Well, I happen to think that anyone working who does not own the means of production with which they work is objectively a worker, that is proletarian. This applies to most academics and many middle managers as well, despite their middle class social status and pretensions.
However, I do note that if one wants to get crudely technical, Marx himself can be interpreted as arguing that productive labor is only that which results in material output, a viewpoint maintained in the former Soviet income and product accounts. Such a view provides a basis for saying that indeed blue collar workers are really workers and white collar workers are not, more or less. Barkley Rosser On Wed, 27 May 1998 09:36:18 -0500 Nicholas Garbis <ngarbis at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >many who hold white-collar
> >jobs--snotty as many of them might now be about manual labor--are _still_
> >workers, not fat cats.
> >
> >Yoshie Furuhashi
>
>
> who is the working class in America?
> those who participate in the production processes first-hand?
> those who _need_ to work to make ends meet? (as opposed to those who could
> be just as well not working)
>
> i think that the distinction between "blue-collar" and "white-collar" is a
> harmful one to the potential for change in this country. the so called
> white-collar middle-class is a part of our society that needs to realize
> that they are at the will of many of the same forces as their industrial
> working counterparts - loss of job benfits, decreasing pay, higher demands
> from employers, etc..
>
> that some (or is it most?) of the "middle-class" is _aspiring_ to something
> higher (i.e., more wealth) can be a point of friction, but i think that
> these groups need to realize a common ground as the distinctions between
> "blue collar" and "white collar" get blurred and the need for a more
> meaningful class consciousness becomes clear.
>
> nick
> minneapolis
>
>
>
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu