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> “Working class” lol. Class-wise, engineers are like the junior executives in the Mad Men era, or junior lawyers and bankers today. They are not only well comp

> “Working class” lol. Class-wise, engineers are like the junior executives in the Mad Men era, or junior lawyers and bankers today. They are not only well compensated, but have tons of impact (and therefore leverage) as individual contributors. Anyone who relies on wage labor for their income (as opposed to earnings from capital) is working class. That is the defining feature of the working class. Unless you could retire tomorrow and support yourself from your capital holdings alone, you're a member of the working class. (Many engineers at Twitter likely could retire tomorrow and live off their equity, but I'm guessing the majority could not.) People love to erode class solidarity by claiming that only people whose incomes are below a certain level are working class, or that you have to "work with your hands" to be working class. Don't fall for it.

shukantpal 4y ago
rayiner 4y ago
> Anyone who relies on wage labor for their income (as opposed to earnings from capital) is working class. Since when is that the definition? Doctors and lawyers have never been considered part of the "working class." Software engineers, and other categories of jobs that didn't really exist in the 1930s, are more similar to those professionals than to working class people. > People love to erode class solidarity by claiming that only people whose incomes are below a certain level are working class You've got it exactly backward. The top 10% has been pulling away from the median American for decades now. They're beneficiaries of the same forces that have produced outsized growth for the top 0.1%. They write the software, paper the deals, put together the PowerPoint presentations, etc., that enable those trends. The delusion among skilled professionals that they are part of the "working class," and their influx into the putatively labor-aligned political party, has had a tremendously negative effect on working class interests. They champion policies like globalization and mass immigration that benefit them at the expense of factory and farm workers. They spent divert vast amounts of political capital to social issues important to highly educated people, at the expense of economic issues important to the working class. And they make it impossible to pay for expansive social services the way other developed countries pay for them: by heavily taxing the upper middle class.
- walrusfromspace 4y ago
  >Since when is that the definition? That's the Marxist definition of the Working Class[0], although nowadays some Marxists would programmers, lawyers etc. "Professional Managerial Class" to distinguish them from the workerist idea of the Working Class. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class#Marxist_definition:_the_proletariat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class#Marxist_definiti...
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Marx was writing in the very specific context of then-emerging industrial factory production. In Marx's dichotomy, there's workers and those that "own the means of production." That dichotomy makes no sense as applied to what we would call today knowledge workers, and it's probably a misreading of Marx to apply his terminology to them. In Marx's dichotomy, ownership of the means of production is critical because workers are utterly dependent on that capital to be able to produce anything. That's not true of knowledge workers. A programmer, like a doctor or a lawyer, isn't dependent on a capital owner to produce the thing they sell.

shukantpal 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago

> Anyone who relies on wage labor for their income (as opposed to earnings from capital) is working class. Since when is that the definition? Doctors and lawyers have never been considered part of the "working class." Software engineers, and other categories of jobs that didn't really exist in the 1930s, are more similar to those professionals than to working class people. > People love to erode class solidarity by claiming that only people whose incomes are below a certain level are working class You've got it exactly backward. The top 10% has been pulling away from the median American for decades now. They're beneficiaries of the same forces that have produced outsized growth for the top 0.1%. They write the software, paper the deals, put together the PowerPoint presentations, etc., that enable those trends. The delusion among skilled professionals that they are part of the "working class," and their influx into the putatively labor-aligned political party, has had a tremendously negative effect on working class interests. They champion policies like globalization and mass immigration that benefit them at the expense of factory and farm workers. They spent divert vast amounts of political capital to social issues important to highly educated people, at the expense of economic issues important to the working class. And they make it impossible to pay for expansive social services the way other developed countries pay for them: by heavily taxing the upper middle class.

walrusfromspace 4y ago
>Since when is that the definition? That's the Marxist definition of the Working Class[0], although nowadays some Marxists would programmers, lawyers etc. "Professional Managerial Class" to distinguish them from the workerist idea of the Working Class. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class#Marxist_definition:_the_proletariat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class#Marxist_definiti...
- rayiner 4y ago
  Marx was writing in the very specific context of then-emerging industrial factory production. In Marx's dichotomy, there's workers and those that "own the means of production." That dichotomy makes no sense as applied to what we would call today knowledge workers, and it's probably a misreading of Marx to apply his terminology to them. In Marx's dichotomy, ownership of the means of production is critical because workers are utterly dependent on that capital to be able to produce anything. That's not true of knowledge workers. A programmer, like a doctor or a lawyer, isn't dependent on a capital owner to produce the thing they sell.