alt Hacker News> I've always heard "millionaires" (the quote was always apocryphal, anyways)
Gotta update it for 2026 because millionaires are broke bitches. Basically part of the permanent underclass that will never escape the singularity at this point.
But more seriously, your view of what constitutes the proletariat is skewed off of its contemporary meaning.
If you can't retire today and never work again without having to worry about money, you're part of the proletariat. You don't have to be poor, you just have to be a laborer. That's... almost all of us.
Also, attribution of the quote to Steinbeck would be apocryphal, but the core idea behind the oft-misattributed phrase has never been more true than it is today on social media and internet forums, so I wouldn't say the quote itself is apocryphal.
This was the essence of the actual Steinbeck quote, for the record: "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams." Steinbeck is no Marxist, but at least he was right about the "game of dreams", which indeed is more true today than ever before.
> Gotta update it for 2026 because millionaires are broke bitches.
> If you can't retire today and never work again without having to worry about money, you're part of the proletariat.
This; this is a middle-class game of dreams.