>I am against the intellectual class,
>especially when it takes imperial form.
There is no _intellectual class_ under capitalism. Intellectuals may be paid or unpaid; and if remunerated, may be wage laborers (who are paid barely subsistence wages, like yours truly, or paid decently, like Michael Perelman), petty producers (like Doug Henwood), or capitalists (like Bill Gates). To put it differently, intellectuals cannot be all put into the same class, by virtue of being intellectuals; nor do they together constitute a class separate from capital & labor.
The opposition between manual & mental labor is primarily a contradiction _within_ the working class created & exploited by capital (read Harry Braverman's _Labor and Monopoly Capital_; buy it here: <http://www.monthlyreview.org/labormon.htm>), _not_ between the working class & capital.
Here is an introduction to Braverman's work -- Michael Yates, "Braverman and the Class Struggle," _Monthly Review_ 50.8:
***** ...Not long after I read the book, I reorganized a course I had begun to teach, with the title "Labor Union Theory." I reconceptualized the course as a study of the capital-labor relationship. I begin it with an analysis of capital accumulation, using Marx's famous letter scheme, M-C-C'-M'. Then I argue that profits derive from what happens inside the workplace, from the power of the employer to extract surplus value from the labor of the workers. The trouble is that there is inherent in this a "labor problem," that is, surplus value must be extracted from what Braverman calls "an unwilling working population." This forces employers to continuously devise "managerial control mechanisms," and it is the study of these and the responses of workers to them which are the subject matter of the course. Beginning, as Braverman does, with pre-capitalist production, we move from the outworking system, to the factory, to the detailed division of labor, to mechanization, to Taylorization, to personnel management, to lean production. These workplace control mechanisms are always situated in a context of class struggle, which includes not just struggle at work but in the larger society and culture. While I have added materials (on lean production, for example), Braverman remains the heart of the course, and nothing that has transpired since the book's publication has rendered it in any way obsolete. In fact, as I shall argue, it is more relevant today than ever....
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/199yates.htm> *****
And we have to learn from Braverman _without_ accepting the premises & conclusions of Max Weber & Emil Durkheim.
Yoshie