[rynohack]

Working class is not defined by income level.

The working class is those who own no significant means of production and thus must sell their labor at whatever price the market bears.

That the market for SE labor is good(for the workers), doesn't mean SE's don't need to work to earn money.

[timkam]

This is an interesting perspective, and I assume your definition is the technically correct one. Still, many SEs receive substantial compensation in RSUs, direct stocks, shares in startups, et cetera. So also from this perspective, there are many non-working class SEs. Another aspect is that culturally, the perception has been that SEs don't necessarily sell their work by the hour, but instead sell knowledge that scales tremendously, in exchange for a comfortable upper middle-to-lower upper class life.

[neom]

To be technical, and to borrow a bit. Proletariat[1] are the working class, they work for the Bourgeoisie[2], the people who own the means of productions. That's why I asked why you used demote. Lower, Middle and Upper are strata or ranks within classes. Within the bourgeoisie, you can distinguish:

Petite bourgeoisie: small business owners, shopkeepers

Haute bourgeoisie: industrialists, financiers

Managerial class (in some frameworks): high-paid non owners who control labor

Within the proletariat, you can distinguish:

Lumpenproletariat[3]: unemployed, precarious

Skilled laborers vs unskilled laborers

Labor aristocracy: better-paid, sometimes ideologically closer to capital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie [2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat [3]

[staunton]

> the Bourgeoisie[2], the people who own the means of productions

> Within the bourgeoisie, you can distinguish: [...] Managerial class [...] non owners who control labor

Contradiction?

[neom]

Class != Job Title

Managerial Class != Bourgeoisie

This was a loose usage of the term “bourgeoisie”, meant in the sociological rather than economic sense. Sorry.

In late capitalism, the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) occupies a weird liminal space:

Economically they're proletariat

Socially/culturally they're aligned with bourgeois values

Politically they often acts in defense of capital (because of career dependency)

Hence: managerial class != bourgeoisie, even if they act like them or aspire to be them.

[schmidtleonard]

It's not technically correct, it's correct.

The distinction here is "do you get your money from owning assets or do you get your money from working" because where you get your money is where you get your incentives and the incentives of owning are opposite the incentives of working in many important regards.

The economy is inhabited by people who work for a living but it is controlled by people who own things for a living. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's the definition of capitalism. If you do not own things for a living and do not know people who do, spend some time pondering "the control plane." It should seem like an alien world at first, but it's an alien world with a wildly outsize impact on your life and it behooves you to understand it in broad strokes even if you aren't trying to climb into it.

[zeroonetwothree]

I wouldn’t say the economy is “controlled” by those people. The economy is just an emergent phenomenon. It’s a natural result of unrestricted freedom of exchange.

[acuozzo]

> The economy is just an emergent phenomenon. It’s a natural result of unrestricted freedom of exchange.

I have a bridge to sell you if you're interested. Let me know.

[analog31]

Something I've always puzzled over is whether the means of production are our laptops, or our knowledge and expertise. I still work for a wage, but expect to be paid above subsistence. I don't own the laptop that I use at work, but also don't own the carpeting on the floor. Both are commodities.

Is the concept of "intellectual capital" a figment of my imagination, or a flaw of the traditional class identifiers? Or both?

[wat10000]

For factory workers, the means of production is the factory.

What’s “the factory” for software? Our equivalent of the factory is the organization we work in, and our connection to the people who turn our software into money.

You can write software at home by yourself, just like you can do machining on your own. But there are a lot of steps between making software, or machining, and turning that output into money. By working for a company, you can have other people handle those steps. The tradeoff is that this structure is something owned by someone else.

[triceratops]

The means of production are the software you produce, the servers they run on, and the patents, proprietary data, algorithms, and other intellectual property that are the byproduct of your labor.

[umanwizard]

This might be the definition in Marxist theory but in normal colloquial language “working class” absolutely does not mean the same thing as “anyone who doesn’t own the means of production”. But I think you know what OP meant and are just derailing the conversation.

[acuozzo]

> but in normal colloquial language

Therein lies the propaganda.

[anon-3988]

Where do people that works in Wall Street fall in this spectrum? They don't own the factories

[SoftTalker]

The means of production for a software engineer is a laptop. Many SEs own them. There are no raw materials or factories needed to produce software, at least not in the sense of traditional production.

[kranke155]

That’s not true. The actual means of production are the data centers. It’s true they didn’t use to be hugely expensive either, but now with AI being the backbone of everything we now have really expensive data centers again.

[cyanydeez]

if we're just going to loop this properly, the modern means of production is the stock market's inflated capital. Most of AI floats on cash that does not exist for any purpose except market speculation.

[kranke155]

Thats capital, not means of production.

The means of producing an AI is a huge data centre for training. Having a lot of money but no chips of any kind wouldn't get you an AI. We had money 10 years ago, but they did not make AIs out of them.

[Jeff_Brown]

You could say the same thing of hands. What really distinguishes capital from labor is not what counts as a tool, but market power. A large number of non-unionized workers are inherently at a disadvantage against a small number of employers with exorbitantly costly infra.

[SoftTalker]

But for the software developer, the tool is also the factory.

[tehjoker]

data, infrastructure, IP, etc You typically don't serve business from your laptop. Without that stuff your code is worthless.

[f33d5173]

The way a word is defined by communists and the way it is defined by the rest of the world are seldom the same.

[closewith]

The working class is globally the class of people who must sell their labour. That includes - to a rounding error - all software developers and that is completely uncontroversial.

[SoftTalker]

This also includes doctors, lawyers, academics, managers and executives, none of whom are traditionally thought of as "working class"

[dragonwriter]

That group is, in fact, traditionally considered largely working class (proletarian, more specifically the proletarian intelligentsia, though some in that group might be middle class, again, in the traditional class analysis, petit bourgeois sense.)

American popular usage defers from traditional economic role-based class analysis to be instead do income-based “class” terminology which instead of defining the middle class as the petit bourgeois who apply their own labor to their own capital in production (or otherwise have a relation to the economy which depends on both applying labor and ownership of the non-financial means of production) defines middle class as the segment around the median income, almost entirely within the traditional working class.

This is a product of a deliberate effort to redefine terminology to impair working class solidarity, not some kind of accident.

[jazzyjackson]

Whose tradition? Not the American working class. Despite the strong labor unions extent I think you'd be hard pressed to find marxists among them. We talk of middle and upper class precisely because we don't ascribe to the "traditional" framing of bourgeoisie v. proletariat, because running a business is actually work too, even if you own the capital. If you sit around and spend money all day we just call you an aristocrat.

[const_cast]

It doesn't, because a lot of those people do not sell their labor. Doctors sell a practice, or can anyway. As time goes on fewer and fewer do - they're being pushed out of the capitalist class to the working class. Most now work a salary for a large employer, like you or me.

[closewith]

All professions are traditionally working class.

[SoftTalker]

I guess it depends on whose tradition is under discussion. In the contemporary American usage, "working class" means the trades, or factory and service work. Few people would call a physician or lawyer "working class" even though they are paid for their time (and knowledge).

[closewith]

I wonder about your contemporaries. I imagine that most of them have a completely different definition to you, because you and doctors and lawyers are - to a rounding error - working class and everyone but you is aware of it.

[Daishiman]

Marxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century and its vocabulary permeates all of political and economic analysis. Marxist analysis is not the same as communism.

[hollerith]

>Marxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century

I agree. Let's hope it will have much less impact on the 21th century.

[OKRainbowKid]

Are you ignoring the rest of the comment?

[hollerith]

Most professional economists IMHO would not agree that Marxism's vocabulary permeates their field.

Core economic concepts are things like elasticity of demand, market equilibrium, externality, market failure, network effect, opportunity cost and comparative advantage, and AFAIK Marx and his follower had essentially no role in explaining or introducing any of those.

[tehjoker]

I think if you had read Capital, you'd find many of these concepts amply addressed, usually with different terminology.

[closewith]

Marx permeates economics like Newton permeates physics.

If this seems like an absurd comparison, I would suggest reading both Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and Das Kapital.

[dttze]

Yeah, one is right and the other is bs pushed to divide people