:
: : SDF: Does your "employment" of the government net you, personally, a monetary profit?: If you must ask, being that I am in the military, yes. A rather significant entry in the black, as I am in Bosnia. Rather lucrative, actually. *grin*
SDF: Now I would distinguish between where the military employs you ("I am in the military"), clearly a working-class matter, and where you employ the military ("I own an army that steals for my private gain"). If you are in the former, you're working class.
: Although my interest in maintaining a strong stable state apparatus is more in the form of 'insurance' than in any direct gain. Not that I'll refuse the direct gain, of course.
SDF: Just because the working class earns a wage doesn't make it "capitalist."
:
: : SDF: Do you charge interest on your loans?
: Not in a direct sense. What I do is enable others to become more affluent, through investment. My 'return' is found through accomplishing more abstract goals, like being known as an 'asset' to my friends.
SDF: So the answer, cutting out the waffling, is NO. You aren't a capitalist in that sense. If you DID actually extract monetary interest from your loans, you would be profiting financially from their labor-power, thus you would be a capitalist in that sense.
: : SDF: To the extent you are a consumer of goods that you use, and not of labor-power you use in order to turn a profit, you are a member of the working class, as defined here
: ... which means that one can be a capitalist AND a worker simultaneously. The idea behind Marxism is to do away with the mechanism of capitalism, not with 'capitalists', per se.
SDF: This is a spurious distinction: it's like saying one wants to get rid of airplanes, not their pilots. Uh, excuse me, but if you get rid of airplanes, the pilots of airplanes are no longer "pilots," since there are no airplanes to fly.
Similarly, if there is no mechanism for the accumulation of capital, i.e. no property and no money, there will be nobody left to call a "capitalist," and thus no capitalists.
None.
