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dingusdew

If they aren't generating capital from investments and work for a paycheck, they are working class.

Capitalists have capital.

The rest of us are born with only our labor to sell, whether that labor is blue collar or white collar.

The middle class is was and always has been a lie to separate the working class.

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There are numbers greater than 2, and colors between black and white.

I suppose it would be hard to lump billionaires in with arbitrary people who generate capital through investments and business, as well as people who do both or just run small businesses. But, I do think software engineering is a working class job. For a long time it's been awkward to say it, because yes it can be extremely lucrative compared to any given other career, but yet unless you're very lucky, it's a path that doesn't excape the drudgery of whatever else you could be doing.

I put my best effort into waking up for bullshit 6am scrum meetings with my global team a few times a week, eventually with the constant stress of some bug being discovered and having to hold for the next sprint and dreading 1-on-1s with this asshole manager who'd consume the entire time with me having to justify why I "wasn't coding faster"; eventually getting laid off during the worst downturn in the tech job market I've ever seen.

What happens when, as often happens, someone works for a paycheck and also has side investments? Working class demi-capitalists hoping for a break?

How do you think retired people are classified by Marxists? The class distinction does not mean "work until you die" , it means "you need to/have needed to work to live". So no, you're not a "demi-capitalist". You're still a worker. Because you had to work for that capital. You didn't inherit it/exploit it from the surplus value you extracted from laborers

What good is this sort of binary differentiation? Someone like Zuckerberg would technically be working class because he worked for his money, despite his negative effects on the world.

People move between income sources...

It's a starting point to my understanding, not an end all be all categorization. It helps get across that the only useful distinction worth making is between those who work, and those whose capital does the work for them

I don't know Zuckerberg's biography but I'd wager to say he didn't have to work or starve ever in his life. And I'm no Bhaskar Sunkara but I'd also wager to say >50% of zuckerbergs wealth is due to the surplus labor value his employees create, not his labor. So in a material examination of Zuckerberg you'd say indeed the issue is not the phase of his life where he worked for a living, but the phase where he is extracts maximum surplus labor value from his workers. That phase constitutes X-99.9% of his wealth, so he is not exactly some hard to pin down edge case

This isn't to say that any company that derives a profit is an evil exploitation factory, it's just an idiots understanding of a useful jumping off point for material analysis.

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