The truth is that when this nation chose to eliminate four million farmers (with their families, hired help, buildings, and boundaries) on the advice of the colleges of agriculture, the agricultural bureaucracy, and the agribusiness corporations, it committed a sort of cultural genocide.
Having a quantity worth money doesn’t necessarily change your class. There are old working class people that are now millionaires because they bought a house in the 70s but they’ve worked a job for a wage their whole life and will almost certainly end up without that house near when they die. Being working class does not mean being poor, it’s about your relationship to production.
With that said, most of these “farmers” are actually farm owners that makes them at least petite bourgeois in character (just like anyone here self-employed to write code for a living) and many are actually employers benefitting from the (super) exploitation of others, particularly undocumented workers.
So I basically agree but I think it’s important to not forget that class is not about income or net worth.
In theory. In practice though, having more wealth does have an effect of which class that person will side with
In your example of the working class elderly with an expensive house, it is likely they will side with the bourgeoisie to further oppress the proles on the matters of rent/affordable property if it means retaining or increasing the value of their property
A wealthy coder for a megacorp often sides with the bourgeoisie because their access to capital affords them similar avenues of exploitation against the working class. Voting against labor laws for Uber/Doordash workers in order to keep their delivery fees down, pushing for more policing of the homeless to keep their property value up, advocating for increased surveillance of people because they’re paid in company stock and the more the tech sector grows, the higher their salaries will be pushed due to supply and demand of their job
Now compare that to a petit bourgeois coder who is living paycheck to paycheck and needs to also drive Uber on the side to keep them afloat
Naturally material interests have a great impact on the larger trends as well as an individual’s decisions, including whether to act against their own immediate property values or paycheck. They are part of the self-reinforcing system of capital that continually calls them back into the fold.
But it is more complex than a class determinism. Class traitors have always been important for the movement, for example, and so has been dragging along the working class that does not actually self-liberate very well on its own. Most successful revolutions have required a multi-class mobilization that includes the peasantry and a fight for national liberation. The leadership of communist parties has frequently been of the petite bourgeois or middle income earners. It is key to separate fighting for the working class and the exact extent to which someone is of it.
This is the challenge of socialist organizing. To recognize the contradictions and synthesize to find a valuable path forward. We cannot have a strict claim about income and class, nor even a personal moralization about prole vs PMC vs petite bourgeois because if we do so we will fail to retrieve use resources available to us. Simultaneously, we have to measure this against becoming beholden to bourgeois interests via using those resources and create a bulwark against it. There is no success in a hard dichotomy (e.g. socialists that end up just being a reading group because no one is sufficiently prole) nor in naively allowing bourgeois interests to capture your project (the politically uneducated cannot make decisions in your org nor can employers, e.g.).
In other words, this is a case where we have to attempt to struggle within contradiction in hopes of resolving it towards a favorable synthesis for working class liberation. To recognize your valid points and still try to mobilize the less-prole in our favor and spread consciousness and build our orgs in unfavorable conditions. Homeowners are partially bought off by real estate dynamics so we need to carefully use them and build from them how we can while guarding against the capitalist response to recapture those who begin dallying with socialist thinking, for example.
Finally, I also think this is a good criticism to use when it comes to deciding how to allocate your efforts. It is not necessarily strategic to focus efforts at the people least likely to come to your side due to material interests. If your org puts all its efforts into organizing white techbros you’ll be inefficient. But if a white techbro becomes politically educated and wants to struggle in their workplace and, say, fight against Zionist occupation via their proletarian aspect, it is foolish to shut that down.
Anyways you’re making good points and I’m not really contradicting them. Just trying to share the direction I’m trying to get at since I’m not sure if I’m explaining it well.