You’ll see people on anti-work posting stories about their bosses taking advantage of them and the responses are almost always, ‘quit your, get a new one and double your wage/salary’.
‘Bro your job and your boss suck, just quit and get a new one with 2x pay’
Or ‘I hate my line of work, what should I do’
A:‘Just get a job at a fortune 500 and transition into a different role’
Or ‘just go back to school bro’
I’m studyied engineering and this theme hits even closer to home to people like me.
‘Oh you earn 50k as an engineer? Weird, the entry level pay of people in my company and everyone I know ever is 120 Million’
The general sentiment on reddit and places like antiwork is one of anger, frustration with our economic system, or general despair. But the frustrations always seem to be ‘I am living paycheck to pay check in a big city earning 200k’ and not ‘I have a PHD and I’m struggling to find a job that pays above minimum wage’, which is more of I’ve encountered. Why does everyone seem so fucking comfortable?
“Middle Class” is full-on vibes based class analysis. It doesn’t exist, at all.
I’ve thought kind of a lot about the type of person this sentiment speaks to. I wonder if you would be comfortable saying more or less your occupation (or just field) and whether you live in the first world? I don’t want to browbeat you I’m just looking for data points
the sentiment of the middle class not being real? it’s simply not a category under capitalist relations, you own capital or don’t, it’s a binary. you can talk about & further define edge-cases but there is no unified middle area that complies with any marxian analysis of class. what the middle class is depends on the speaker, is it a function of income? a self-identification? this is why it’s “vibes” because there isn’t a coherent and dominant definition, it’s just a word anybody gets to use to mean almost anything.
the middle class was real in the society from which capitalism emerged, and important to early capitalist identity, but it’s not a meaningful way to understand capitalism as it functions as an economic system
GOOD post