- What is the distinction that Reading 4.3 makes between owners and employees? Give an example of each.
- How do you understand the quote by Adam Smith on pg. 28? What is it saying about labor?
- What are your thoughts on the main argument of Reading 4.4 that class is NOT an identity?
- How do you understand the argument Reading 4.4. makes when stating that “class structures are built around a close form of dependency”? What is this close form of dependency, and can you think of an example?
1. Owners are people who are able to live primarily off of their investments (stocks, bonds, rents, etc.) Colloquially, their money makes money. Employees are people who live off of their labor. Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, lives off the wealth generated by his companies and financial maneuvering. Amazon’s warehouse workers are employees, trading their labor in Bezos’s warehouses for wages – a fraction of the wealth generated by their work.
2. Adam Smith believed that the true value of a product was best measured by the labor that went into its creation and distribution, including the labor that may have gone into producing the tools, materials, and whatever other means used in the process. This, to me, places labor in a superior position in the balance between labor and capital.
3. I agree that class is something separate from identity. While facets of identity may or may not be something we choose for ourselves, identity by no means determines our actions. We are free to choose our actions whether or not they conflict with or identity. The socialist idea of class, however, is determined by the actions we’re able (or forced) to take. Being a worker or being a capitalist is an identity we must actively take part in in order to survive, and as such is a fundamental concern, though other aspects of identity may impact how we’re able to function within our class role, or may be impacted by our class.
4. To say that “class structures are built around a close form of dependency,” is to say that the capitalist and the worker cannot exist without that other. Workers depend on capitalists to purchase their labor; capitalists depend on workers for their labor. Forklift operators rarely own their own forklift; they depend on the warehouse owner to provide one and to hire them to drive it. In the reverse, warehouse owners depend on forklift operators and other workers to perform the essential functions that make a warehouse profitable.
