[eli_gottlieb]

That the industrial working class would come to compose the supermajority of society? That history was driven by a Hegelian dialectical structure which would guarantee that something like the attempted German Revolution would succeed?

[reillys]

Are the working class not the majority of society? 1% of the population of most western countries are farmers. 1% are extremely rich and 98% are the rest of us.

[metalliqaz]

Well, as far as industrial workers, they definitely aren't a super-majority, given all the people working in service, creative, and white collar jobs. But I don't know why that would matter.

I'm no scholar of this stuff by any means, but by my understanding the relevant difference was between those that lived by what they owned versus those that lived by selling their labor. I don't know the exact numbers but I would assume those that live by selling their labor are a majority but not super-majority. Those that live entirely off their property are a tiny minority, but there currently exists a solid chunk of people that both sell their time and build wealth from property/interest.

Most of the HN crowd probably falls into that later category

[lucubratory]

>I don't know the exact numbers but I would assume those that live by selling their labor are a majority but not super-majority.

They are a global supermajority. In some of the wealthiest nations on the planet, they are instead only a majority.

>there currently exists a solid chunk of people that both sell their time and build wealth from property/interest.

Yes, they are called the petite bourgeoisie. Marx wrote about them extensively. In very wealthy nations like the US, Canada, UK, Australia etc my understanding is that they make up roughly 30% of the population. The rest are proletarians & lumpenproletarians, aside from a negligible-in-numbers percentage of the population that compose the haute bourgeoisie or "real bourgeoisie". I believe the percentage of the population who are bourgeois in the US is around 0.3%, much lower in the other wealth nations because so many of global elite choose to live in the US.

The percentage of the population who are petite bourgeoisie in countries other than the wealthy nations is highly variable, class composition varies a lot worldwide (e.g. there are many countries like the Phillipines where there is quite a large peasant population still). In general, outside of the wealthy nations the petite bourgeoisie are something like 5-15% of the population, and the haute bourgeoisie make up significantly less than 0.3% of the population.

[reillys]

I think having some money saved does not make one petite bourgeois as I say in the comment above I think people who trade their time for money are working class. If you’ve saved enough money that you can retire you aren’t not working class, you are working class. The bourgeoisie do not need to work and so don’t retire.

[eli_gottlieb]

>Well, as far as industrial workers, they definitely aren't a super-majority, given all the people working in service, creative, and white collar jobs. But I don't know why that would matter.

The Marxian theory, as such, concerned specifically industrial workers, because they were, by their own occupation, brought together in organized thousands at single sites of production.