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.
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
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.
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”.
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