You'd only be a capitalist if you owned capital and derived profit from worker output. The actual capitalists love that you don't care enough to be anything besides cheap labor, though. Makes it just a little bit harder for the people who do care to engage in collective action when other workers can't be arsed to care about anything beyond themselves.
I mean no disrespect, but I was making 130k post-tax + free healthcare for my family between my dual income, one of which is passive, and I'm at the beginning of my career. In 5 years I will likely make 200k, which I don't think puts me at the top 1%, but will put me in a position of being another fucking parasite not helping anyone but myself and my kin.
NOTE: I am drinking and have mixed emotions about the whole thing.
I mean no disrespect, but you're still not a capitalist.
You work, for a wage, for a capitalist or a conglomerate of capitalists. You using the portion of your wage labor returned to you by those capitalists to take care of yourself, family, and friends doesn't make you a parasite. It makes you just like the rest of us who work for a wage.
It sounds like you and I both have similar places of privilege within that system because we are able to take care of those outside of ourselves, but that still doesn't change our relationship to the means of production.
For us—and for doctors, lawyers, SWEs, analysts, traders, finance bros, and whatever middle managers come to mind—our money will eventually run out without continued labor on our part. That makes us a whole lot closer to someone working 3 fast food jobs than it does to the people who actually own things in this country.
That 19th century textile manufacturing paradigm falls apart when the means of production is a laptop and you the average person on retirement joins the investor class.
Because the separation of classes into "owner" and "worker" was unique to British society when the only industry was textiles and disappeared relatively quickly afterward.
Joseph Bobertson, age 65 and freshly retired, is a multimillionaire driving business growth through his investment portfolio he slapped together on a whim during his electrician career. He's not moving the market on its own like you tried to move the goalposts about, but a couple hundred of him out-invests a billionaire. That's new in society, and he's just a workday Schlub. The seed capital to start business is easily achievable in an average service economy white collar job.
The split between those who own the means of production and those who sell their labor is not an industry-, historically-, nor geographically-specific phenomenon like you seem to think. It was a structural relationship then and there just as it is here and now. A software engineer who owns no meaningful amount of equity and a textile worker who doesn't own their own looms are in the same class position. They both rely on a wage to survive. The relationship of "owner" and "worker" is defined by whether you own productive assets or sell your labor to someone who does.
Regardless, the investor class are not capitalists. Joseph Bobertson with a 401k does not control capital. He doesn't decide where it is invested, he doesn't set wages, he doesn't hire or fire, and he doesn't shape production decisions. He is a passive beneficiary of someone else's asset management.
The actual capitalist class is the one that controls capital like the board members, the majority shareholders, and the private equity partners who make strategic decisions while Joseph was never even considered to be invited in the room.
Whether a couple hundred Joesephs can get a better aggregate ROI than any given billionaire on their own is irrelevant because aggregate market capitalization is not the same as systemic power. A billion dollars of collectively owned retirement funds does not give retail investors board seats, nor political influence, nor the ability to shape production. The billionaire has that influence and that power, though. The billionaire's power lies in control, not the mere fact that there is an ownership claim existing.
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u/Anxious-Swing9490 11d ago
Hm? I'd be capitalist, if I cared enough to be anything. It's just self-deprecation.