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This. People can make more in the US because the country doesn't give a fuck about it's people. It's like gambling the health and wellness of you and your family to horde up some Cash.
as if anyone in America is saving their money 🤣
There absolutely are. There are a lot of people at the top (not even billionaires) that are making tons of money as the working class suffer.
we're talking about the average person; the idea that the average person in the US is using their higher income as savings to compensate for lack of social programs is delusional imo, I think most people have significant debt and will just fall between the cracks if they lose their job or get sick and can't work, etc.
Sure. My point wasn't that. My point is that there are still a not insignificant amount of people that are a part of the professional/managerial class who's material interests align with that of the ruling capitalist class of billionaires.
There is still a portion of "working" people that benefit enough from neoliberalism that they continue to believe that capitalism is a fair system that benefits hard work.
sure, but it doesn't feel particularly relevant, those people aren't that different from less economically privileged working class folks who defend capitalism despite gaining no material benefit from doing so. The upper middle classes that align that way are still exploited in their jobs and victims of the system they align with, and that's no different than everyone else. Division among the working classes doesn't help our cause, and those middle upper classes would be some of the most valuable allies in cultivating change if their consciousness was raised, since they at least are not completely empty-handed. Think of people like Che Guevara who had such immense influence - he was precisely one of those middle upper class people whose consciousness was raised when he witnessed the American-backed coup in Guatemala.
I mean the average person in the professional/managerial class is not Che. The entire point is to analyze it from material incentives. That is the tools of dialectical materialism that we have at our disposal.
The material interests of the professional class aligns with the capitalist class. I'm in that class technically. I'm a well paid software engineer that gets a large portion of my pay in stock. I'm doing well.
I know that my material interests are aligned with the success of capital. I have to make a conscious choice to be a class traitor and work against my own material interests. And that's easier for me. I'm not even a manager or a landlord.
You're kind of proving my point using an example like Che. He literally was educated into Marxism through personal experience throughout motorcycle diaries.
The average person in the professional/managerial class is not like me and definitely not like Che.
Yes, but we continue to fail to communicate - I was never undermining your point about material commitments, I think that point is well-taken, it's the conclusions you draw that I disagree with, i.e. in terms of lumping the capitalist class together with members of the working class ... When I say Che Guevara was a valuable member of the revolution, it is to highlight an example of how valuable class consciousness can be from members of the working class who are more privileged but are not members of the capitalist class.
I wish to resist the tendency to view someone like a software engineer as equivalent to the capitalist class, just because material incentives exist. A software engineer is not a capitalist, they are working class, and the revolution is served by viewing professional and managerial workers as workers, worthy of being included and incorporated into the revolution. Not because they are that way already, I am agreeing with you by suggesting the opposite, that they aren't aware of their status as working class because they have some material incentives, so they align with the wrong class interests.
The right response to this, in my opinion, is to work on raising their class consciousness, while it feels like you are suggesting the opposite (essentially lumping them together and furthering the entrenched idea that they are helplessly aligned with the capitalists and thus basically capitalists themselves).
Yeah. The top 1% of incomes is generally $500K - $1M depending on which site I look at.
In the eyes of billionaires, people at that level are just poors that get paid too much to keep them humble, but with respect to regular incomes they are the rich people building investment portfolios in things like stocks and being a landlord to 5-10 units.
focusing on income is distorting, socially and politically some of the wealthiest and most powerful people have the lowest incomes, it's just not the best lens of evaluating power or wealth.
Very true. It's like an order of magnitude difference, where 1% income is in the "approaching a million" ballpark, but 1%er net worth is above 10 million.
But relative to the billionaires like I was talking about, they are at about the same tier of "poor person but with class," lol.
it is people, indeed
We call it savings, not hoarding. But yeah. You need it. If you lose your job here, you’re fucked.
One illness and it’s all gone. House, kit and kaboodle.
To be fair, it’s really one serious illness.
Not really. Could be something entirely fine but requiring monthly medication. If you can't afford that. You're fuck.
We have people rationing insulin in this country for Christ sake.
Well, sure, if we’re gonna bring in the do you have insurance factor, then it becomes a whole different game. If you don’t have insurance, I don’t even know. Death is probably imminent..
EDIT: Who is downvoting me? Fans of American health insurance corporations? Our system is trash, why are you mad at me?
Even with insurance. I had to take an ambulance ride once only to literally end up hanging out at the hospital with the nurses who put me on a saline drip and otherwise just chatted with me because it was a nice break, and the ambulance cost me $600 AFTER insurance.
The average American has less than $300 in their bank account.
$600 is cheap for an ambulance, as I understand it. I’ve fortunately never had to take one. I have $15 in my bank account.
Yeah, it was that cheap because I have health insurance, otherwise just the ambulance probably would've cost over $1,500, and I was perfectly fine by the time I reached the hospital. The ambulance ride and 3 hours at the hospital were mandatory to make sure I was actually okay, but I didn't have any serious issue that needed medical intervention or anything. My point was that even without a serious illness, and even with health insurance, you can still be one trip to the hospital away from being bankrupted by medical debt.
There are plenty of people whose policies get cancelled or there insurance companies refuse to cover stuff.
I know. I was trying to say that if we take that into account, it gets a whole lot worse.
For a lot of people in this country it's hording. But I get what you mean.