• queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    3 days ago

    Being working class doesn’t just mean you perform work. It’s a social class defined by the relation to the means of production.

    Soy farmers in the US own their fields, own their equipment, set their own hours, and directly profit from selling commodities on the market. They’re small business owners, they are not workers. Workers don’t own or control shit, they sell their labor to someone else who actually owns capital and land. Workers toil under a boss and soy farmers do not, they are their own boss.

        • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          But what class are they? Or are you saying they are a class themselves?

          That said, most small business owners I know work way to hard and end up with very little in the end. It is hard to compete with the large corporations. But in the past, if the area they lived in experienced significant growth, they often made a killing on the business property alone. Farmers don’t really have that since they live on the business property.

          Kinda feels like they should be their own class really. Though I suppose there is a big difference between farmers who own their land, and the ones where the bank essentially owns it… and they just pay rent with no real hope of wver paying it off.