this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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Petit bourgeois? Our money is all in our house and in retirement assets that are just America's poor excuse for a pension system. If we're petit bourgeois, so is every retired school teacher that's worked long enough to earn a pension.
Petit bourgeois refers to people that have to work but also control their own means of production. Classically this meant artisans, tradesmen, shop owners, etc. People who aren't having their labor exploited, but also still have to work.
In our careers, we've almost always worked regular salary jobs. We're not immune to job loss. We do not own the means of production. We've had our labor surplus siphoned off by employers our whole careers.
That's the whole point of this discussion. Even most millionaires are just working class people trying to achieve a little bit of stability in their lives.
Owning the means of production is the capitalist and bourgeois class of which you are below and do the functional work for, the petit bourgeois are professionals like yourself. .8% of the world has a net worth over a million dollars and only around 2.5% of Americans have over a million in retirement accounts. You are quite literally in the global 1%
That's true for a lot of people in "first world" countries. One is ahead of billions of poor people basically for existing.
Yeah, and none of them are in the working class. That wealth represents a direct transfer of wealth from where I live to the imperial core. You are all liberal petty bourgeois and you are not going to be allies in the revolution, you are going to side with your capitalists when you realize that breaking that transfer is going to be against your material interests.
You are saying that capitalists own the means of production, while "little capitalists" don't.
I don't think its useful to lump in high-income professional work with the low end of capital accumulation. The sums may overlap, but the actual class interests don't, at least not entirely. Good analysis should recognize the distinctions here.
You can have whatever definition you want. But for me, working class means just that - a person that has earned their bread through the work of their own hands, not through the exploitation of the labor of others, through rent-seeking, or from inheritance.
I'm sure you can cite plenty of theory, but frankly, I don't care. I prefer a definition of the term centered in lived experience. If you go off raw wealth, you just end up classifying entire nations as working class or bourgeois, at which point the term loses all meaning.
Ok, except your wealth comes from a transfer of wealth from the labor and resources from where I live. Your wealth is based on the super exploitation of the rest of the world. You are enemies of the global working class and you're not going to ever be revolutionary or do anything to change where you live because your material conditions are dependent on your empires continued exploitation of the rest of the world. At best people who live in the imperial core will use labor organization to secure themselves better welfare under the system you live in, you're incapable of changing it because you are the perpetrators of it and your material conditions are dependent on it. This is why Americans are useless babies and why you live in a country that is run by someone like Donald Trump, he perfectly represents you. This is why "tankies" support literally any country that fights you, because you are the actual global villains in your banal servitude to the empire.
I think you’re thinking of the professional managerial class.
The PMC is part of the petit bourgeois in modern society. White Americans are for the most part not part of the working class or global proliteriat since their material conditions are based on the exploitation of the labor from where I live. Read Settlers