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Does buying stock in Robinhood make someone a petit bourgeois due to the person benefitting from a company’s surplus value? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 2 years ago* by to c/asklemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml
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[–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

You remain a proletarian so long as you have to sell your labor power to eat

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Even if you are also a landlord?

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't think landlords have to sell their labor power to others to eat, since they receive rent

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Well… I have a friend who is a landlord and after mortgage fees and all other fees, all that he gets are 300 dollars and he lives in California, so it depends on where the landlord lives and where the property home is.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Don't see any labor being done.... Doesn't matter where the home is. Same applies to shares.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    My question is, let's say that someone owns private property yet, still has a paying job unrelated to the private property because the surplus value extracted from the private property is not enough for this person to live. Does the fact that this person needs to also sell their labor make them a proletariat or does having any sort of private property make someone a petit burgeois?

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    Remember Marxist concepts of class are dialectical. They're not rigid, static categories. The class system is also global, so it's not possible to determine someone's class only by looking at their day-to-day life.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    Just another instance of class mobility. If for instance this person has to rely on the rent for their main income but works a casual job to supplement it, then their interests lie in protecting that rent.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    Lenin cathegorised people belonging to other class but also needing to sell their labour to live as "half-proletarian". Usually he meant peasants having too little land to live from, but i think it can be also used for this kind of small time renters.

    They key to that was that such situation is usually not stable, capitalism eventually will shove those people to become fully wage labourers, similar to the petit bourgeoisie and small scale landowners.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    How much rent does the tenant pay?

    Two points.

    First, the tenant is paying the mortgage. So while your landlord makes $X in monthly income ($X x 12 in annual income), they make $Y in capital accumulation. That is, their tenant is buying the landlord a property and giving the landlord a monthly income.

    Even if the mortgage is interest only, the landlord benefits from property appreciation (house prices going up) for as long as the tenant keeps the bank happy with mortgage payments.

    $3600/yr plus a free house in Cali to live in or sell at retirement isn't a bad deal for doing zero work. If all or a portion of that income goes towards the mortgage for the property where the landlord lives, the tenant is really paying off two mortgages, not one.

    Second, the portion of the rent that goes to pay taxes, interest, agency fees, etc, is still rent. The landlord facilities all these other scummy practices. Additionally, if there is 'only' a $300 cushion, the landlord is likely to immediately pass on any increase in fees, interest, taxes, expenses, to the tenant in the form of charges or increased rent. That kind of thing makes it very difficult for tenants to plan for the future and probably increases the likelihood of eviction if they can't get a pay rise the next time the landlord 'has to' put the rent up.

    I'd suggest that those landlords who are doing the buy-to-let thing are liable to being worse landlords than others. How much can/will a landlord pay to maintain the property if they have conceptualised the whole thing as them 'only' earning $300/month? (For doing nothing except 'own' a deed, which on a mortgaged rental property is effectively a small partnership with an imperialist bank.)

    I should add a caveat. This is just to lay out the facts. I'm not overly concerned with small landlords like this. It's not much different to investing in a pension is stocks and shares or buying government bonds. It's also relatively insignificant in comparison to the functional exploitation by western labour aristocrats of proles (in the global north but mainly in the global south). (In simple terms: western workers get paid so much only because global south workers get paid so little.)

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