"New Class"? Weber Redux! (was Re: whatever [something about objectivity])

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Feb 17 09:36:24 PST 2000


Kelley:


>you're wrong because
>you don't know anything about me and you don't appear to realize that there
>are a few working class people on this list--at least as you seem to
>suggest.

Individualizing & personalizing like you are doing here make any discussion impossible (not to mention boring).


>what was in dispute was that one section
>of them, "the working class" was more racist than another segment of them,
>namely i guess people such as yourself.

Justin said no such thing, nor did he imply that.

And here's the problem:


>Brint, Steven, "'New-Class' and Cumulative Trend Explanations of the
>Liberal Political Attitudes of Professionals," American Journal of
>Sociology, 90 (July, 1984), 30-70.

The concept of the 'New Class' is obscurantist; it has more to do with Weber than Marx, and it helps to perpetuate the empiricist denial of the primary contradiction of capitalism: capital versus labor. Most people whom social scientists classify as 'New Class' are simply white-collar workers. Many empirical and subjective divisions & hierarchical relations exist within the working class, but they have to be analyzed as contradictions _within_ the working class.

Yoshie



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