🚨🚨 THREAD TIME 🚨🚨

let's talk about the differences between income, wealth, and class

tl;dr: income is earned, wealth is bought, and class is inherited

also hi friends, while on the topic of income, this work is my only source of it! times are tough and folks are really struggling, but if you have a couple extra bucks please consider sending a tip my way

💰 venmo rachel-kahn-5
💵 cashapp $rachokay

https://t.co/wGjQBJpWsW
INCOME is the amount of money a person makes from labor and investments

so if you work for 2,000 hours and are paid $40,000 in a year, that's income

OR if you have a $1,000,000 stock portfolio with a 5% return rate and cash out $40,000 of it, that's income too (fucked, right?)
WEALTH is the amount of capital you own

that could be owning a house and land worth $150,000

or owning a small business with $150,000 in assets

or owning $150,000 worth of stocks

wealth is the investments that are themselves accruing value
CLASS is about what you stand to inherit

in the united states we use a lot of weird doublespeak to avoid talking about the proletariat, the petit bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie directly

proletariat ~ working class
petit bourgeoisie ~ middle class
bourgeoisie ~ upper class
liberal categorizations of class are misdefined by income level (vs overall familial wealth). this happens because the bourgeoisie want the proletariat to believe class mobility is possible.

it isn't.
https://t.co/GEpWyuxuhQ
so when biden and cnbc are arguing whether a $400,00 income is "wealthy" or "upper middle class" they're actually both totally conflating a bunch of terms and misunderstanding the system

if you have $400,000 in income but no wealth, you aren't middle class. you're working class
frankly, even if you have $400,000 in income AND you have wealth, you aren't necessarily upper-class, because the inheritance of class isn't just capital and wealth--it's your connections. it's how many senators you have in your pocket. it's how many CEOs you can call on for help
that's why i say the only way to be in the bourgeoisie is to be born into it.

even if you make enough money to acquire capital and secure your wealth, YOU will never be bourgeoisie, because your parents weren't.
becoming filthy rich won't give you the advantages of having gone to a fancy boarding school and graduating from harvard. it won't give you the shared bourgeois cultural background.

you'll still dress wrong, talk wrong, enjoy the wrong things. they'll still see you as less-than.
at best you'll be like donald trump: a desperately self-conscious nouveau riche misfit

that's why the bourgeoisie have such an interest in obscuring who and what they are--they don't want you to realize you'll never become them, that their system is fundamentally nepotistic.
the only way to fix this problem is to do away with class altogether. and the only way to do away with class is to dispossess the bourgeoisie

capitalism only exists on the broken backs of working people. there are no good capitalists, just like there were no good slave masters.
but knowledge is also a kind of power, and i hope this thread will empower some of you to see through the smokescreen they've built for themselves.

they can't actually make us work. we can liberate ourselves. we can stop this by putting down our tools and refusing to cooperate.
@threadreaderapp unroll pls n thank u

More from Economy

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is analyzing damage due to COVID and projecting further severe consequences if current policies persist. They state “despite involving short term economic costs, lockdowns may lead to faster economic recovery by containing the virus”

1/


Note: This report doesn’t do a dynamic analysis that makes things much clearer, but it does a thoughtful statistical analysis based upon increasingly available data.

https://t.co/5Xmt8y7lCL

A few more quotes:

2/


“The analysis also finds that lockdowns are powerful instruments to reduce infections, especially when they are introduced early in a country’s epidemic and when they are sufficiently stringent.”

3/


“lockdowns become progressively more effective in reducing COVID-19 cases when they become sufficiently stringent. Mild lockdowns appear instead ineffective at curbing infections.”

4/

“The results suggest that to achieve a given reduction in infections, policymakers may want to opt for stringent lockdowns over a shorter period rather than prolonged mild lockdowns...

5/
Let's discuss how little you actually understand about economics and energy.

The first thing to understand is that energy is not globally fungible. Electricity decays as it leaves its point of origin; it’s expensive to transport. There is a huge excess (hydro) in many areas.


In other words, it can also be variable. It's estimated that in Sichuan there is twice as much electricity produced as is needed during the rainy season. Indeed, there is seasonality to how Bitcoin mining works. You can see here:

Bitcoin EXPORTS energy in this scenario. Fun fact, most industrial nations would steer this excess capacity towards refining aluminum by melting bauxite ore, which is very energy intensive.

You wouldn't argue that we are producing *too much* electricity from renewables, right?

"But what about the carbon footprint! ITS HUGE!"

Many previous estimates have quite faulty methods and don't take into account the actual energy sources. Is it fair to put a GHG equivalent on hydro or solar power? That would seem a bit disingenuous, no?

Well that's exactly what some have done.

You May Also Like

Still wondering about this 🤔


save as q