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Comment by denton-scratch | Hacker News Reader

> There's plenty wrong with Ethereum, but casting miners as 'the working class' is a flawed analogy.

Agreed.

Marx's working class consists of those who do not own means of production, and are therefore compelled to sell their labour.

Miners do not lack means of production; they operate expensive mining machinery. That machinery continues to run, and earn money for the miner, even while the miner sits on the beach. Selling their labour really isn't a good model for what's going on. Miners are just ordinary capitalists, exploiting a market opportunity.

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And there's a fixed amount of mining labor to be done, requiring far less than 1% of the current effort spent. So why are the pay cuts a problem? (Especially if you chart payout in USD.)

The two class cycles

workers cycle: Commodity(labor) -> Money -> Commodity(food, housing bills)

Capitalists cycle: Money -> Commodity(means of production) -> Money(profit/surplus value)

At least that is the bit that kind of sticked to me and made me realized in the west you want to do the second cycle. Earn money by selling labor, live life as a cheap ass for a while use savings to become a asshole landlord.

> use savings to become a asshole landlord

Being an asshole is not a requirement for landlords, nor is it exclusive to them. Oppressed workers can be assholes too!

An oppressed class has every right to be a asshole.

To their oppressors, perhaps. But if they are also assholes to everyone else then they are just assholes and the oppression has nothing to do with it.

Unfortunately, the second option becomes more and more difficult for most people. With increasing costs of living, saving enough money for investments often times seems impossible.

I think the working class in crypto would be the nocoiners.

Of course this is kind of reductive and silly but I see the analogy as taking Ethereum as Money (abstracted labour power), there are those who have to put said labour power into the system, and those who don't. This too: "But the ruling class now feels that’s too much because it amounts to a lot of value for the work. So the ruling class changes the rule of 5 Eth per block to 4 Eth per block.", mirrors the contradiction of wages and surplus value in the capitalist mode of production. The thing is regardless of the form of abstracted labour power, those who hold large sums of a commodity are free to buy lots and make an easy turnover in the market world, resulting in easy power in most societies as well.

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