Juice

The "means of production" is a very abstract and fundamental concept. I think its right for you to question it, and how it relates directly to you. Its a very general concept, and everything you are asking of of applies to is very specific. The means of production has been well defined it seems elsewhere in the discussion, but its basically "everything that is used in human production" which is the driving force of history from a Marxist/sorta Hegelian perspective. So it is a big deal.

But what is also relevant, is how production is defined, and namely who owns its products. You work in IT (so do I) so in that example you own your work laptop? That laptop is MoP, same as the painter tools, and you sell your product to the company, who uses it to run how ever millions of transactions. Or making those transactions possible for that company, integrating some new feature. So more specifically, those tools are Capital, which is an essential mean of production under capitalism. But a ton of the infrastructure for those transactions was publicly funded, paid for with taxes. But now most if not all of that infrastructure is privately owned.

So in that way you are like the painter, in that you sell directly the product of your labor to the capitalist. Both you and the painter are workers in the same way, but youre an intellectual worker vs he is a physical laborer. but the paint and personal items in your personally owned house is for your personal use, whereas the software you sell to a company is for commercial use, in effect the software is capital, whereas the paint on your walls is not. But if the painter painted the walls at your company's office, that would be capital. The painter "bought the paint with his own money"? But you are paying him, so you are buying the paint.

You can't tell me you don't understand why this is

Decimation of the middle class is a natural tendency of capitalism, but politically its highly desirable to have a middle class. So the middle class in a highly capitalist society ends up being somewhat precarious. Billionaires aren't attacking the middle classes more than laboring classes, but the "answer" to almost every problem caused by overproduction bubbles is to somehow suppress wages. The government, which needs a strong middle class for political stability, now has to find a way to lower wages or ,in the case of business owning/managing middle class, make new capital investment difficult. There are different kind of middle class, so there are different ways of accomplishing this. But as a result, middle class people are class conscious to the extent that they feel always threatened, but often aren't able to link it to the economic system, or if so then they might not be able to link global economic problems to the actions that actually caused the problems.

"There is no middle class only virgin workers and chad lumpen proles" is an incredible bit

You're 100% right

Increased interest rates make it more expensive for businesses to borrow money. This causes them to tighten up expenses to remain profitable which means cutting hours and laying people off. The more people that are unemployed, the lower wages become.

Inflation is caused by companies raising prices in response to higher revenues. Forcing people into unemployment stops that by taking money out of circulation, it just sits in accounts as capital, rather than being used to pay wages

He's a fucking Vanderbilt, he'll be fine

Putin seems to make implicit threats every time he opens his mouth, and I'm sure Musk's "I'm a very dangerous crazy loose cannon billionaire" that is such a huge part of his public image, even -- maybe especially -- with heads of state, went over extremely well with an actually very dangerous guy who tames loose cannon billionaires as a part of his actually very dangerous job.

This is garbage why should I care about what some nerd with a sub stack thinks about other academics? Intellectuals suck, Marxist intellectuals are no exception. So in the wake of MacCarthyism, at the dawn of Neoliberalism, intellectuals in universities were being pressured to gravitate away from Marx. No shit. Does this mean they were correct to do so? Well the death of the militant labor movement around the same time would give us some indication.

Why would you care so much to try and ensure that people don't read very good books that you likely havent read? Seems like someone with an axe to grind. But let me assure anyone who is reading this, Marxist Intellectuals are as big a pain I'm the ass, and kind of necessary, as they are in any other org. The problem isn't with the intellectuals though, it's that there's not enough regular working people who read and understand revolutionary theory to push back against them and their tendencies toward splits and polemics and laziness.

This is the problem with not reading Marxism though, the basis of the argument is "all these smart people stopped studying Marx" and takes it for granted that it is because the source material was somehow incorrect. And maybe some of it was, there's no shortage of that. But that explanation completely ignores structural and social pressures that would have been a clearer and more direct explanation than, "all at once all these smart nerds left Marxism, so they must have been right to do so." This is not what causes a mass exodus. What causes someone to leave a field of study for another one is the threat that their livelihood will be taken away.

Its so funny I wonder if this would have worked on someone who was new to Marxism. Homie I'm so far gone, if you think this post might be the reason someone would give up on reading Marx that person would have to be already unfamiliar. Actually engaging with other Marxists will do more to run you out of Marxism than this goofy ass nerd ass substack

I did neither of those things, literally

Wow 70 years of history is so flat, it just folds right up in your pocket like that, stunning. Its possible you've left a few details out