Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
We deserve better than this. We can get it.
Calling google workers proletariat is out of touch and borderline insulting to real working class.
3-month salary for a junior at google is what a “real” proletarian do in a full year, with addition of pension, stock options, benefits and bonuses
Ah, the “true Scotchman” fallacy.
I guess it’s your gut deciding who’s a “real” worker?
The whole piece that we are commenting is a guy who said that some people were not proletariat and now they are. It is a gut piece. He’s the one deciding that some people are now randomly proletariat
Ah yes, just what the working class desperately needs, a gatekeeper.
I am not a gate keeper. I work in an unionized company in fintech. But I also recognize that calling me “proletarian” is detrimental for battles of real proletariat. Because I have a better salary than a medical doctor with a 5th of the stress. And I don’t make near google salary. I have former colleagues who went to google… They are not absolutely struggling. They need to unionize? Surely. But let’s keep it real, use words properly, because there are people in the current economy who are struggling. Proletariat means that the only “capital” owned by someone is their children. It evolved to mean working class, where only capital is ability to do a work.
Google engineers have real capital invested in stock market and pension funds, a great salary and benefits, transferable skills, and their biggest asset is their knowledge. They need to unionize only to fight back to mass lay offs, and have more saying on the company direction. Other than that they are doing pretty fine.
I work in tech, not Google but I am compensated similarly. The reason you are getting my downvotes is because you’re missing the point. We worked our asses off to get where we are only to say we’re “not struggling” anymore and have early retirement plans in place because we were thoughtful in our career choices and personal budget. That’s a lot different from someone who had a retirement plan set from birth or doesn’t need to work for a living.
Ultimately as long as tech workers continue to sell their labor then they are working class.
Than read again my comment. You are not proletariat. I am not proletariat. A manager at your bank is not proletariat. A doctor is not proletariat. We face issues of life, but we are absolutely privileged compared to proletariat
I grew up in one of the poorest region of Europe. To study I had to live in 2 of the worst ghettos of UK. There you see proletariat.
Anyone who call google engineers proletariat is as out of touch as a wall street ceo.
And I am surprised how lemmy can be this out of touch with the real word
Obviously not everyone has the same situation and some people are more privileged than others. But there is a huge difference between someone who has to work everyday VS someone who doesn’t. That doctor has to go to work, same as the programmer, or the manager. They all have unique lifestyles but they are all workers. They are the proletariat
Stop using the word “proletariat” when you clearly do not understand what it means and clearly have not read any of the theory from which the word was popularized
“Proletariat” != “impoverished”
I grew up reading gramsci… You are here claiming that modern version of petite bourgeois are proletariat. We need the “we are not the same” meme.
If you insist on using Marxist terminology, it would greatly benefit you to read some actual Marxist theory. I’m not saying that Gramsci wasn’t a Marxist either. He was. You clearly don’t understand these terms, however.
To be honest I am relieved to not have your approval on this. You all guys are so completely out of your mind, that agreeing with you would mean something is really wrong with me.
I’ll ask my google friends, now that they have suddenly become proletariat, to stop by their proletarian loft by the lake with no offspring whatsoever to arrange seizing the means of production. We’ll arrange it between their trip in costa Rica and their Kenyan safari. We wait for their tesla to fully recharge though.
They should first reinvest all their google stocks, as market do not value proletarian revolution, and the stock price might get an hit.
I heard fake communists were a bit crazy around here. But this whole thread is another level crazy
The difference between the people you call proletariat and the people you refuse to call proletariat is often luck. Luck is fickle and can swing both ways. A manager at a bank is absolutely proletariat, they’ve just been given a bit more money and told they’re no longer proletariat. This is because it’s way easier to keep workers and management at each other’s throats than to have everyone target the real source of the “orders from above”.
The line dividing working class from owning class is not their monthly salary. It’s their relationship to capital. Do they work for their living, or do they own for their living?
same reason why being an athlete sucks – even though you’re making insane sums, the guys at the top are making far more than that, without putting their body on the line in any way whatsoever, indefinitely [whereas most players retire in their 30s, if they’re lucky enough to have that long of a career]
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Some. But at firms of even modest size, though, a CEO receives ownership of capital, not just salary, as compensation.
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Difference in stock options as compensation for executives vs managers or the entire middle management layer is beyond insane. Like exponentially more.
They are petit bourgeoisie, they work for a living but their interests are aligned with capital as they’re hired by the owners to extract as much surplus labor as they can and will often get bonuses tied to how well they do that, they’re the overseer.
Software developers work and contribute to the company, they are the ones whose surplus labor is being extracted. They may get a larger chunk of the value they create but they don’t get all of it. They are still in class conflict with the owners to get all the value they create. They’re house slaves, treated better but still fundamentally against the owner.
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No, I’d say that “financially independent” really means your dependent on capitalism, and that dependency will lead you to defend capitalism from any challenges. That is the bourgeois position and puts you against the proletariat. Their are other classes though besides proletariat and bourgeoisie with different relations to capital. Petite bourgeoisie are neither bourgeoisie nor proletariat but there interests align with the bourgeoisie/capital and against the proletariat, but they are not completely dependent on capitalism so they won’t defend it as zealously. There is also the independent worker class who work for themselves outside a corporate structure, eg. An independent farmer, whose interests don’t align with either the bourgeoisie or proletariat.
Dog the shadeholders who let google pay you that high wage to convince people to join this profession also own the fucking overpriced housing and grocery stores that take it riiiight back.
