Tfw a bitch like JWB is describing the petty bourgeoisie small business ownership of someone who has the same class interests as a wealthy business owner and a supposed socialist is trying to describe them as working class.

Like yeah a petty bourgeoisie business owner can seem like the working class but at the end of the day they side with capital. This is known.

I'm not sure why you think them putting in work at their own business makes them akin to a worker. It makes them a frugal business owner. They aren't selling their labor to anyone, they are investing time and effort into a business that they expect to generate wealth for them in the future. That's not the same relationship with the business as just a worker with a really good salary at all.

I didn't say they have the same exact class interests. They don't in every case. But they are both capitalists. And you can name call all you want but at the end of the day you are just purity testing people based on how well they adhere to some version of socialism you've conjured together by listening to podcasts.

Bro you don't have to be be self conscious about agreeing with socialism when you agree with socialism.

I'm sorry but you simply missed my point. My entire point was that the owner/ worker distinction isn't sufficient to tell us everything about class. It's one metric among many that correlate to higher status and wealth but are not synonymous with said status/ wealth.

The entire point was a business owner/ capitalist can actually be lower on the class totem pole than a successful worker from another industry.

As far as the political class interests of all business owners coinciding... that's probably not always true either. I'm sure the are things that could be lobbied for which specifically help giant corporations at the expense of small businesses or vice-versa. In that case their interests would actually be diametrically opposed.

Yes, you are agreeing with socialism.

Upper/middle/lower class is not a socialist concept. Bourgeois/proletariat is. You can make working class money and still be owning class and have owning class interests. This is called petty bourgeois.

Congratulations, comrade.

immigrants can be bourgeois too Elph lmao

Charles is mostly right I think. Class, money and bourgeoisie/proletariat are all different things. I wouldn't say that everyone who owns a tiny business is bourgeois, but having a business generally means aiming to exploit capitalism instead of being exploited by it. What jwb said about generating wealth etc.

I'm using the worker/owner distinction correctly to identify them as capitalists, yes. That doesn't mean I agree that the worker/owner distinction is a good replacement for income based class distinctions. In fact it was a demonstration for why I don't.

If they don't hire anyone then you can remove the exploitation angle but nonetheless their relationship to the business resembles that of an owner, not a worker. They can pay themselves a salary which might not even be that much but that is only really limited by how profitable the business is. Fundamentally, how much money they make is irrelevant to the worker/ owner distinction. That's the point. It's not a technicality either, you are just trying to make a weird exception here based mostly on intuition from what I can tell.

Inherited social standing and wealth is class, not bourgeoisie/proletariat