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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Why don’t labor issues resonate more with tech workers?

Because many tech workers don't see themselves as workers, with some justification, many having substantial capital investments alongside labor income, making them, in class terms, petit bourgeois or at least close enough to it to perceive their own interests in more bourgeois than proletarian terms. And even the tech workers that are clearly part of the proletarian intelligentsia tend see themselves (rightly or wrongly) on a path that leads into the bourgeoisie, with bourgeois interests.

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I’ve always thought of it in these terms:

Working class: you are sustained by your current labor.

Upper class: you can sustain yourself based on the returns from your investments more-or-less indefinitely.

Middle class, between the two: you can sustain yourself off your investments for so long that you can’t practically be threatened by unemployment.

It is a labor relations issue explicitly, you need a union if you are in the first of the three classes, because otherwise you can be threatened by unemployment to do something dangerous or dehumanizing.

In the middle class definition, practically there’s some element of the fact that our skills are in high demand, so you can become unthreatened by unemployment by having just, like, a 1 year buffer. But I do think we can overstate how in-demand our skills to satisfy our egos…

I honestly think the "middle class" idea is just a fallacy. It feels like it's used by people to distance themselves from "working class" because they feel that working class is somehow beneath them. All of the middle class in todays parlance are just slightly more affluent working class. If you sell your time for money you are working class. If you make money from having money you are bourgeoisie.

If you have to think about which one you are you are working class. At a stretch you might consider the owner of a small tech company (say 5-10 employees) as petit bourgeoisie but the vast majority of small business owners (say mechanics, shop owners, small companies) are squarely in the working class. They may have employees but they still work, either for wages or as managers of those employees - which is work.

The usual American idea of “middle class” is mostly (thoufh it tends to be defined more by income than actual means of relating to the economy) a mix of the upper income segment of the primarily labor-dependent class (working class/proletariat) and the lower (comparatively) income segment of the mixed labor/capital-dependent class (petit bourgeoisie).

The middle class (petit bourgeoisie) is real, but its not centered around middle income (it is middle in the sense of being between the dominantly capital-dependent class and the dominantly labor-dependent class, primarily in how it relates to the economy, but in practice also on average, in income and wealth, but it is still an elite minority, just less so than the haut bourgeoisie that sits at the top.)

What is it about the owner of a small tech company that potentially bumps them into the middle class, in your view?

I like the definition I provided because it seems functional to me; it describes classes with labor-capital relationships, and describes how the incentives influence their behavior.

honestly the tech company person is probably not - I was just thinking of someone who started a what would be derisively called a "lifestyle business" and has basically retired earning a couple of million a year. Most small tech founders are still working for their crust.

What I don't like about the middle class definition is that it is to my mind just a subset of the working class but designed to drive a wedge between people who should be looking out for each other. It has the effect of attempting to align working class people with super rich capitalists. Interesting that "middle class" was the original name for the capitalists who were between the working class and the nobility, now we pretend that the middle class are working class adjacent.

> I honestly think the "middle class" idea is just a fallacy.

One definition I found reasonable was that it it "starts" with those that can meet their basic necessities (housing, food, transportation, healthcare) and still have funds left over for discretionary spending:

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-biggest-lie-in-personal-fin...

Where it "ends" at top-end is perhaps more arbitrary (not Top 10%? 20%? 1%?).

I don’t like this definition as much because it includes most people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck with minimal leisure expenditure, right?

Like if you by groceries, rent an apartment, have a bus pass, qualify for Medicare, and you have a Netflix account or get fast food (discretionary spending), then you seem to be middle class by this definition. Is that right? Maybe Medicare bumps you out. But ok, you can get the cheapest marketplace plan.

I mean, to be below middle class by this definition your expenses have to exactly match your revenue, or you are living beyond your means. So other than some tiny slice (in some perimeter vs area sense) of the populace, being working class seems to be definitionally unsustainable.

> […] then you seem to be middle class by this definition. Is that right?

Middle-class is a spectrum like being "rich" is.

It is a definition so I can’t say it is wrong, but a spectrum that includes everyone who is not either actively in the process of running out of money, or able to quit working and become a capitalist, does not seem super useful to me.

> If you sell your time for money you are working class.

This would put a trader earning $3m/yr as working class. That’s fine I guess, but then we need another distinction, for the difference between that person and a minimum wage worker.

Now in all the conversations where we would say “working class” we use this new term, because we almost always mean things relating to income level rather than labour vs owner.

And so all we’ve done is changed the name for “working class”

A trader is working class. They are just rich. As soon as they stop working as a trader their income will stop.

You can be rich working class. If you acquire enough capital where you no longer work and just deploy your capital you are no longer working class.

There is some reasonable split between "bankrupted by missing even a single payment period" and "can live off dividends and saving by N years"

At the very least the second camp is the only one that can effectively vote with their wallets, Poorer and you can't afford the better alternatives, richer and you have better means of influence (Or deal with things that are low volume and less price sensitive)

It's crazy how we've abstracted financial serfdom out of the status of being a property owner. Contrasted with renting it surely seems like independence, but whether the bank squeezes extra value out of you directly or through the proxy of a landlord, the end result is similar.

>Contrasted with renting it surely seems like independence, but whether the bank squeezes extra value out of you directly or through the proxy of a landlord, the end result is similar.

The difference is public policy. Owning property in the US absolutely elevates you to a higher privileged status above renters. How many homeowners were being evicted from their homes after missing a couple mortgage payments during the pandemic? Precisely zero. While thousands of renters in red states had the sheriff at their throats within 60 days. That's all you need to know about class in this country.

Fair, and owning certainly puts you in charge of your own quality of life. My dishwasher has been broken for three months and I'm still having to fight to get it fixed. When I own my own place starting from next July I'm just going to fix things like this on my own time and dime.

People with equity in a home aren't the same as delinquent renters?

different circumstances are treated differently?

>different circumstances are treated differently?

Yes, exactly. My entire point is that owning a home is nothing like renting, even if you're spending the same amount, and is treated as a privileged status.

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