Isn't being offered stock in your own company broadly consistent with Marxist principles: workers own a share of the wealth they create? Maybe not as much of a share as they'd like, but I wouldn't have thought that was reason to avoid taking any.
Off-topic from the thrust of this conversation, but I always considered the above extremally risky. If your company goes tits-up, you loose your job and your savings.
This happened to a lot of people during the dot-com crash of 2000.
(Unless you have a high risk tolerance, you will want to diversify much more.)
It's orthogonal to Marxism but Marx and Engels both engaged in stock trading (not to mention that Engels literally owned a factory).
Employment is by definition exploitative because a capitalist system requires the owner to derive profits from labor, i.e. pay workers only a part of the value they generate. This isn't a value judgment, this is a matter of definitions: the capitalist mode of production is by definition exploitative because avoiding exploitation would steer the owner towards bankruptcy and thus kill the entire business.
The only solution to avoid this contradiction is to not have a separation between ownership and work, to abolish the capitalist class, i.e. ownership of a business is granted by working for that business, with all the rights and responsibilities ownership implies. However the ultimate ideological goal is usually (similar to how Free Software doesn't want to control copyright but abolish ownership of software) to abolish the notion of ownership or even businesses as distinct entities, much like discrete ownership of land was a nonsensical concept before enclosure (i.e. it was "your land" because you used it and the community was okay with you using it).
I think the most frequent misunderstanding of communism comes from trying to fabricate communist structures within capitalist power dynamics. Most of the prominent "communist experiments" had very little to do with actual communism because they were built around the assumption that they were building a foundation for communism to happen later rather than directly building communism in the here and now (hence the Eastern Bloc phrase "real socialism" as a euphemism for authoritarian governments with mandatory labor and limited democratic instruments, none of which is compatible with the definition of communism).
The thing most people seem to forget is that the goal of "abolishing the capitalist class" is to also abolish the working class as a subjugated dependent group because it is only a meaningful concept when contrasted with an owning class. The Soviet Union failed terribly at this by replacing the capitalist class with bureaucrats, effectively still maintaining a distinct working class and hoping he bureaucracy would magically "wither away" eventually while doing nothing to make that happen. They also tend to forget that the distinction between capitalist and worker is purely about ownership and there are many overlapping hierarchies of power, and owner vs worker is merely one of them (although one of the most important ones).
hnbad answered this much more thoroughly than I’m able. I would just like to add that in my experience stock options and grants has been an excellent way of pretending to pay me more then they actually pay. It feels like they are giving me a lot extra until you actually look at the numbers. And I bet a lot of workers get fooled by this. For me it feels like an exercise in cognitive dissonance, that is my employer is trying manufacture a cognitive dissonance in my brain which favors them.
Of course owning these stocks gives me nothing over their monitory value, so having them benefits me nothing over having an interest account with equal interest rate. So I just look at them as a bonus pay with additional headaches (moving money out of the stock market is harder then to cash in a normal check). And as while the power imbalance exists between workers and bosses, I would rather just get paid in regular salaries without the extra complexities.
