Is white vs blue collar ever a useful distinction? I think worker versus capital owner is a more important one.
White collar workers will tend to place blame on a poor person's character before their situation. To accommodate a worldview that understands most working conditions, white collar workers would need divorce their economic standing from their sense of implicit value. (ie: I deserve 120k a year because I work really hard. Of course you do, but MOST people do.)
I assume I'll get pushback for saying this, but whatever. The fact of the matter, is that nobody seems interested in taking the risks involved with owning more than "their own private slice of problems"
I can assure you that it's a very different crowd from what I see at my day job. We're very used to a being among a self-selected group where something like an EE degree is assumed. Physics/Math majors are not uncommon including some PhDs.
And I don't mean just credentials. It's noticeable in how intellectually curious people are, how they digest information, how comfortable they are with basic school level math (e.g. complex numbers). Not to mention that textbooks at that level are a little watered down in comparison with your first year college textbooks.
The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, then whispers in the ear of the blue-collar worker "Hey, I think he wants your cookie."
Do we somehow think the blue collar guy and the immigrant are dumb? Do they not see the theft of the 11 cookies to start?
They should both go home to their wives who surely have their cookies ready along with a pair of slippers and a backrub.
Now that women are back out of the workforce, there's enough money for the blue collar worker and the immigrant. I hear the 2050s are gonna be a 1950s paradise but with better technology. Here's hoping.
> Do we somehow think the blue collar guy and the immigrant are dumb?
The country that's so loud about their second amendment that the average English-speaking person, not citizen, knows what it is, still hasn't executed Jeff Bezos; one of the richest men in the world who treats his employees so inhumanely that they have to pee in bottles.
Let me know when Americans as a whole boycott Amazon instead of buying from them, and maybe we can move on to "beat[ing] the CEO to death" from there. I've heard the country might be going back to live executions, but I hesitate to call that a step in the right direction.
Eg to carry out the holocaust, the Nazis first instituted gun control so that the local population couldn’t fight back.
Amazon pays considerably more than other warehouses and Amazon has been absolutely revolutionary to both retail and computing. You’re insane to suggest we should just shoot people.
If having guns protects against government overreach how come there hasn't been an armed uprising against the Orange Dictator and his cronies?
However, as we have seen, even high paying jobs like software engineering where I and most of my colleagues long assumed we don't need to organize can get exploited almost over night.
There's three types of people
1) You rely on a paycheck to live
2) Your passive income is enough to live
3) You are so wealthy you can influence the world
Someone working for a 40k a year payslip, or even a 200k a year payslip, is likely in group 1. Someone with 5 million net worth is comfortably in group 2 - even at 3% in a savings account gives them an income way above people earning from labor. Both of those groups are so divorced from those whose wealth increases 5 million a year, or 5 million a month that they're basically the same.
At some point it ceases to be about money and being able to afford the things you want, and becomes power to control others.
This is level -1 of class consciousness and that's exactly how the top 0.x% keeps us down.
The eventual conclusion was that the interests of the upper middle class did not align with those of the working class. Anyone with substantial non-labor income, such as a small business owner with permanent employees or a professional with enough wealth to have a rental property or other investments of similar value, would not want to have their wealth taken away. That made them class enemies of the working class.
It can be instructive to read what happened to kulaks (wealthy independent peasants) in the early USSR.
You don't have to be marxists or revolutionist to notice that you're getting the short end and that a smaller and smaller part of the population is profiting more and more. Wealth inequalities weren't anywhere as bad between the 1930s and 1990s for example, it was still capitalism, still largely the same societal organization, etc.
We're asking that we perhaps should consider doing something about the 0.1%... and people like you are misrepresenting it as "they want to literally kill anyone owning anything". Nobody gives a shit about the local baker, farmer or ice cream shop.
"Your passive income is enough to live"
The communists confiscated everything of value from the majority of the population and in theory all that became "common property of all the people".
In reality, every valuable property was controlled by a small class of privileged people, who even if they were not the owners on paper, in reality they used and benefited from those properties exactly like or even more than "capitalist" millionaires and billionaires. All the communist revolutions just replaced a few privileged people with other few privileged people and the majority of the people typically became even poorer after the revolution, though frequently some minorities received some advantages after the revolutions, because those in power needed faithful people in some lower jobs, to be able to control the majority.
The only difference between the "capitalist" oligarchs and the "communist" oligarchs is that for the former the amount of money recorded in their bank accounts is important for their power, while for the latter money is of little importance but what is important is their network of allies with which they are connected by family relationships, complete obedience when subordinates, bribes or barter of various favors.
During the civil war, communists saw kulaks as enemies, as their loyalties were at best unclear. And because they were convenient scapegoats. Most Russians were peasants, and kulaks were the neighbors who were better off than you. When things were bad, you could blame kulaks for your misery, because they had more than you.
Later kulaks were tolerated as a necessary evil in market socialism. Then Stalin started his "dekulakization" campaign. Millions of kulaks were deported (mostly to Siberia and Kazakhstan), which was a major contributing factor to the famine in the early 1930s. And when Stalin's purges started, most of the victims were from former kulak families.
A million seconds is a couple of weeks, a billion seconds three decades. Comparing a worker at any salary to that singular concentration of socioeconomic power just doesn't make any sense to me, the key distinction of the rentier is that he can avoid the domination non-rentiers must suffer almost by definition when rentiers exist - they are subject to the arbitrary whim of someone who cannot be voted out of power through democratic efforts. In my view liberty is the freedom from domination, and any private individual with the power to dominate in their own right is inherently hazardous to a democratic society. It is in the interests of both workers that the billionaire is prevented from gaining a position of political influence.
Is this some cultural aspect I'm missing here? Eg lower social cohesion between income levels in the US?
Or maybe it's just a life stage thing. I'm still in my 20s, and none of my friends or myself have children. As time passes and savings mount and people start having families maybe the problems emerge...
"When education isn't liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor." as it was eloquently posited by Paulo Freire.
In which case, yes, owning a plumbing business is closer to capital than working at one, which is in turn closer than doing unskilled manual labour on a job site. And on the other end, maybe owning an Airbnb which you clean yourself is closer to labour than owning a portfolio of ETFs.
Something I always intend to do and regularly find myself falling short of! Thank you, your interpretation makes sense (as most interpretations seeking nuance do)
> You're a plumber with years of training? Face the wall, capitalist pig.
It's kind of interesting that some of the people below are identifying "the CEO" as a capital owner, when in fact, all of his actions which are of relevance to the rest of the workers, are as a worker - as an employee of the enterprise he makes hiring/firing decisions, etc. He may well have acquired his position by virtue of holding a lot of stock and thereby influencing the board of directors, but this is not necessary, and there are a lot of big companies where it's not the case.
Marxists had to come up with "labor aristocracy" as a concept relatively quickly, for what it's worth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy
They are small shareholders with vanishingly small shares, they are not the capital owner with power.
Clearly there is a useful distinction to make here, as clearly some jobs are disportionately robust to technological innovation. Clearly doctors and lawyers have not expected the same amount of replacement as software engineer. Maybe blue or white collar does quite capture it but captial and labour framing provides no explanation for any heterogeneous effects on different trades within the labour force.
Capital/labor in strict sense, sure, but there is also material support, or a “seat at the table”. A decision maker (in service to Capital).
The division is power—-be it Capital or knowledge or labor.
Is it because women through out the 1960s-2000s had a seat at the table, which men didn't?
Obviously not, they often faced workplace discrimination and their choice of job was limited to what was socially acceptable for a woman to work in and often those were jobs men weren't interested in the 1940-1960s, but they were working in what we now call the service industry and they didn't experience the displacement which came with global trade at the same rate men did.
> Capital/labor in strict sense, sure, but there is also material support, or a “seat at the table”. A decision maker (in service to Capital).
This just is not an informative framing here for why software engineers are more impacted than doctors
> The division is power—-be it Capital or knowledge or labor.
This simply isn't informative, the blog post is clearly focusing on a definite industry and your fixating on a general class (which the impacts are not being felt equally across).
Ideologically, I'm speaking from personal experience. When your career is disrupted by technology, power is the first thing to go. You don't have any of it, and nothing you can do will bring it back. You have to bust a move, pivot, or something.
But don't take my word for it, Cory Doctorow has wrote a book and is on a lecture tour about it. He's not an economist, but does distill the complexity of modern culture and technology into compelling stories. A bit like Mark Twain.
"All this means that blue collar workers are the pioneering early adopters of the bossware that will shortly be tormenting their white-collar colleagues elsewhere in the business." (https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-03-13...)
He's also used his experience as a writer supporting the Hollywood writers strike to comment directly about software engineers. Not long ago engineers had massive power in the workforce. Their labor cost was like a 10x for their employers revenue. But SWE failed to use that power for collective organization when they had that power, and now it's too late. Though, the best time to organize was 10 years ago. The second best time is now.
It has more to do with the demand for the specific skills. Jobs in Western countries had more demand for workers in the service industry, but had less demand for labourers, as globalisation took place. And here we have less demand for software engineer labour because an alternative is available here to an otherwise expensive hire.
We all speak from experience, I’ve had shitty bosses and had shitty workplaces. By all means we should validate the shit people go through, but it doesn’t provide an explanation of the underlying forces
My suggestion of power at the table is not an “explanation” as you say. I don’t care about tidy explanations. I care about agency. I care about models of relationships that you can grasp and strategize your way back to a “place at the table”.
And the first step is to realize why anyone gives you power and responsibility in the first place.
In the first instance it’s not personal, it’s just business (and not economics).
I think that's post-hoc. A few years ago, you could have reasonably written "clearly software engineers have not expected the same amount of replacement as factory workers."
The only distinction that matters is worker vs. capitalist. And the jobs that seem "disproportionately robust to technological innovation," only haven't been subjected to it yet. And it's not even that hard to see: the AI companies are gunning for doctor and lawyer work. The main difference between those professions and software engineers, is that they have some level or worker-organization and regulatory protection.
Software engineers as a whole, were really, really dumb not embrace unionization before 2022, when we had a lot of economic power. Instead we got confused by our high salaries, and embraced libertarian propaganda like we were temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
But AI is coming for capital allocators as well, too, so we are seeing more and more white collar people getting “blue collarized”.
As AI marches through various institutions, fundamentally shorting their utility, and as these crumble and morph (including law-enforcement & military), I suspect many people will be surprised how little they actually "own".
That includes much of the "capital ownership" class.
Good luck with your squirrelled bank accounts and brokerage accounts!
Seems a bit lopsided though; I wonder if they are only considering selected stock markets or something.
[0] https://hellosafe.ca/en/investing/broker/stock-ownership
If you have enough excess income that you can build wealth in assets/investments until you become financially independent and no longer dependent on selling your labour, you're white collar.
If you don't, so you're condemned to work forever (apart from state support), you're blue collar.
It has never been about how much money you make.
The overwhelming majority of self employed professionals I know (electricians, mechanics, plumbers) make way more than the average white collar worker (southern Europe).
Just to make it clearer: my SO, which works in governance of a major italian bank, makes way less than her brother painting walls.
Is that ever a useful distinction?
A bakery/bodega owner is a "capital owner"
A top NBA player is a worker
But I know who gets more money, has a good retirement margin and sleeps better at night
In communist terms, these are part of the petit burgeois. They are technically capital owners but are as vulnerable as workers. Crucially, they don't own any relevant means of production.
> A top NBA player is a worker
Yes, and if he fails to turn his income into capital, thus becoming a capital owner, he'll be as vulnerable as all other workers or more since his working age is much more limited.
It's the "circenses" in "Panem et circenses"
Marx tried but failed in his effort to collapse identities into two buckets.
Really? How would that happen? Maybe with a small loan of a million dollars...
[1] https://www.kauffman.org/reports/the-anatomy-of-an-entrepren...
I can easily melt ice into water, but for most solids, that's very hard for me to do. It still makes sense for me to categorize ice as a solid though, rather than saying that there's no reason to categorize it separately from other liquids.
Their original complaint wasn't about defining these groups (one can debate that classes are supposed to be more rigid than this), but the "collapse of all indenties" into these two buckets - which material dialectics calls for. It's a criticism specific towards Marxism and its notion of "no war but class war".
That wouldn't make you a billionaire or anything, but it would make you someone who primarily relies on capital rather than labor for income. Your economic interests would align much closer to a billionaire than to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck.
What? How do I freely become a capital owner? Do people just... give you large amounts of capital? That sure sounds nice and good for you, but for the rest of us, your post is kind of nonsensical.
> Marx tried but failed in his effort to collapse identities into two buckets.
I don't think you know what "collapse" means. If anything, "separate" would be the word here?
Depending of how you define some words, one could say that. Loans aren't particularly easy to get, have string attached, but they are available and can come from just about anywhere. Or you can just be lucky and have made a series of good investments. Unlikely, but possible. You don't need the party's approval to control capital so, for some, that counts as "freely".
> I don't think you know what "collapse" means. If anything, "separate" would be the word here?
They probably meant "collapse" in similar sense to wave collapse: collapsing the indeterminate sets of identities into two discrete and reduced ones.