The qualitative difference is that today it is trivial for a &quot;knowledge worker&quot; (which includes a software developer) to control his or her own means of production (basically a laptop and an internet connection).<p>In Marx&#x27; time, the means of production was a factory or large areas of arable land, and those weren&#x27;t, and generally still aren&#x27;t, possible for individual workers to own. This situation gave the owners of those means (capitalists) undue negotiating power over the workers -- hence collective ownership of the means of production by the owners.<p>In the first paragraph, I&#x27;m purposefully steering clear of the word &quot;own&quot; since there are grey areas, what with binary driver blobs on the computer, and especially the fact that you never meaningfully &quot;own&quot; your internet connection and many of the services you rely on. Yet I would argue that this is a very (quantitatively) different situation from the worker&#x2F;capitalist class struggle of Marx&#x27; time.