Labor theory of value
Labor theory of value
No hate for the middle class. I can't help but enjoy the irony of people who thought they had solidarity with capital talking like Ned Ludd all of a sudden.
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Middle class people don’t need to work.
Creatives usually don’t make much money.
Are you just hating on the working poor for no reason?
Middle class people don't need to work
If you don't need to work, you are not middle class. Middle class still earn a paycheck.
Is $400k/year not enough that they need more?
If you need to work for your salary, you are working class, not the capitalist class.
Some working class people make a lot more than others, but they all pale in comparison to the capitalist class.
$400k per year is very well off. But they're not rich.
A multi-millionaire is significantly closer to houselessness than they are to being a capitalist class/billionaire.
Exactly.
I don't think 400k a year as an individual is middle class. I've never seen a definition saying anything more than 150k.
That’s what the GOP defines as middle class.
Middle class absolutely needs to work though. They just aren't complete wage slaves because they have some personal capital to absorb urgent/unplanned expenses and can survive without working for some time. Ultimately they still need to work to survive though
The GOP defines the middle class as $400k a year. If they make in excess of that, is it coming from work? Are they truly part of the working class living paycheck to paycheck at $400k a year? I don’t think so, but hey who knows.
Working class isn't defined by being poor and middle class isn't defined by not having to live paycheck to paycheck. Middle class in general is pretty much a made up difference to to split the working class.
Working class is very easily defined. If you have to work for a living you're in the working class. It doesn't matter if you make 40k, 400k or 4 million as long as it's coming from your labor. Capitalists don't have to work, their capital makes them money and they can live off the labor of their workers. If you make 400k regardless of your contribution, then you're not working class.
TIL donald trump is part of the “working class”
And what work does he do that's a necessity for his livelyhood?
Sexually assaulting women and making rotten steaks I guess.
And who is paying him to do that?
His customers (supporters)
Well, first of all I seriously doubt he himself is making steaks and I doubt he lives solely on the supposed money people pay him to sexually assault people. Most likely his money comes from his real-estate business which means he doesn't need to work to live and thus is not a worker.
Hmm, I guess I’m going to need to explain to you that I don’t think a person can actually make money via sexually assaulting others.
But seeing the instance you’re on I feel like I might also need to explain that Donald trump isn’t a very rich guy actually.
A better explaination for how he got his money would be “scamming” and “running businesses to the ground and leeching off the US government.”
So, according to the GOP, less than 12% of the US population is middle class (much less actually, that statistic is apparently for people making more than 200K a year)
The embattled “middle class”. We need to support them. Something something trickle down.
Middle class people are not working poor. Creatives are sometimes working poor, and other times are making $250k as UX designers.
And sometimes making minimum wage as UX designers.
Probably fall into the working poor category.
But I don’t know anyone making minimum wage doing UX.
Startups love to hire kids out of college who can do anything U, I, or X related with regards to tech. My first programming job I made minimum wage for the first few years and then got a $0.50 per hour raise before the company went out of business.
There’s FAANG and then there’s everyone else. Some jobs can be pretty bad in terms of pay. That first job also had a seasoned professional graphic designer with multiple decades of experience and she wasn’t making much more than I was.
That’s crazy. And definitely not the norm, even outside of big tech.
I’ve been in 4 startups, no one was making that little money even 20 years ago.
Yep, I've worked at tech places with bad pay but never "decades of experience and only making a little more than minimum wage". Especially if they held a Senior title. It's been a wild ride listening to their story evolve.
That first job also had a seasoned professional graphic designer with multiple decades of experience and she wasn’t making much more than I was.
How seasoned could they be if they weren't able to demand a raise or work somewhere else for more as a UX Designer? How could a seasoned professional be so close to entry level, and minimum wage?
Know your worth, companies aren't just going to hand you money to be nice. Negotiate, and if they don't play ball, prove you're as good as you think you are somewhere else.
Not everyone lives in the bay area / silicon valley. Sometimes folks with tech talent live in more rural areas (or smaller college towns) and there may be only a few options around. It’s great that people have more opportunity to work from home, back then that wasn’t the case. If you did work remotely, you’d probably keep in touch on irc or icq and you’d periodically have a GoToMeeting or a WebEx conference (Zoom wasn’t a thing).
Also, skill level does not equal pay level. We don’t actually live in a meritocracy.
Some of us have been working remote since way before Covid.
Skill level doesn't equal pay level directly, but if you have decades of experience in a technical field like UX Design and are still making close to minimum wage in the USA, that does sound like a skill issue.
Again, my guy we do not live in a meritocracy. If the businesses in your local area aren’t hiring UX (well at that time, they were just called “graphic designers” though they did UX work, we hadn’t defined UX as an industry at this time), then you don’t get a job, regardless of skill level.
You ignored the fact that myself and many others were working remote many years ago. Even using the old project middleman websites would have made more than minimum wage.
Why was moving impossible? Programming is full of foreign nationals who left their family, culture, languages, etc to try and make a better life for themselves but we can't move to a different city and try?
Decades of UX Design experience, near minimum wage...
I didn’t actually. I mentioned GotoMeeting, WebEx and IRC as methods for ways to work remotely, but not things like github (because it wasn’t around). Sure, CVS was around, but not Mercurial or git. Everyone wanted to own a blazing fast T1 connection… Around the year 2000. I’m sure there were people working remotely because that was technically possible, but it wasn’t something everyone had access to.
Why was moving impossible?
Well for me I just graduated high school so I didn’t have the money to move yet. When I could afford it, I did move - to a HCOL area which didn’t pay well. I helped multiple startups and yeah, probably wasn’t paid what I was worth but then again few people actualy are.
For the person seasoned web designer (well, to be clear they were senior web designer, having worked as a web designer for multple years. I’m not sure how many years, but considering the web was invented in 1989, it couldn’t have been more than 11, though I think they was working as a graphic or digital designer prior to that.
Programming is full of foreign nationals who left their family, culture, languages, etc to try and make a better life for themselves but we can't move to a different city and try?
You ok there kiddo? You seem to be harboring a lot of animosity on this subject. Yeah, I mean I can’t remember exactly the circumstances and I didn’t look outside the job market for my first real job in my industry which I got out of high school so I can’t speak to what the next biggest city was doing in terms of web dev agencies or other tech companies sprouting up. I think this was during the dotcom bubble so maybe I should’ve just predicted the future and up and moved myself and all the employees at the local web dev agency to silicon valley and got some of that sweet VC money. It worked out well for everyone involved, as I understand it.
Middle class isn't real, the closest is petite bourgeoisie, who own Capital but also must work to live.