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I am not sure if the concept of working class and proletariat as the revolutionary subject is useful anymore, specially when many of the new members of the so c

I am not sure if the concept of working class and proletariat as the revolutionary subject is useful anymore, specially when many of the new members of the so called working class may not be able to get a job in their whole lives, depending on how the situation evolves. We will have to see if the redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital stops at some point or inequality just keeps increasing. Now it's the golden age for programmers, but we will have to see how this holds in the long term, seeing that the main goal of a perfect programmer should be to automatize himself out of a job in some sense. Anyway, malthusian apocalyptic predictions are fun, but one should not forget that just because they were wrong once it doesn't mean they will be wrong each time, we don't have "father God" nor "mother Nature" to cover our asses anymore. All responsibility is in our hands.

wffurr 11y ago
If you use the formulation of class as power, then the unemployed are definitely part of the "working class", as they have no more say than the workers do.
kalkin 11y ago
> Now it's the golden age for programmers, but we will have to see how this holds in the long term Yeah, the article takes that up a bit: "Since the Industrial Revolution, capitalism has shown a long-term tendency to deskill labor and separate conception from execution in a way that increases the power of management. As industries mature, they tend to try to make workers interchangeable units." "Nobody has yet figured out how to Taylorize software development. The task of writing a working program has yet to be broken down into subtasks that can be performed without specialized knowledge and some grasp of the whole system... [But] the larger trend doesn't bode well for the relative privileges that programmers have acquired."
- icebraining 11y ago
  I think a difference is that as soon as you can break down parts of the software development work into rote and unskilled tasks, you can write software to do those tasks. An example would be compilers, which do plenty of routine work (converting higher level algorithms into low level machine code) which used to be done by hand. That said, I also don't agree that software development hasn't been at least partially "Taylorized"; it's just that, like the factories where the original Taylorization happened, that work has been moved overseas. There are plenty of companies doing custom development upon preexisting platforms (Wordpress, Sharepoint, etc) and which employ people that could barely code Fizzbuzz, to do stuff like adding a field to a report, add a simple conditional filter or read some XML file into a database.
- werber 11y ago
  "Nobody has yet figured out how to Taylorize software development." Agile/Scrum... https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-and-especially-scrum-are-terrible/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-an...
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
> I am not sure if the concept of working class and proletariat as the revolutionary subject is useful anymore, specially when many of the new members of the so called working class may not be able to get a job in their whole lives Which leaves them plenty of time for revolution...

wffurr 11y ago

If you use the formulation of class as power, then the unemployed are definitely part of the "working class", as they have no more say than the workers do.

kalkin 11y ago

> Now it's the golden age for programmers, but we will have to see how this holds in the long term Yeah, the article takes that up a bit: "Since the Industrial Revolution, capitalism has shown a long-term tendency to deskill labor and separate conception from execution in a way that increases the power of management. As industries mature, they tend to try to make workers interchangeable units." "Nobody has yet figured out how to Taylorize software development. The task of writing a working program has yet to be broken down into subtasks that can be performed without specialized knowledge and some grasp of the whole system... [But] the larger trend doesn't bode well for the relative privileges that programmers have acquired."

icebraining 11y ago
I think a difference is that as soon as you can break down parts of the software development work into rote and unskilled tasks, you can write software to do those tasks. An example would be compilers, which do plenty of routine work (converting higher level algorithms into low level machine code) which used to be done by hand. That said, I also don't agree that software development hasn't been at least partially "Taylorized"; it's just that, like the factories where the original Taylorization happened, that work has been moved overseas. There are plenty of companies doing custom development upon preexisting platforms (Wordpress, Sharepoint, etc) and which employ people that could barely code Fizzbuzz, to do stuff like adding a field to a report, add a simple conditional filter or read some XML file into a database.
werber 11y ago
"Nobody has yet figured out how to Taylorize software development." Agile/Scrum... https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-and-especially-scrum-are-terrible/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-an...

AnimalMuppet 11y ago

> I am not sure if the concept of working class and proletariat as the revolutionary subject is useful anymore, specially when many of the new members of the so called working class may not be able to get a job in their whole lives Which leaves them plenty of time for revolution...