"New Class"? Weber Redux!

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Doug:

>>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.
>
>But these "new class" people give orders to others on the job
>(meaning workers perceive them as bosses, even if they're only
>glorified forepersons), and don't at all feel working class (quite
>the contrary, they run screaming from the identification). I know
>perception and feeling don't matter much to you, but they really do
>matter for politics. So while these NC people may "objectively" be
>part of the working class, it's a bit more complicated than you're
>making it out to be.

In my message above, I don't say that "empirical and subjective divisions &
hierarchical relations" don't matter; in fact, they matter _a lot_, and
that is why work of feminists, black radicals, etc. is of extreme political
importance, and so are struggles over skills, control, & autonomy in
workplaces.  However, they have to be analyzed as secondary contradictions
_within_ the working class.

Those who are possessed by "the pre-eminent preoccupation...with the
'embarrassment of the middle classes'" (which is the starting point of Erik
Olin Wright's & many other Western Marxists's theorizing) either themselves
eventually become post-Marxists or pave the way for post-Marxist revenges
of Weber against Marx.

There is no reason to posit a _separate_ class -- the "new petty
bourgeoisie" (e.g., Nicos Poulantzas), the "new class" (e.g., Alvin
Gouldner), the "professional-managerial class" (Barbara and John
Ehrenreich), "middle strata," etc. -- _between_ labor and capital.  To
repeat, divisions & hierarchies have to be analyzed _within_ the working
class.  Otherwise, you end up reinforcing at the level of theory the
empirical divisions that must be fought in politics.  Moreover, you end up
replacing exploitation by domination as the basis of class relation.  In
fact, Erik Olin Wright took note of this problem when he was first
criticizing other scholars' conceptualization of "the middle classes," but
through his adoption & modification of John Roemer's account of class and
exploitation -- which does away with the labor theory of value -- Wright
creates a view of exploitation based upon the notion of "assets": "Classes
in capitalist society...should be seen as rooted in the complex interaction
of three forms of exploitation: exploitation based on the ownership of
capital assets, the control of organization assets and the possession of
skill or credential assets" (Wright, _Classes_, 283).  Michael Yates wrote
in his reply to Kelley: "After the talk, Wright made some remarks about the
benefits of markets which seemed to me to be completely off the mark."
This is not surprizing, in that, in Roemer's & Wright's accounts, the labor
market as such & the extraction of surplus labor through it are not at all
the central mechanism of reproducing class relations under capitalism.  In
short, the preoccupations with the "middle classes" tend to efface or erase
the core principle of Marixst critique of the market and wage labor.

Lastly, "the pre-eminent preoccupation...with the 'embarrassment of the
middle classes'," however it is expressed in theory, makes people define
the working class _very narrowly_.  While Wright rightly argues against the
manual labor definition, the productive labor definition, and the
culturalist definition of "what the working class is," according to his own
account, "even if...we exclude all possessors of marginal exploitation
assets from this designation [of exploiters], somewhere around one quarter
of the labour force in Sweden and the United States are exploiters.  Looked
at in terms of families rather than individuals, an even higher proportion
of families have at least one person in an exploiting class within them,
*probably around forty per cent of all households*" (emphasis added, 285).
With his notion that those who can "exploit skills and other non-capital
assets" are "exploiters," the working class gets defined away in his theory.

While we often make fun of the RCP's and other Western Maoists' view of the
terrain of class struggles in rich nations, theorists preoccupied with
defining "the middle classes" in fact do no better than risible
"sectarians."

Yoshie