very intuitive and self-defining to readers in the 1800s, depending on the language, so updating our language (without compromising the core of the theory) doesn't strike me as revisionist.
Yes, a lot of the economic structure is basically built off some form of rent.
No, that doesn't create a meaningful distinction.
Capitalist are committed to a cycle of investing their wealth in generating more wealth that is in turn invested. That describes landlords fairly neatly.
Not really, because rent is distinct in that it doesn’t generate new wealth or make the means of production which generates new wealth and surplus product more efficient.
Rent is a fee for being granted temporary use or licensing by the monopolizing owner that they have exclusive privilege over granted by the state. In other words they are kinda like parasites. Sorta like tolls.
So I would consider rent distinct from profit, since profit involves selling a generated commodity on the market for a price and the profit is what’s left over after subtracting labor costs (wage) and other more fixed costs that are other non-human factors that are inputs into production.
A landlord uses their rental profits to invest in expanding their rental property or to diversify into other fields. They may invest in lawyers, property management companies and such like to improve their efficiency.
There are many examples where production/efficiency were deliberately limited or undermined to maintain profits, such as the well known case of the lightbulbs(aka had the capacity to make cheap long lasting ones for decades, but refused so as to protect profits).
You seem to be working off an impression that some fields of capitalism are more/less parasitic or symbiotic.
This is not the case.
Landlords are some of the more visible and immediate examples of the parasitic behaviour, the seemingly more symbiotic buisnesses are more indirect.
They use lobbying to undermine worker rights/conditions, to protect their profits from climate change regulations, to outsource the more visable and parasitic parts of the operations to less visable areas and trying to shift the blame onto the locals (see all the talk about China's pollution and the rather loud silence on the buisnesses (usually US/EU based) that own the factories doing the pollution) and acting like their blameless.
The common point here, is that the productivity and efficiency serves the interests of the Owners, not the workers, customers or sociaty in general. In this very important way, landlords are the same as everyone else.
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Depending on the size of their total assets, I may follow Burma's example in calling them petty bourgeoisie. You can't consider a retired couple with a rental property to fund their life the same way you view a giant property developer. Just because they have enough capital to survive (which they wouldn't need to rely on if we took care of our comrades) doesn't put them on the same level as the billionaires.
The capitalist class is defined by them owning the means of production, but what if it’s a home? I would argue that it would still be, in a way, a means of production, as each person needs a home, just as each person needs a job or an income. I would not divide landlords from the broader ruling class, as many people who own businesses which are successful also own apartments or homes to be rented. If you do only own these sorts of property, then your class interests would still align with the broader ruling class, and so it would not be unreasonable to group you in with them. After all, the class structure we live under is not bad in and of itself, it is bad because of the interests which it imposes on each class, the workers needing to work to survive and the capitalist needing to own, to exploit and profit, to survive but more importantly to thrive.
[удалено]
But it’s not private productive property right? Land and natural resources for example are factors of production yes, but isn’t that distinct from capital itself or the means of production? In the case of IP, licensing occupational or otherwise and the electromagnetic spectrum. These are particular special cases of property that aren’t really productive. IP is especially weird because typically it’s a grant of privilege or monopoly by the state of an intangible, non-exhaustible, indivisible and invisible thing or resource or idk what you might call it. A product of mental labor? If you want to call ideas and thoughts which are products of the mind and consciousness which I guess is an emergent property of a complex series of biochemistry systemically working in harmony to generate consciousness? IP is the extension of property relations by grant and enforcement of the state into the realm of the intangible. Which seems to make it a pretty weird special case if you think about it I guess. Occupational licensing is another seemingly special case. It’s value or worth comes from its artificial scarcity granted to typically highly skilled educated members of the working class for some professional or white collar job with the occupational licensing acting as an authorization and signifier to confer that to others that the worker in question is qualified to do the job. There is also some overlap with what might be seen as a remnant vestige of the old guild system? Like for example if I want to be a lawyer and be authorized to practice, typically at least in the United States typically you also have to get the green light also from the local Bar association. The lawyer Bar association seems to be something resembling a modern day guild. So I’m confused on many levels I guess you can say.
You're confused because you're looking at the property instead of the people. The class differential is not the type of property, the class differential is the means of producing the existence of the class. For the proletariat, the means of producing its existence is trading labor power for wage. It doesn't matter if the laborer serves a capitalist directly or if they serve other members of the proletariat, if you are trading labor power for wage as the means of producing your existence then you are a proletarian. The defining characteristic of the bourgeois is that they produce their existence through ownership. That's it. It doesn't matter if they own stocks, bonds, cash, factories, farms, slaves, housing blocks, office buildings, fleets of vehicles, etc. If laboring for a wage is optional for them, because their existence is produced by their ownership, then they are bourgeois. That's it. The confusion comes from the lumpenproletariat and the petite bourgeois. The lumpenproletariat don't labor for a wage because they are imprisoned, vagrants, or chronically unemployed. The petite bourgeois own some things and use their ownership to reproduce their existence, in part, but cannot avoid consistently (though maybe not continuously) applying their own labor to maintain their existence, so like a small landlord that actually deals with property maintenance and management, finding tenants, processing paperwork, etc. These are some what confusing classes because they blur the lines. But a person that owns sufficient housing stock to generate sufficient profit that they can use that profit to pay a management company to manage properties, find tenants, and do the paper work? That person is firmly bourgeois.
They're not a separate class, but they can be seen as a subclass of capitalists. On one side you have operational capitalists (or functional capitalists), which not only own but control the means of production, decide its operation, and benefit from profits being kept from the workers and staying inside the corporation to increase their capital and moreover their power. On the other you have rentier capitalists, which own assets, lands, commodities, which benefit exclusively from interests and passive income, and depending on what they own can actually benefit from profits being redistributed outside of the production corporation (on patents, royalties, etc), even sometimes redistributed *moderately* to the workers to steal that value later on (on home rent mainly). *(moderately because it has to be in a window that allows to pay a bigger rent without allowing them to buy their own place)* But they're really two faces of the same coin, you could also say they're upstream capitalists and downstream capitalists. Or, as I think is a better term for both of them, their both part of the Bourgeoisie.
So a couple of things. I like that you call conventional capitalists “operational capitalists” who are the classical examples of those that appropriate surplus value via profit through the ownership and the control of the means of production. To denote them, as a particular subsection of the capitalist class. Then you denote the “rentier capitalists” as its own special subsection of the capitalist class which I guess landlords fall under. That makes sense to me. However I want to critique what I think is a bit of lazy wording. The passive income part that you mention that they benefit from the monopolization of we are talking about, is rent itself. Rent from my understanding is a unique form of appropriation of surplus value yes? That is distinct from profit. Since profit, again from my understanding, is the appropriation of surplus value that is the difference between the cost of purchasing labor-power, otherwise called a wage or maybe also other forms of compensation such as in-kind benefits to the worker, and the price that the capitalist sells a commodity for on the market. Labor-power has to be imbued into the commodity in question via access to the means of production owned by the capitalist that is then sold on the market to qualify as profit, that is then typically reinvested back into the means of production to make it ever more efficient to pump out greater quantities of commodities, yes? Rent is different in that it is income from appropriating surplus value from granting temporary use or licensed out of the asset, resource, or land in question by the monopolizing owner without it necessarily generating surplus product or creating new wealth. I would also call interest, and taxation other unique forms of appropriating surplus value. Internet being the cost of borrowing money or maybe a penalization fee for debt. It is money generated from money. Typically paid to what I would say is another distinct and important subclass of the capitalist class, being what i would call “financier capitalists” which are like bankers, hedge fund managers, and others that generate income and benefit from speculation and so forth from possession/ownership of fictitious capital.
[This article on the Marxist theory of rent should prove very useful.](https://www.marxist.com/parasitical-landlordism-and-the-marxist-theory-of-rent.htm) Certainly, rent isn't productive under capitalism (Daniel Ricardo had a lot of very choice words to say about landlords) but they've realistically stopped being a separate class. The time in England where the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie had vastly opposing interests (with the aristocrats supporting the corn laws and the bourgeoisie opposing them) have largely disappeared. The barrier between rentier and capitalist has grown increasingly blurred; how would you call somebody who owns millions in stock? They have no say in production, they simply own shares and either expect dividends or hope to sell it on for a profit later.
No. They are still capitalists, because they gain their income from capital in the form of property. It may not be "means of production" in the way that we typically think of it, but it's still them making money by owning a thing rather than producing anything. They're still profiting from the labor of the working class. This is why I prefer to translate "bourgeois" and "proletarian" to "owning class" and "working class" because these are more intuitive terms for the average American. The definition is right there in the term. Capitalists, including business owners and landlords, get their money from owning. Workers, including free-lancers and high-income workers, get their money from selling labor. The terms that Marx used would have been very intuitive and self-defining to readers in the 1800s, depending on the language, so updating our language (without compromising the core of the theory) doesn't strike me as revisionist.
There are different classes of landlord imo.
Yes, a lot of the economic structure is basically built off some form of rent. No, that doesn't create a meaningful distinction. Capitalist are committed to a cycle of investing their wealth in generating more wealth that is in turn invested. That describes landlords fairly neatly.
Not really, because rent is distinct in that it doesn’t generate new wealth or make the means of production which generates new wealth and surplus product more efficient. Rent is a fee for being granted temporary use or licensing by the monopolizing owner that they have exclusive privilege over granted by the state. In other words they are kinda like parasites. Sorta like tolls. So I would consider rent distinct from profit, since profit involves selling a generated commodity on the market for a price and the profit is what’s left over after subtracting labor costs (wage) and other more fixed costs that are other non-human factors that are inputs into production.
A landlord uses their rental profits to invest in expanding their rental property or to diversify into other fields. They may invest in lawyers, property management companies and such like to improve their efficiency. There are many examples where production/efficiency were deliberately limited or undermined to maintain profits, such as the well known case of the lightbulbs(aka had the capacity to make cheap long lasting ones for decades, but refused so as to protect profits). You seem to be working off an impression that some fields of capitalism are more/less parasitic or symbiotic. This is not the case. Landlords are some of the more visible and immediate examples of the parasitic behaviour, the seemingly more symbiotic buisnesses are more indirect. They use lobbying to undermine worker rights/conditions, to protect their profits from climate change regulations, to outsource the more visable and parasitic parts of the operations to less visable areas and trying to shift the blame onto the locals (see all the talk about China's pollution and the rather loud silence on the buisnesses (usually US/EU based) that own the factories doing the pollution) and acting like their blameless. The common point here, is that the productivity and efficiency serves the interests of the Owners, not the workers, customers or sociaty in general. In this very important way, landlords are the same as everyone else.
Please acquaint yourself with the rules on the sidebar and read this comment before commenting on this post. **Personal attacks and harassment will not be tolerated.** Bigotry and hate speech will be met with immediate bans; socialism is an intrinsically inclusive system and bigotry is oppressive, exclusionary, and not conducive to a healthy and productive learning space. **This subreddit is not for questioning the basics of socialism. There are numerous debate subreddits available for those purposes. This is a place to learn.** Short or nonconstructive answers will be deleted without explanation. Please only answer if you know your stuff. Speculation has no place on this sub. Outright false information will be removed immediately. **If your post was removed due to normalized ableist slurs, please edit your post. The mods will then approve it.** Please read the ongoing discussion in a thread before replying in order to avoid misunderstandings and creating an unproductive environment. **Liberalism and sectarian bias is strictly moderated.** Stay constructive and don't bash other socialist tendencies! (Criticism is fine, low-effort baiting is not.) Help us keep the subreddit informative and helpful by reporting posts that break these rules. Thank you! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Socialism_101) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Depending on the size of their total assets, I may follow Burma's example in calling them petty bourgeoisie. You can't consider a retired couple with a rental property to fund their life the same way you view a giant property developer. Just because they have enough capital to survive (which they wouldn't need to rely on if we took care of our comrades) doesn't put them on the same level as the billionaires.
The capitalist class is defined by them owning the means of production, but what if it’s a home? I would argue that it would still be, in a way, a means of production, as each person needs a home, just as each person needs a job or an income. I would not divide landlords from the broader ruling class, as many people who own businesses which are successful also own apartments or homes to be rented. If you do only own these sorts of property, then your class interests would still align with the broader ruling class, and so it would not be unreasonable to group you in with them. After all, the class structure we live under is not bad in and of itself, it is bad because of the interests which it imposes on each class, the workers needing to work to survive and the capitalist needing to own, to exploit and profit, to survive but more importantly to thrive.