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Comment by incr_me | Hacker News Reader

I've always heard "millionaires" (the quote was always apocryphal, anyways), and that belief is much less delusional than the belief that we're part of the proletariat, that class of workers who have nothing to lose but their chains. The vast majority of people here have lots to lose. These Blizzard workers, however miserable they are, have always had a staggering lot to lose, more than the proletariat could ever dream of possessing.

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> I've always heard "millionaires" (the quote was always apocryphal, anyways)

Gotta update it for 2026 because millionaires are broke bitches. Basically part of the permanent underclass that will never escape the singularity at this point.

But more seriously, your view of what constitutes the proletariat is skewed off of its contemporary meaning.

If you can't retire today and never work again without having to worry about money, you're part of the proletariat. You don't have to be poor, you just have to be a laborer. That's... almost all of us.

Also, attribution of the quote to Steinbeck would be apocryphal, but the core idea behind the oft-misattributed phrase has never been more true than it is today on social media and internet forums, so I wouldn't say the quote itself is apocryphal.

This was the essence of the actual Steinbeck quote, for the record: "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams." Steinbeck is no Marxist, but at least he was right about the "game of dreams", which indeed is more true today than ever before.

> Gotta update it for 2026 because millionaires are broke bitches.

> If you can't retire today and never work again without having to worry about money, you're part of the proletariat.

This; this is a middle-class game of dreams.

Surprisingly, large, structural changes in society require non-zealots, who yet can still see the advantages of the vision, to be on-board.

I haven't read Steinbeck, but I get the feeling that you're mischaracterizing his thrust.

Uh, do you think that the labor class is defined by utter poverty or something? The labor class is defined by having to work for their livelihood, which most of us still do, even if we have a mortgage or a nice 401(k) or whatever.

You are most definitely not getting a seat at the campfire.

I'm going to guess that you want this to include SV/SF people as part of the labor class. This is a joke to the labor class and they are making fun of you

define livelihood, it involves a standard and cost of living that is different for different people

My parent did not say "labor class" (a mishmash of words), they said proletariat, which is an abstraction that has a real history. Most of us here are petty bourgeois, labor aristocrats, or settlers. A house or a 401(k) are literally capital. So, the proletariat is defined by utter poverty more than being wage laborers, yes. That's my point. Those conditions of utter poverty define the majority of the world's population, but exceedingly few in the imperialist sphere.

I mean, the wikipedia on proletariat disagrees with your definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat

The proletariat’s primary economic value is their labor. They do not own the means of production. Having capital is not the same as being able to live entirely off your capital and the hired labor of others.

In Marxist terms, we are possibly the petite bourgeoisie, although I personally always viewed that as being only the small-business-owning or freelance-style non-capital class: i.e. people who don’t live off their money/property exclusively, but who own a business that they themselves must work to maintain. People who “are their own boss” but who still have to work, essentially.

A key point is that the petite bourgeoisie always wants to act like and identify with the capital class, despite not belonging to it. In an era of continuously deepening equality, the petite bourgeoisie would likely be better off identifying more with the proletariat, since the capital class is not itching to let them in.

Marxism is good. Here:

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm

> "The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour...

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