actually marx talks about this in terms of piecemeal work. there were plenty of tailors for example that owned property for their work that they wouldn’t have used personally unless they personally wanted to work. they were still considered proletarian but they owned their own tools. at what amount of money for the tool is the qualitative difference in your mind between personal and private? also a big part of why they were proletarian is because that mode of work ultimately drove prices for labor down and they screwed themselves in the long term and so could never become bourgeois.
most of these owner operators will never own a business where they exploit other truckers. that might be their dream but most of them are stuck being workers for a few companies doing long hours with no benefits and labor protections whether they like it or not. there are also many “classical” workers that are scabs and reactionary and don’t see themselves as workers, they have more in common with them than they care to realize
at what amount of money is the qualitative difference in your mind behind personal and private
An amount that is sufficient for barrier to entry for a majority of the population, such that a proletarian class remains. The bourgeoise cannot have their entire population own their own personal means of production, else they lose their entire extractive position as owners of those means of production and they would cease to be the ruling class. Therefore, in any capitalist society the owner-operator class remain smaller than the wage paid classes, partially enforced by markets and by barriers to entry and to high capital costs for means of production.
In terms of these smol bean truckers having to take out debt to get semi-trucks, so what? They still control the asset and extract profits from it, the debt is merely a driving cost and does not fundamentally change the owner-operator trucker’s class nature
You don’t have to have employees to be bourgeois, many petty bourgeois are sole proprietors
I’m not placing a moral category on them, I’m making an objective statement of class nature. Someone who is a sole-proprietor with property they control is not proletarian and is not paid a wage
right but you run into the contradiction that the uber worker by that classification is also bourgeois
also, many people can’t afford to get into debt to buy the car either, so that makes them bourgs as well i guess, that’s a barrier of entry right there and is kinda arbitrary
i also am not placing a moral category on them i just don’t think marx even dealt with the question of piecmeal work in this way either and also i think these definitions are lacking if we walk ourselves into an argument that uber workers that ofen make below minimum wage are bourgs because they own the means of production and dont get paid a wage. owner operator truckers are just a more contradictory example of the above, so if we are classing one group of them as workers we should the other and the quantitative difference in the price of the tools doesn’t matter
Also I would sooner concede that Uber drivers have some petty bourgeois interests than I would concede that truck owner-operators share proletarian interests if you really insist on drawing the lines this way. If you knew these people you would see this clearly, these petty bourgeois owner-operator types are often wildly reactionary and anti-worker in a way I have not experienced while working prole positions
Uber drivers are indeed paid a wage, and they receive tips which doesn’t alter their wage relation (most people who get tips are proletarian).
Again, owning a car is obviously not prohibitive to most of the population since most of the adult American population has one. The fact that some cannot afford one does not change this.
A personal home owner is not bourgeois. A landlord who owns that same home and rents it out is. The addition of mortgage or debts doesn’t alter this either. The actual property does not physically change but it goes from personal to private property when it goes from a home owned by the resident to one owned by a 3rd party and rented out. That change is due to 1) most people cannot afford multiple houses, cost prohibitive barrier to entry and 2) the act of profit generation from this.
An Uber driver is not receiving profit. They are being paid a wage. The common car is just the prerequisite they need to qualify for this proletarian position. If cars were so expensive that only a few people could get them, car owners (including uber drivers) would wield way more power in such a society of rare cars. That’s not America right now though.
Truck owner-operators are receiving a profit. They are not being paid a wage. The capital intensive rare truck is the prerequisite for the petty bourgeois position. Trucks are so expensive and normally unnecessary that owners (including owner-operators) do wield way more power in this society. That’s America right now.
