- The Owner-Employee Difference in Reading 4.3
Michael Parenti makes a clear differentiation between owners and employees in Reading 4.3 Capital and Labor. Owners are classes that depend on investments made in stock, bonds, and property. Absorbed by the efforts of others, they earn their income from business profits. On the contrary, an employee is one who usually earns income as a payment for services rendered in work done by another. These are the ones who sell their labor to eat and drink but actually do not own the means to put it into practice.
For example:
Owner: A major shareholder in a multinational; earns income dividend and capital gains income;
Employee: Factory worker whose cash flows are from wages of the same corporation.
- Understanding Adam Smith’s Quote: Page 28
On page 28, Smith expresses the phrase: Labor is and can be just so much the ultimate and real standard by which to estimate, at all times and all places, and to compare value between all commodities. Really we can speak about their actual price at these-widely we would call this nominal price.” The actual value of goods and services is based on human labor. Money is the form of exchange. It’s the exertion involved in the production of goods attached value to them.
- Class Suffering Not an Identity in Reading 4.4: Insights
Class cannot be seen as an identity just like race and gender, the way this counter-argument essay goes. Rather, class is a structural channel within the economic system defined by one’s relation to the means of production. Clearly, the world of classes concerns what one’s role and power are in an economic hierarchy and not an identity of culture and personality. That line of argument embodies the systemic division of class and correlates these structures to the fundamental concern of inequality.
- Arguments Over Class Entering Into Reading 4.4 “Structures Built Around a Close Form of Dependency”
The claim according to Reading 4.4 is that class structures are built around “a close form of dependency,” which means that classes depend on one another within the capitalist system. Capitalists rely on workers for producing goods and services, while workers depend on capitalists for jobs and salaries. This mutual dependence leads to such a situation that each class’s status, as well as its power, is defined in relation to the other.
For example:
In a factory, owners depend on workers to operate machines and produce goods. If the workers fail to operate in the factory, the production stops, and the profits would go down. Exchanges, on the other hand, are dependent on owners for their jobs and the payment of wages by which they sustain themselves. Such interdependency shows that classes are interdependent by definition in the economy.
