Thread by @FromKulak

🧵1/
Americans don't understand class. American socialists especially

Every week I hear: "How can Trump be considered anti-elite? He's a billionaire!?"

This fundamentally misunderstands class. it's not how much you have, it's how you make it.

And Trump definitely ain't elite

2/
Classic Marxist economics divides class via the individual's means of securing resources.

The proletariat trade their labour to employers for wages.

The bourgeoise use their ownership of the means of production to extract surplus value from the proletarian laborer, etc.

3/
Sure this usually resulted in the bourgeoise being wealthier than the proles.. but not always. Some decayed bourgeoise barely made more than proles, while many successful skilled proles earned as much as lower tier bourgeoise.

These were dubbed the labour aristocracy

4/
there was an intensive debate amongst socialists in Russia as to freed serfs, many of whom owned their own land (and owed a mortgage to their former masters), and whether or not these former serfs should be considered Proles or Bourgeoise.

Thus the peasant/kulak distinction

5/
The important thing to understand about the American Class system and the rise of "The Elite" as opposed to "the Bourgeoise" or "the Aristocracy"

Is the rise of prestige-generating institutions and their integration with governments.

6/
Universities, thinktanks, government departments, prestige media, NGOs, and non-revenue generating segments of fortune 500s have exploded in the past 50 years

All targeted at controlling political and regulatory outcomes via manipulation of institutional and social prestige

7/
A typical career for the modern elite is to do a master's or PhD at an elite university, a postdoc or internship at a thinktank, a few years at a media firm, get hired at a government department

then bounce back and forth between the government and the companies they regulate

8/
At every stage in their career their wealth is generated either by their attachment to institutions the government funds, or by their perceived ability to manipulate regulatory outcomes...

Trump by contrast is a classic American huckster who attracts hostile regulators

9/
Trump's career could not be more different than the modern American elite.

He generates his wealth through a blend of family business ties, real "free" market activity, and his extreme bravado-infused brand.

He's a man who sells board games of himself

10/
His entire brand is a crass rejection of the prestige elite. every effort they've put into seeming thoughtful, measured, or respectable he rejects

Trump is the Grifter's grifter... the Petite bourgeoise's ideals made flesh.

There's a reason rappers reference him so often

11/
Even his book "Art of the Deal" is infused with an ethos of getting away with something, of going into a negotiation and winning.

Any of these "thoughtful" "measured" "girl-bosses" would have written "The Dream of Compromise" about politics, not business

12/
But the economics of class are the real division.

The American elite almost never ventures outside of government-funded institutions except to collect tribute from the corporations they regulate.

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Trump by contrast is an old-school capitalist.

Sure a capitalist in the corrupt field of New York real estate... but a more or less productive person who had to make bribes to government officials... not a leech who sat back a collected bribes

14/
Notably, Trump is the only president in the past 40 years who will not be offered a teaching position at a university, nor be invited to the board of think tanks or Fortune 500s.

Unlike Obama he does not receive Wall Street speaking fees into the hundreds of thousands

15/
Trump is a man with more negative prestige than almost anyone else in US history. his currency amongst the governing elite approaches negative infinity.. yet he is one of the most potent political forces in America today.

This is not just a culture war, it is a class war.