given that i posted long ago, january, several lengthy posts which provided both you and yoshie with an argument for utilizing the terms in an analytic fashion in much the same way that marx utilized similar distinctions in the 18th brumaire, then i was under the impression that you were, again, asking for justification. i tire of doing so, just as i would tire of whipping out my activist street cred in order to justify every piece of drivel i type here or elsewhere.
briefly, here, i have argued that how people understand who they are or who are others are in terms of class is important, that it is not merely erroneous subjectivity in operation nor is it a mistaken subjective idealism on my part. rather, i have argued that those ideas can be traced to real, concrete material social processes, institutions and practices which mean that these labels mean something to people and thus they act on them in important ways. my specific interest in this in terms of research has to do with spending a year working beside, interviewing, observing upper level mgrs in a corporation that had gone thru downsizings and had, in fact, been the target of much derision in the popular press [the ceo's face was plastered on the front of a newsmag and he was called a 'corporate killer']. i wanted to know how the much discussed death of the social contract and the 'new rules of work' [shifting ideology] combined with having had to slash and burn other managers [changes in concrete social relations of production in the workplace] might have shaped the way these [mostly] men understood themselves as not unlike the 'workers' they managed and whether or not this might change their ways of thinking and acting in the workplace and elsewhere. perhaps i delude myself, admittedly something i'm quite fond of doing, but i thought i was engaging in asking what is oft-discussed on this list: under what conditions do workers come to achieve class consciousness, or at least the inklings of that which is what we hope for because these provide the gaps where a wedge can be driven in the interests of dismantling capitalism hegemony. the econs can go on about contradictions at the macro level but it is also important to ask how those macro level contradictions shape and are shaped by people's activities in their daily lives, in this case work [though also family as it turned out].
yes, there is a great deal of debate over what these categories mean. i do find it a bit insulting to have someone suggest that i was deploying such a crude analysis as the WSJ uses. but as you must know, this classification typically means that the worker is educated, typically an advanced degree
is considered a professional or managerial worker and, thus, has a degree of autonomy over the conditions of his or her labor that those punching a time clock do not
and, following braverman, they tend to hold positions in which they control the labor conditions of others, either directly [upper and exec level mgmt] or indirectly by producing theory and research that is then used to control workers in the workplace as well as in other realms of their lives [psychologists, physicians, lawyers, profs, etc] which of course helps to create disciplined, obedient workers.
kelley, who appeals to max for some tunes. i shall get the beer and headphones so as to not disturb the neighbor. PBRmeASAP??