Classes POLL

[flashleg8]

as a word of warning, people often screw up self reporting.

Also a lot of people dont really understand the technical distinction of what puts you into each strata in terms of classification.

What technical distinction? Money, education, housing ownership, parental class, job? Sorry but from a Marxist perspective there is really only two classes: Bourgeois (owners of the means of production: capitalists) and proletarian (producers: workers). I doubt there are any people on this forum that are bougeois. Pretty much ALL of you are proleterian.

P.S. To the OP - your poll doesn't even have working class as an option?! Poor(!) Your class loyalties are obvious!

Really? My grandfather was a small-time dairy farmer. He owned his land, tools, cattle, etc, but probably made less than he would have if he'd worked a 40 hour week on an assembly line. Is he Bourgeois? How about the President of a major company who makes millions of dollars a year, but doesn't own any significant amount of stock; i.e. control of the means of production. Is he a prol?

Marx did acknowledge that other classes existed, but he believed they were becoming increasingly a part of the two main classes and that these were becoming more and more polarized as capitalism progressed.
I would suggest that your grandfather would be categorised as a peasant. Marx acknowledged that they were a separate class, but did not think they would be easy to involve in any class struggle (though Mao proved differently ). The tendency in farming in the last century is for smaller farms to increasingly struggle to compete against larger "factory farms", this reflects the tendency of small family firms to be increasingly taken over by larger firms or to go out of business. Successful farmer owners will rise to the bourgeois, the rest will be pushed down into the proletariat (without wishing to intrude into your personal life, you suggest that your family no longer owns the farm - this perhaps shows the forces in action?).
As for the president of the major company - well I suggest there are few CEOs that are not paid part of their salary in company shares but Marx makes a distinction between "functioning capitalists" those who manage industries and "mere coupon clippers" those who live off interest from shares or properties, but basically they belong to the same class.

People today can own property much more easily than they could in Marx's day. Just about anyone with a full-time job in the US holds an ownership stake in many companies through their pension or 401k.

I believe I have covered the distinction between personal property and those who derive their income from ownership in this thread somewhere before.
As for the more interesting question of small workers share ownership, I would suggest that pension share ownership is more usefully looked at as deferred wages. Marx's response to pension funds and speculative trading was "What the speculating trader risks is social property, not his own. Equally absurd now is the saying that the origin of capital is saving, since what this speculator demands is precisely that others should save for him." As for the workers controlling the company through their stock ownership this is really not the case: most do not have a voting right or cannot exercise it. Thus the control of the means of production is still in the hands of the capitalist class.

Contrawise, managers who do not actually own the property that they manage are far more common as businesses grow larger and larger.

Marx does identify the subsection of the proletariat of managerial workers, such as factory supervisors, these are also wage labourers but they are slightly more privileged than ordinary workers and are less likely to come into conflict with the capitalist than the workers because of their position.

Marx's distinctions were arbitrary and painted with far to broad a brush when he wrote them. Today, they are completely meaningless.

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Marx's theories have been built upon and expanded since his day and have provided increasingly sophisticated analyses of society and culture. Marxism is a living philosophy and his tools of dialectical analysis are still relevant to the material conditions of life we face today.

and rich people are not snobs or idiots, or at least most...

But they are still parasites