These terms are all pretty flexible - blue collar in 1950 is extremely different than blue collar in 2026.

What category would you place the following 99% of human people:

You you will lose your ability to eat and have housing if you do not show up to a place (even if it’s at your rented apartment) and spend hours doing on what someone else wants you to do

Software developers definitely do not have class solidarity and their anxiety is unjustified.

No question about that and that’s the whole point

people think that they’re gonna become an independently wealthy millionaire by boot licking their way into some kind of financial windfall

The difference is having your body worn out before you are at an age where you can retire.

Having your body worn out before you can retire assumes retirement as a concept exists, which it doesn’t in the US. “Retirement” aka living without working, as a blue collar worker, was a middle class fantasy that only existed for an extremely small minority of people from 1949-1985. Even the ones who had their bodies worn out dealt with years of asbestos poisoning black lung all these other externalities that corporations did not care about and so arguing about this concept of retirement is moot because it’s never really a real thing.

For the majority of working people in the world they never had any type of retirement like this and for anybody who did it was a very temporary period in western society.

So while it might’ve been true in the past that the body was the first thing to break, now it’s just “can you maintain your own financial status in the future given your previous work history.”

Everybody at this point understands that there is no possible job you could as an 18-year-old in 2026 that you will be able to retire from and live comfortably in your twilight years from 65-80 with the earnings and “investments” made in the preceding 50 years of work.

Beyond that if I look around at least the “western” world there are very few of those jobs left that totally destroy your body - military, mining, construction etc… still have a lot of that (My body is ruined from 17 years of military) but it’s a shrinking group

For example most of agriculture is being done mechanically compared to 100 years ago, similarly for manufacturing lines humans are a minority in a manufacturing line at this point

I remember back in the 1990s it would take a work party of three families to cut and bail hay in Texas. I was on one of those crews for at least a couple years as a kid. Literally nobody does that anymore it’s all mechanical bailers and silege wrapping machines