[dragonwriter]

> Why do I have the feeling that most posters on HN who consider themselves the "middle class", actually fall well above of the middle quintile of household income and most are in the 5th quintile.

Because middle class in a capitalist society is an economic relationship between the captialist and working class (characterized by mixed dependence on capital and labor, most archetypically the independent operator who supports themselves by applying their own labor to their own capital rather than primarily by renting labor to apply to capital or selling labor to capitalists), and its members are usually well above middle income (though, on average, far below that of the capitalist class.)

The middle income quintile is largely members of the proletariat, not the petit bourgeoisie.

[jadedhacker]

This is a concept I haven't yet seen a good definition for though I know it is rigorously defined. What is the difference between the bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie?

[AstralStorm]

The difference is owning major assets. Be it a company, many housing investments, office spaces, factories, big farms, major amounts of stocks, financial institutions etc. Secondary, amount of political and medial power and pressure wielded.

Finally, a condition wether your own labour is not technically required for survival.

Most petit bourgeoisie still has to work, does not wield direct (individual) political power nor has big enough assets to survive despite major downturns.

The difference from proletariat is that they can rent and hire labour. Sometimes they get to manage it too.

[dragonwriter]

In discussion of capitalist economies, a rough definition (loosely following Marx) of the major classes is:

haut bourgeoisie (capitalists): those who own capital and rent labor to apply to it.

petit bourgeoisie (middle class): those who live by a combination of labor and capital, particularly those who apply their own labor (perhaps alongside a small amount of rented labor) to their own capital.

proletariat (working class): those who derive income mainly by selling labor to members of either of the preceding classes.

[Maybestring]

Do I understand correctly that an Uber driver with a 30k capital investment in a car is part of the petite bourgeoise, and a surgeon working for a hospital who has put 400k toward education is part of the proletariat? Or do you count education as capital?

[derekp7]

Capital is something you purchase or work to build from raw material, or some combination. And an education (with or without a degree) is considered an asset. So why not?

[danans]

It's just a classification system, so I wouldn't take it in isolation. If what you are trying to understand is wealth and power, you have consider more dimensions.

In Marx's time, these categories perhaps mapped more consistently to the gradation of wealth and power, but there were exceptions then too.

And the degree to which an asset is "capital" that produces wealth and income without the owner's labor is relative to it's scarcity. The 30k car is a common possession, and also it has no added economic value without the driver's direct labor. A fleet of cars driven by rented labor is capital, as are factories, valuable land, or high concentrations of wealth.

Education is a kind of capital, but the surgeon's student loan is no different in than a social worker's student loan, except in the cost and income potential.

In that sense the surgeon is a worker but their work usually produces a great deal of extra income that allows them to purchase capital assets of other kinds.

[dragonwriter]

> Do I understand correctly that an Uber driver with a 30k capital investment in a car is part of the petite bourgeoise

In the simple, no debt financing case, that's the most obvious categorization, though much the same concerns that lead to questions about whether those drivers are rightly categorized as contractors might be raised as to whether they are genuinely self-employed independent business owners or rented labor being applied to Uber capital with a weird gatekeeping mechanism.

> and a surgeon working for a hospital who has put 400k toward education is part of the proletariat?

A lot to high income workers (surgeons often very much among them) are joint capital/labor earners of a kind that diverges from the independent small business owner model, because they gain substantial income, often deferred through reinvestment and often mainly in what are held largely as retirement funds, on capital to which their own labor is not applied, as well as selling labor to capital; for that reason they’d generally be seen as petit bourgeoisie, thought somewhat different from the main textbook example.

> Or do you count education as capital?

Traditionally, if it's not been made property that can be itself sold freely in capitalist economy, it's not capital in the analysis of economic class in a capitalist economy. (Looked at from within the system rather than from critics of capitalism, ask yourself: are the returns of education taxed like labor or like capital—that tells you how the capitalist system itself sees them.)

[ryanx435]

Marx's labels are so outdated it doesn't make sense to use them in our modern economy.

[scarface74]

I agree. When a couple of developers can start a software company with nothing but a credit card and an AWS account the concept of "capital" has changed a lot.

[jadedhacker]

I have a feeling this idea is deceptive. Renting equipment has existed time immemorial.

[ryanx435]

It's funny to me that you are using words like proletariat and bourgeois, words used to describe class differences in an agrarian basee society/economy, to describe modern america, which is as opposite as you can get from an agrarian society.

The social Dynamics of the modern anerican situation have changed so much from when Marx was alive his labels no longer accurately apply.