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What is actually wrong with working at a nail factory? It’s not advice I would give to a bright young man, but, like, somebody has to be willing to work at a nail factory, and the continuing availability of nails is more vital to our civilization than further refinements in advertising software.
There are plenty of people who aren’t college material and aren’t cut out for the trades or the army. What would you have them do? A factory job is usually a step up from McDonald’s. It’s better than being a welfare parasite.
Bourgeois ethics are not constructed around how important one's work is to the maintenance of civilization but to how much it enhances an individual's self actualization.
If making nails was a prestigious endeavour or part of some social movement you could get away with it, but getting stuck in low tasks is a failure to raise one's social status and therefore contemptible.
The idea that people can not be college material is alien to this ethical framework. So is valuing family, religion or anything else over self actualization. Everyone can and must become a self actualized bourgois individual, axiomatically.
Apologies for the digression, but I feel compelled to point out there are legitimate economic reasons why certain jobs are valued over others that are in their totality more important to the maintenance of civilization. It is, at least, not purely aesthetic and cultural.
Imagine a society with two professions: farming and weaving. Of the two, farming is obviously the more important -- it doesn't matter how nice your clothes are if you starve to death. And, for the sake of argument, let's say that weaving is the harder of the two, requiring far more education/training/practice.
Farming is both more useful and easier. So everyone should be a farmer, right? Clearly not. If you have no farmers, adding one is massively valuable: he directly saves many lives. But if you already have many farmers, adding another one just increases variety slightly, or reduces produce prices. If you have no weavers, adding a weaver is pretty valuable. Less so than the first farmer, certainly, but the most important uses for cloth -- bandages, maybe, or protection from the elements in harsher climates -- are important, and obviously that's where the products of your only weaver will go.
So you want some of each. How many? Not an easy question, but here's an algorithm that should work: given X farmers and Y weavers, would X-1 farmers and Y+1 weavers be more valuable? Or the reverse? Swap one worker in the indicated direction and then repeat until neither change improves total utility. The average value of a profession decreases monotonically with worker count (if you cut one farmer, the rest will adjust such that only the least valuable farming work goes undone), so this simple algorithm should always find the optimal arrangement.
This is all just a long winded way to say that jobs (and all other goods) are valued at the marginal return rather than the average, and that's a good thing. The point of a wage is to incentivize workers to adopt a certain profession, and you want to allocate workers to where they can produce the most value given the current state of the market. If nail factory workers aren't paid well, that's because we already have enough nail factory workers. You don't compare the total value of nails to the total value of [some other better paid profession], you compare the marginal value produced by an additional worker in each field, because that's the number that indicates where the marginal worker should go.
If that poor wage results in a large exodus from the profession, fewer nails will get made and more and more important uses for nails will go unfulfilled... such that it becomes worthwhile to pay nail factory workers more. Everyone -- factory owners, consumers, and workers -- just need to follow their individual incentives and the result naturally maximizes total utility.
As for prestige: to some extent I think you're right that it's about self-actualization. Teachers and musicians and journalists are much higher status than their wage predicts, and petroleum engineers much lower. But these cases are interesting because they diverge from the baseline; wage is the baseline. After you've stripped away all the cultural/philosophical cruft, you'd still expect to see the observed phenomenon.
A valiant and praxeological critique of sociological Marxism!
At the risk of opening a huge can of political economy, and bearing in mind that I agree with Mises a lot more than the average person, there is still legitimate criticism to be had of how will and whim can make work that is not necessary (in the economic calculation sense) look immensely valuable.
Indeed, economic analysis is sometimes blind to what is a far more valuable if difficult to measure commodity: power.
Why are NTY journalists who are literally on less than subsistence pay higher on the totem pole than your average chemical industry executive? Power. They can ruin that executive and make him kill himself if they round up enough of their colleagues. You can't buy that. Billionaires have tried and failed.
Now this isn't to say that wage isn't a primary factor in one's status or immensely correlated with power and prestige (we do live in a capitalist society to some degree), but it isn't the only factor, and other factors can supersede it given circumstance.
Economics is like nature, you can override it for a long time if you have the will to do so, albeit never forever.
In what universe are NYT journalists higher on the totem pole than a chemical industry executive? And even if they were, they don't have some magically independent power to conjure life-screwing facts out of thin air.
Kavanaugh was an example of life-ruining facts literally being conjured out of thin air. They didn't succeed, but that was due to notable external factors.
Could you elaborate with actual concrete examples how mainstream media did it? My memory is hazy, but if I recall correctly, even some of the more liberal magazines like NYT specifically mentioned that they couldn't corroborate certain allegations against Kavanaugh with other people they questioned.
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Maybe this time one is successfully disciplining their journalists.
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This is like saying that cop is more powerful than CEO, because cop can arrest the CEO not the other way around.
NYT can indeed "ruin" even otherwise rich and powerful people, but the decision to "ruin" someone is not made in any democratic way (by "rounding up" friends) and is made far above any "subsistence pay" regular journalist.
A charismatic colonel is more powerful than a CEO. It's all contextual, of course. My point is that status is not reducible to monetary value. That doesn't mean you can't make an economic analysis of it, just that it's a lot harder than looking at the numbers you do have.
Yes, it is all contextual. "Charismatic" colonels are few, most officers are cogs in the machine (just like most CEO's). Analogically, you can say that popular and well connected investigative reporter is rather powerful, but how many of these are in NYT of today?
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Agree with some of this. Having a self-actualizing career is very important in contemporary bourgeois society. This can be seen in the way the prestige of jobs is imperfectly correlated with income, being a college professor is higher status than being a restaurant manager even if the latter makes more money. But this part gets to a general problem I have with the Online Right:
The American bourgeois has a lower rate of divorce and a significantly lower rate of bastardy than the working-class. One of the reasons high-class people don't want their kids to work at the nail factory is because the nail factory is full of people from unstable families for whom that behavior is normalized. Plus other pathologies like obesity, criminal records, etc.
But the reason isn’t that they prioritize religious and family values above all else, or that they see the role of a family man as an end unto itself. It’s that their bourgeois social circle expects them to form stable marriages with children with members of the same social circle or a similar one that partially overlaps it, because it’s one important thing that confers social status and thus contributes to self-actualization eventually. On the other hand, failing to achieve this is a sign of high time preference, which they see as a personal shortcoming.
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Well sure, I’m not saying that kids who are college material should go work at a nail factory for forty years. This seems like a significantly worse life than being an accountant or claims adjuster or whatever other unglamorous white collar job. But we shouldn’t shame people whose abilities simply aren’t that great into going to college or bust. Society needs garbage collectors, it needs nail makers, it needs forklift drivers and ditch diggers.
As an aside, restaurant managers don’t really make more than full professors unless they’re top performers. Their pay tends to be performance based(health scores, keeping within budgets, and drive through times for fast food) and most restaurant managers are not towards the top.
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Don't get me wrong, this isn't a total criticism of bourgeois morality. Like every creed it has some value but is fundamentally flawed. I'm merely trying to elucidate why it produces such value judgements.
This sort of bourgeois universalism has produced much good and can work very well provided it is only applied to a homogeneous society of smart, pious and honor bound individuals.
Once you start trying to enact its universalism away from just Englishmen of good character is where nature comes to ruin the party.
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This ethical framework is retarded. Do they expect their cushy laptop job to cause nails and potatoes and sausage and paper to spontaneously generate as maggots were once thought to? Do they expect a college degree to make the garbage spontaneously vanish and power lines to repair themselves? Do they think being 'actualized' will make ditches form out of the ether, complete with sewage pipes that then cover themselves? Will it pave the roads? Build the houses? Slaughter the chickens? How do they expect the chores of maintaining a civilization to get done?
There's a reason communism is the bourgeois ideology par excellence. Because it proposes to solve this question through the sheer power of technological progress.
Machines will do it. Pay no mind to the forced labor, it is merely transitional. Food comes from the store. And if it doesn't, we shall make it so by force.
Now one might criticize the feasibility or merit of abolishing scarcity, but one must recognize that it is the project. Star Trek is the bourgeois utopia, where free from lowly material concerns, we are then free to pursue the true purpose of humanity: self actualization.
There is some irony in the ultimate goal of commercium to abolish itself, which even Marx remarked on and in some ways personified. But I digress.
As a linguist, this is one of the best examples of linguistic drift I've ever read.
The 1800s communists and bourgeois would have obviously disagreed with this sentence (because communism was about stripping the bourgeois of their power and giving it to the working class).
But you're not using these terms how Marx and his contemporaries used them. The way I'm reading you is that: the bourgeois is idealized by the DINK couple who works an email job and got a degree in "gender-studies"; communism may-or-may-not be the traditional purely economic theory, but it likely has incorporated a lot of generic social leftism (that we would expect to be taught in a gender-studies program).
Is it really "drift" though?
Even in the 1800s, communism tended to be more popular amongst students, intellectuals, and the idle rich than it was amongst farmers and factory workers.
Lenin (yes that Lenin) laments this in his own writing and cites it as one of the reasons that a vanguard party is neccesary. You see, the problem with giving power directly to the working class is that they will use it to persue thier own interests rather than those of the revolution. The implications of the interests of the proletariat differing from those of the revolution appearing to have been either lost upon or intentionally side-stepped by Lenin and subsequent communist thinkers.
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Incorrect, I am using these terms in the same ways Marx and communists in general originally used them. I am however saying something that communists sought to hide about themselves for tactical reasons.
Marx and Engels themselves were of bourgeois extraction (the latter the son of a wealthy factory owner, no less), and most of the original communist intelligentsia were too. Communist social theory seeks to abolish such class distinctions through a unification of all of society into a classless whole. It isn't inherently against the bourgeoisie (Marx himself says as much).
However, Marx saw the victimisation of the proletariat as a powerful force ready to be captured, which is why he and his contemporaries designed polemics against bourgeois rule (really capitalist rule) because they thought that a proletarian revolt would be the best vehicle for their revolutionary social engineering project.
However however, Marx's original predictions that the proletariat would be amenable to his revolution has proven false, and thus communists have had to seek different strategies, most famously abandoning the capture of economic classes for socio-cultural minority causes. But the original verbiage has stuck and become contradictory.
Your typical gender-studies student attacking "the bourgeoisie" which she ostensibly belongs to is engaging in an ancient lie devised for a defunct political stratagem. Meanings change, symbols don't.
In all this, a neutral observer of communism will notice a pattern emerging of a revolutionary vanguard made of educated bourgeois counter-elites that is looking for a popular coalition to drive against their internal class enemies. And this makes communism, in a bout of irony that would have immediately sent me to the worst of gulags, a bourgeois ideology. Perhaps the most bourgeois ideology. One would have to argue whether it is more or less characteristic than Liberalism, its progenitor, but that's a whole different can of worms.
Interestingly, the points I'm making were at one time part of Soviet politics, Bukharin and the NEP supporting "right" were really supporters of the peasantry against the cities whose more influential urbanite population is quite literally what the term originally designates.
You're right that there's a lot to say about the linguistic drift of the term, but it went the other way around of what you're thinking. Marx's politics made the term for urbanite (bourg literally meaning city) which he used into a political category and epithet. In moving to designate email-job "coastal elites", it is merely returning home.
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- Aristophanes, Women in Parliament (391 BC)
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Undocumented migrants.
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