1.What is the distinction that Reading 4.3 makes between owners and employees? Give an example of each. 

There are many crucial differences between the owners who have most of the wealth in society and the employees who must work to survive. Those who live in owning class families can use their stocks, bonds, rents, payments for minerals, and money for owning property to pay for their necessities and luxuries. Those employed by the owning class are forced to live off their wages, salaries, and fees for their labor. However sometimes it gets confusing because owners can be both the wealthy citizens who have stocks in large corporations and can also be struggling business owners. However, those struggling owners don’t meet the requirements of the wealthy owning class citizens. The smaller businesses usually get eaten alive by the larger corporations run by the owning class.  

The employee class consists of factory and service workers, as well as people who are managers and business professionals who fall in the middle or upper-class bracket. Those who are in managerial and executive positions are considered employees who are hired to get their employees to work harder and produce a superior product in all fields of business. Some employees make enough money to climb up the corporate ladder and become members of the owning class themselves. To put it plainly, you belong to the owning class when you have a substantial amount of income and live off the labor that others put in working for your business. Additionally, owners can accumulate a generous sum of money through multiple investments. You don’t become prosperous just by putting in the effort and working hard. You gain wealth by having laborers put in the effort for you. Therefore, many people who worked in factories all their lives retire with extraordinarily little money to show for it, while owners collect a sizable amount of money.  

2. How do you understand the quote by Adam Smith on pg. 28? What is it saying about labor? 

Adam Smith, a man who is considered one of the founding fathers of capitalism, stated that “labor … is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is their nominal price only” (Parenti 28). This means that many things begin to become complicated once products are traded for money. Smith explains that not all work is the same and measuring the amount of labor that was put in to produce an object may not have the capacity to tell us how much effort went into making the product. Certain labor involves more skill than others. There is no straightforward way to solve this issue because there is no real way to figure out the accurate measure of labor. However, a lot of work is put into making each product such as manufacturing, shipping, advertising, and selling the item. Furthermore, only a small amount of the money workers receive for their efforts represents the amount of wealth that was accumulated from that one item. 

 I don’t believe this is the right way to reward the efforts these workers put into making these products. It looks like the product itself holds more value than the demanding work it took to create it. Consumers don’t think about the workers who made their products while purchasing them, they think about the value of the product and how it will make their life easier. It seems as if the owners take advantage of this school of thought while selling items their employees worked hard to make to their consumers. They understand that all consumers care about is product value, and as a result, the owners can get away with paying their employees a wage that is much lower than they deserve. As stated in the Michael Parenti article, workers who were under the employment of Intel and Exxon had one ninth of their value added to their wages. Most of the money accumulated from their business was made up of the surplus value, the money obtained by the owners. In businesses like tobacco and pharmaceuticals, the workers only received one-twentieth of their value added. In the United States, rate of value going to the owner has doubled within the past 50 years.   

4. What are your thoughts on the main argument of Reading 4.4 that class is NOT an identity?  

I agree with the main argument that class should not be part of someone’s identity. Class identity can influence someone’s overall happiness, a person’s sense of safety and security, it can impact who we choose to associate and interact with, and even how we experience law enforcement and the justice system. We should learn to eliminate class from our identities and find a better way of labeling ourselves.  

Even people who claim not to use class as an identity incorporate it into their daily lives. In Paul Heidman’s article Class Rules Everything Around Me, Heidman expresses that class politics is just another form of identity politics. Politicians like Bernie Sanders have run on the platform of attacking big business and billionaires on Wall Street. He has publicly rejected the use of identity politics, but according to Heidman, this isn’t completely true. Class is considered an identity, just like race or gender, but to achieve the balance socialists strive for, they see it as the most important identity. When socialists declare that they oppose identity politics they are simply using their own adaptation of it, leaving aside the key factors of racial and gender discrimination.  

An example of this being used in a harmful way would be during the 2016 primary when Hillary Clinton responded to Bernie Sanders ignoring social issues and focusing too much on class politics. Clinton is quoted asking if the banks were suddenly broken up if it would resolve issues with racism, homophobia, and xenophobia? The answer is clearly no. People who are too heavily focused on issues of class and social standing are not putting their energy towards solving the world’s most serious problems. Furthermore, someone whose main goal isn’t to destroy racial, gender, and other varieties of oppression that don’t include class, cannot call themselves faithful to the left side of the aisle. There are very few social and political movements pertaining to class identity and it’s often used during political campaigns just to seek votes from a particular group of people, like Trump going after working class voters during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.   

 4. 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? 

In reading 4.4 it states that “class structures are built around a close form of dependency.” Unlike the concept of whiteness being reliant on blackness, the notion of “worker” is not contingent on the capitalist to hold value. A worker is reliant on an owner or capitalist to provide them with a job, and a capitalist is supposed to manipulate his workers so he can continue to hold onto his top position. As expressed by Heidman “a white person’s whiteness, by contrast isn’t dependent on any particular relationship with or actions by nonwhite people” (Heidman 4). Both a racist and a non-racist are white in the same way. Now the system of class structures works in a form of interdependency where you’re constantly under the threat of your capitalist employer. Simultaneously the workers have the option of threatening to remove their capitalist employer from their position at the top. Thus, this is a system of threat vs. threat. The capitalists not only have power over their workers but have power within society. The public depends on the capitalists to produce a product, and the capitalists can choose not to produce that product if they think it won’t make enough money. Society is responsible for making sure the capitalists maintain their success, so they keep producing more items for them.