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Comment by scilro | Hacker News Reader

In terms of economic class demarcations, I find the Marxists' definitions much easier to follow and reason about. If you own capital, you're a capitalist. If you work for a wage/salary, you're a worker. You might be an extraordinarily affluent worker but your relationship to capital is the same. Also, some might be part-time capitalists and part-time workers.

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Most engineers in tech will have the majority of their net worth growth come from returns to capital and imputed rent as they approach retirement age.

Does that mean they shift from "worker" to "capitalist" over the course of their life? I'd say there's some value in having a term distinguishing those who will predictably be in that state from those who will not be, no?

Is that meaningfully different than being a "pensioner"?

I haven't found it useful to think of those categories as strictly binary. You can be a capitalist and a worker, as far as I can tell. They're more like roles than essential qualities.

In the Marx era “owning capital” was a means to create products that you could sell to make money.

In 2019, where if you have a credit card to create an account on AWS, you can create a product that has a near zero marginal cost.

Yes, that's exactly the point. You _can_ create a product at near-zero marginal cost.

If you do, and it sells, you're an owner / producer. If you don't, you're a worker / consumer.

I think that a difference might be that when your capital allows you to create a physical product then there is a very good chance that the product has value. On the other hand, if you use AWS to create a product then it most likely that the product does not have value (since most web startups fail).

Most startups selling physical goods fail. Hardware is much harder to manufacture at scale. The logistics involved is crazy. Even the vaunted Tesla is a money pit.

That's a fair point. I think the distinction that I was trying to draw was between a company that primarily derives its value from the physical manufacturing of goods versus deriving its value from something intangible such as design, intellectual property, technological prowess, etc. In Tesla's case I don't think the company ever intended to derive their value simply from their ability to manufacture a car; rather it derives from their ability to develop novel car technology.

That being said, it does strike me that in the Marx era it was most likely easier to be successful as a regional provider of some commodity while globalization means that even a manufacturer is effectively competing against the entire world.

This is the only definition that matters.

Really? A guy working at McDonalds for 10 bucks an hour is no different from a software engineer pulling down hundreds of dollars an hour?

Please.

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