1) Ownership of sufficient productive assets 2) Authority (the power to hire and fire workers, boss workers around, etc. -- almost always correlated with income) 3) Potential to one day have a substantial amount of 1 or 2, but who lack it presently (e.g. people in their 20s who've recently earned their MBAs and are just entering the workforce)
The primary advantage of this definition would be that it accounts for the problematic class position of the higher-paid administrators and professionals that Marvin noted. Moreover, it also explains why a lot of Americans are confused about their actual class interests (too many folks overestimate how much of 3 they have).
-WD
On 6/5/07, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Taking this at face value, I proffer the following
> definitions, rooted in Marx's critique of political
> economy:
>
> 1. a person who has private ownership of sufficient
> productive assets so that he does not have to sell his
> own labor (power) (i.e., ability to work) to live and
> who instead employs others who work for wages to make
> goods or services that are sold at market;
>
> 2. a person who satisfies the characteristics of (1)
> and who is aware that he and others like him do so
> enough to have shared interests in preserving that
> status, a common identity with the others, mutual
> values and a common culture rooted in a conception of
> history.
>
> These definitions are not axiomatic or totally
> transparent, but they are no worse than many
> definitions in the human sciences and better than
> many. As a definition it might be improved, but I
> aware that there are really no necessary and
> sufficient conditions for anything, and that there are
> possibly examples of capitalists who lack one or more
> of the qualities attributed to them, as well as
> borderline cases.
>
> It must be understood that the term is rooted in a
> theory about how the worlds works -- all terms with
> any theoretical interest are. (Consider "neutron,"
> "gene," "compound") In this case the theory is
> historical materialism, which posits that "capitalist"
> is a class relationship, that is, that someone's
> having the properties of a capitalist is a function of
> his class position, his location in a certain kind of
> social structure ("capitalist society") with a certain
> kind of dynamic (accumulation of surplus value through
> exploitation of wage labor).
>
> So defined "capitalist" is a far better term than "the
> rich" (your alternative), an ahistorical category that
> fails to distinguish between Crassus and Carnegie, and
> is not anchored to any theory about the way society
> works or why "the rich" are, in any particular
> instance, rich.