So I’ve had a pretty good run, career-wise. I did the follow-my-passions thing (for computer touching) and it worked out. The problem is that there are very few jobs of any social utility whatsoever to be had as a programmer in the US.
The thing I’m encountering is everyone in my social class (unless they’re only driven by money) seems to want that same thing: a prestigious, engaging & creative job that pays well, allows one to cultivate & showcase their individual talent, and has positive social utility. Unfortunately I haven’t ever actually come across one of these jobs. The closest is just people lying to themselves that their app does anything other than speedrun exploitation of marginal workers while making people in their own social class more comfortable.
When I think about social utility it makes sense to consider what things I require to live my day-to-day life, and think about what jobs are required to provide those things. Unfortunately here I run into what I think is a bourgeois mindset ingrained from birth: none of those jobs are good enough. Think about a shopkeeper, or someone sitting at the help desk at the subway station, or a picker at an Amazon warehouse. If I took one of these jobs my parents and social circle would all believe that I had literally gone insane. Objectively, every one of these jobs is necessary for contemporary society to function and the people filling them have easily contributed more social utility than my entire programming career. And yet the idea I could actually take one of those jobs runs into gigantic barriers that exist in my mind. A local political org is working to salt Amazon warehouses and this seems like a pretty easy way for me to get in. But I just can’t do it. Every time I try to articulate the idea I could work in an Amazon warehouse to one of my friends it starts to sound like a joke.
To me this indicates I have a fundamentally non-proletarian and thus anti-marxist mindset. I’ve worked jobs like this before graduating university and I know they suck. They are boring, the pay is bad, and worst of all - you get absolutely no respect. The lack of respect is what really sticks with me in my memories of those jobs, and still makes me burn with anger over a decade later.
Anyway I’m rambling but I guess my question is - does anybody relate to holding this attitude toward employment either now or at some point, and more importantly how does one overcome it?
Instead of quitting your well-paying job to salt, set aside $20k to provide supplementary pay for salting. This is probably more helpful to the cause, overall.
You’re still of the working class in the sense that you survive through wage labor. That you are paid more or benefit indirectly from exploitation is usually something as a factor in why segments of the working class fail to radicalize. But you already radicalized. So, instead, figure out what you can do from your uncommon vantage. A common avenue is to treat PMC types as a piggy bank for left causes. Build an activist network among them (it doesn’t need to be properly socialist) and use it to raise money for your org or coalition projects, for example. Through this process you would gain organizing experience they could allow you to try more difficult things like actually radicalizing people in your profession and eventually using the big scary U word.
Have you tried doing this? This would depend on what type of PMC/bourgeois proletariat you are but past a certain point (investment banker, management consultant, quantitative researcher, fang coder, corporate sales, corporate lawyer, etc.) It’s largely a waste of time because of how selfish, classist, and capitalist worshipping those people are
I’ve had success every time with this, yes.
The key to subclass analysis is to use it to engage critically, not leave every person in it behind.
I recommend starting by creating a list by getting people from X industry to come to Y radical event and having them sign in (specifying industry X if more than them are coming). Tap into any existing social movements attended by people in the industry.
Once you can get a decent group started you can leverage its networks to recruit and agitate.
It takes about as much effort as any other campaign I’ve ever done.
Can I ask what your success rate is for getting people to start getting involved? I’ve tried with my well off circles for the Palestine movement and I literally managed to get 1/~50 people. And that 1 person was already a Marxist…
My initial steps have been kind of a shotgun approach where I get the word out kind of blindly and then people show. So in that case it’s either unknown or 100% depending on how you look at it. I’ve also gone the route of working with an existing org.
I guess the best info I could provide is that in one case I went to an org specifically dedicated to activism around social issues in an industry and chatted with them about collaborating on a project. About 1/3 of their members are now part of the thing I organized (as well as their original group) and are explicitly socialists advocating for Palestine and refusing to condemn Hamas whereas before they were squishy SocDems. Honestly that group now has better positions than a lot of local self-labeled socialist groups. I think it’s helpful that these people have time to read and be active whereas less privileged folks are tired as shit, so it’s good when that time and resources can be put to good use. They’re frequently bankrolling small local union actions as well.
It’s not all perfect, there have been many frustrating moments, but it’s on par with basically everything else in my experience.