It's been like this for a while now.
I think I even saw someone in a conservative subreddit suggest that everyone should work on a farm for a few years after college before they get real jobs. I'm still unable to determine if this was a troll or if a well-meaning conservative actually reinvented Mao's Down to the Countryside movement.
People also seem to try to shoe horn him into every topic, even when it really doesn't fit. For instance this issue is not one about some group of melancholy workers being alienated from the product, but 'capitalists' who have become so detached from their product that they are left looking at things through a sort of compression lens that leaves them with a deeply distorted view of reality. Even with your example - I agree that learning 'life skills' is extremely important for a solid development, but Mao wasn't doing that - he was effectively exiling people to rural areas, largely to replenish populations after massive famines that were created by his other harebrained schemes.
The difference is access to capital. Just like it was 150 years ago. Workers don't have enough holdings to sustain themselves without selling their body. Capitalists have enough holdings to not have to sell their body and can instead put their money to work through various means like entrepreneurship.
Also, I didn't even bring up the Down to the Countryside program as a good aspect of Mao... But since you brought it up, I figured I'd mention that his "harebrained schemes" doubled the life expectancy in China rather quickly. Like all world leaders I've studied, he did great things, and he did horrible things.
Well paid workers can amass the means to become capitalists.
>Let alone with the stereotypes Marx depended upon for his arguments?
Marx called these types of people that make enough money to own their own means of production "petit bourgeoisie". This is in contrast to the "haute bourgeoisie".
This isn't some exception to Marxist thought; this is literally one of the core components of Marxist thought.
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"Karl Marx and other Marxist theorists used the term petite bourgeoisie to academically identify the socio-economic stratum of the bourgeoisie that consists of small shopkeepers and self-employed artisans.
The petite bourgeoisie is economically distinct from the proletariat social-class strata who rely entirely on the sale of their labour-power for survival. It is also distinct from the capitalist class haute bourgeoisie, defined by owning the means of production and thus deriving most of their wealth from buying the labour-power of the proletariat..."
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The critical distinction being that they aren't 'selling their labor-power' to others.
And I just don't see how one can claim this makes any sense in modern times! Proles selling their 'labor power' are out-earning the bougies, anybody (even relatively low wage workers) can hire the 'labor-power of the proletariat' with things like Fiverr (amongst many others). And basically everybody owns the most valuable means of production in modern society - a computer. If you don't, you can buy one with a day or so of minimum wage work.
For that matter bougies in modern times don't make wealth their from buying labor power - they mostly just dump money into investments, bonds, and other such financial vessels. Bonds right now are at near 5%! And again the distinctions really fail because the same is also true of retail investors with a a Robin Hood or whatever.
No, they generally are not. There is obviously overlap, as there was in Marx's time, in income, but that’s not a problem with the theory—class isn’t about income but mode of participation in the economy.
> For that matter bougies in modern times don't make wealth their from buying labor power - they mostly just dump money into investments, bonds, and other such financial vessels.
The “financial vessels” are instruments of other entities, most of which exist by rented labor power.
> And again the distinctions really fail because the same is also true of retail investors with a a Robin Hood or whatever.
The distinctions have never been hard lines. In the most simplistic analysis class is determined by the predominant mode of interaction with the economy, while a more nuanced view sees class membership as essentially a fuzzy membership function, depending on the degree to which one interacts in the manner (selling labor to capitalists vs applying your own labor to your own capital vs. owning capital to which rented labor is applied) archetypical of a given class (both these modes of a analysis have been around for quite a while, thougj the fuzzy membership function language would only be used fairly recently.)
We can challenge this assertion by reductio ad absurdum. Imagine somehow all bougies earned less than all workers. Everything Marx said would be absolutely and completely nonsensical. There's nothing inherently impossible about such a world existing and it makes clear the point that income levels do absolutely matter. And in Marx's time I think it is fairly safe to say there would have been exactly 0 proles earning more than bougies. The concept of a 'factory' worker earning more than a factory owner would have been entirely alien to him, and most of the world, until fairly recently.
The most paradoxical thing about all of this is that the people most drawn to Marxist stuff are disproportionately in tech, the exact sort who, in many cases, already earn more than many, and likely most, business owners, work far fewer hours, and generally have dramatically nicer working conditions. I think it's mostly misidentified discontent. It's not the economic system that's at fault, but somehow building things in the digital world is fundamentally unsatisfying and unfulfilling, even if you get drowned in money, massages, bean bag chairs, and ping pong tables.
If people want fulfilling lives (so far as work as concerned) don't work in ad-tech. If you want stupid amounts of money work in ad-tech. You get the stupid amounts of money precisely because the work is awful and empty. It's a rather dramatically different world from Marx's time where, in general, work was awful and compensation was awful.
I mean, it wouldn't, if they still exercised power. But...they don't, while there is overlap on the boundaries, the classes defined by modes of interaction do, across every capitalist economy (including modern mixed economies, which are not the same system as the capitalism that Marx named and addressed, but share important features with it) form on aggregate hierarchy of both power and income in the same order that as the heirarchy of power Marx describes them in, even though the ranges of individual incomes overlap.
> And in Marx's time I think it is fairly safe to say there would have been exactly 0 proles earning more than bougies.
No, definitely the most well-paid person-living-by-rented labor would have had a higher income than the least-successful owner of capital to which rented labor applied. Capitalists (then no less than now) are capable of losing money continuously, eventually reaching the point where they fall out of the bourgeoisie entirely, and even among those that are more fortunate than that, there would have been many who were technically haut bourgeois because they relied primarily on renting others labor to apply to their capital, and many more who were petit bourgeois and applying their own labor to their own capital--like homesteaders with small holdings--who would earn less the most successful hired experts.
> It's a rather dramatically different world from Marx's time where, in general, work was awful and compensation was awful.
Yes, in modern mixed economies the condition of the median worker is better than in the capitalism of Marx's time, but, in general, work is awful and compensation is awful. Sure, the small percentage of the workers in well-compensated positions like the ad-tech you point to may do amazingly well -- but that's a minute fraction of workers.
Factor in the fact that a business owner is going to be working far more hours on average, than a 'worker', and it turns out that we do live live in this apparently not-so-hypothetical world where proles make more than bougies if we just define classes by their 'modes of economic interaction'! We can argue/nitpick the specifics in Marx's time, but I don't think you can claim in good faith that the situation was even remotely like this, and his logic was largely based on the conditions that he lived in. Even the most fundamental concepts like means of production are obsolete because in modern times everybody owns the most valuable (by a very wide margin) means of production.
And the pleasure or pain of labor is always relative to itself. For most people there's about a million things they'd rather be doing than working (including for business owners), but everybody has to put food on the plate and in modern times that's so much more pleasant an endeavor that it can't really be overstated, and this applies even to relatively recent times. When I, and I assume you, were growing up don't you remember getting endlessly spammed on TV with the non-stop 'Hurt on the job? Call Mr. Ambulance Chaser at 123-4567 today, and get what you deserve!'
[1] - https://altline.sobanco.com/small-business-revenue-statistic...
Investments into what? Businesses?
Businesses that have employees? Employees that are selling their labour? Who are they selling their labour to?
Just quoting from Wikipedia:
>Han argues that subjects become self-exploiters: "Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself."[12] The individual has become what Han calls "the achievement-subject"; the individual does not believe they are subjugated "subjects" but rather "projects: Always refashioning and reinventing ourselves" which "amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint—indeed, to a "more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation." As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the "I" subjugates itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.[13]