How would a Marxist classify an entrepreneur that starts their own company?

Question

This would probably apply equally to all software engineers that formed their own company, whether it is Mark Zuckerburg, Noland Bushnell, or David Crane. These entrepreneurs started their companies with very little money. Legend has it Atari was founded on $500, Activision received $650,000 in venture capital, and Facebook was founded on $200,000 and received half a million in VC for a 10% interest in the company.

Marx defined several classes of people, the Landlord Class, the Bourgeoisie, the petty Bourgeoisie, and the Proletariat.

What class did those engineers belong to?

Did it change when they founded their companies?

Answer 1

As a Marxist, I can answer from an opinionated AND analytic response. If you've ever read 'Das Kapital' or 'The Communist Manifesto', Marx at a base level considers anyone who owns a business to be some form of bourgeoisie.

Now you can be a petty-bourgeois or a -just- a bourgeois. So let's say a man has a small bakery and hires several workers. Now he is considered a petty-bourgeois who will eventually either become a member of the bourgeoisie when his company grows OR will be reduced to becoming a worker (proletariat) when a larger group or more powerful member of the bourgeoisie buys him out, runs him out of business etc.

So in the end it's rather simple. If you start a company and hire people, you belong to the petty-bourgeoisie. If you get really big and hire a lot of people. A lot of workers. Then you become bourgeois, and according to Marx, an enemy of the worker.

Answer 2

The bourgeoisie.

It doesn't change that they're the founder. They're usually just as reliant on finance capital as existing capital.

The failures tend to be petits-bourgeois (or "kleine" more accurately) bourgeois rather than haute or gross bourgeois. The distinctions being whether they employ wage labour and how much.

The central class relationship in capitalism, for the Marxist, is the relationship around the ownership of capital and wage labour. "Those engineers" belong to the bourgeoisie no more or no less than Isambard Kingdom Brunel, also an engineer, sometime successful as a capitalist.

Whether their class changed when they founded a company to reproduce value in an expanded form depends on their previous class relationship. In Zuckerberg's case he probably comes from the kleine bourgeois, given his parents profession and the structure of dental work as collective team labour with employees. So no, Zuckerberg's class didn't change appreciably, but the role of his control of capital changed significantly as the volume of capital controlled expanded.

Answer 3

One has to remember that Marx wrote his manifesto in the midst of the industrial revolution, when there was considerable abuse of monopoly power and definitely abuse of the working class in manual labor jobs. At that time, there were no laws regarding employment conditions, so the oligarchs were free to squeeze their people for all they could.

People working for a software firm are paid to generate intellectual property. A motivated, satisfied person is ten to twenty times as productive as an abused or disaffected person. Consequently, a Marx style industrial abusive work environment tends to destroy the company, as productivity plummets, and the most productive people leave for better working conditions.

The big difference between the industrial revolution and the tech revolution is - the tech revolution relies on inspiration and motivation, not pure sweat. Marx age working conditions are not only cruel, in the software field they are counterproductive.

Yes, there are 'software sweatshops'... anyone who works in software knows what companies to avoid. If you're good, you can find a position elsewhere.

So, to get back to your question - how would Marx categorize an entrepreneur? They don't really fit in to any of his categories, because both the economic and social conditions have changed so much since Marx's time.

Answer 4

Here's the thing. There is only one way to make money according to Marx -- you have to get someone to work for free. That sounds crazy, but this is what Marx meant. You have to hire someone to work for you who will create more value than you pay them for. So in essence, the worker is not paid for part of his work, in Marx's viewpoint. Some of the value created by the worker goes to the owner instead. For those who asked why the business owner who provides jobs to the worker becomes the enemy, you now have your answer. Work under these terms is fundamentally exploitative to Marx. The typical response of the capitalist is to say, well, you don't have to accept that job or that salary. While this is true, it's also misleading. Because exploitation in the fashion described is the basis for all jobs in capitalism. Every job offer in Capitalism would have this exploitation as an a priori feature. The worker must produce more value than he is paid. What's the alternative? Marx doesn't do a very good job detailing the alternative, but it would be some version of Communism, where the workers own the means of production. If you start your own business, you attempt to move into the world of the exploitative capitalist. But what Marx describes is that for most companies, a larger company will put them out of business. So then you enter the workforce again. Increased competition for jobs leads to lower wages for workers. To Marx, revolution was inevitable. It was a philosophical necessity. While all of this is an interesting answer to the question, I find that Marx's work about value itself and how money flattens every other notion of what a person might value is quite compelling. A good place to start is to read Marx's essay "The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society."

Answer 5

The moment someone starts their own company, nothing much happens. They still work, and sell their work for money. The interesting transition points are in my opinion

• accumulate enough 'capital' (that may be in the form of software written) so that a sizeable part of the income is in fact rent on this capital
• Hire workers and sell their work, thus extracting surplus value

ETA:*: In response to the claim that capitalists "are employed by their customer":
This is very wrong , with a kernel of truth. The wrong: Customers don't hold the same kind of power over a capitalist as the capitalist does over their employees. The kernel of truth is of course, that capitalists are stuck in a rat race against other capital and compete for the same market. But they have options: exploit their workers harder (e.g. invest in machinery that allows the same worker o produce more), move their factory to aplace with lower wages or even liquidate and invest the money in a more profitable ndustry. The key difference between capital and workers beeing that capitalists can move capital, while workers can only move themselves, sometimes.
Claiming that capitalists are employed by their customers is more ofcustating than telling.