"New Class"? Weber Redux!

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Chris K.:
>The emergence of largely autonomous wage earners, and
>high-level supervisors who see very little of their surplus value
>appropriated, have contradictory roles in the class system, then we should
>engage this reality.

Even as empirical description, is Wright's work _really_ useful?  Does such
a clearly-defined group of "autonomous" wage earners exist in reality?  Who
are these "autonomous" wage earners, "autonomous" _to the extent_ that they
cannot be said to be part of the working class?  Most importantly, *why
should "autonomy" be a measure of _class_ division (instead of a measure of
division of labor _within_ the working class)*?  What's your reason?  There
are both empirical and theoretical problems here, which Wright himself
discusses in his _Classes_ (one virtue of Wright is he takes note of _some_
of the new difficulties generated by his own conceptual shift):

*****   Structurally, the characterization of autonomy as 'petty bourgeois'
rests largely on what may be a rather romantic image of the petty
bourgeoisie as independent direct producers characterized by a 'unity of
conception and execution'....[F]or a variety of reasons, self-employed
petty-bourgeois producers may have little choice over how they produce or,
in some circumstances, even over what they produce....On the other hand, it
is easy to exaggerate the extent to which workers in modern capitalist
firms are indeed fully separated from 'conception', since in many factory
settings the actual operation of production continues to depend heavily on
a wide range of accumulated knowledge on the shop floor, knowledge which
must constantly be applied in non-routinized ways.  Such autonomy,
therefore, may not have a distinctively 'petty bourgeois' character at
all....

A second problem with semi-autonomy as a class criterion is what could be
called its structural underdetermination.  Whether or not a given job is
'semi-autonomous' could easily be a consequence of rather contingent
characteristics of the work setting....Should such a shift in jobs [from
more supervised to less supervised labs] be viewed as a change in the
_class_ character of the technician-position?

A final problem with autonomy as a class criterion revolves around a number
of empirical anomalies....For example, if autonomy is defined in terms of
control over what one produces and how one produces it, then many janitors
in schools who also perform a variety of 'handyman' tasks will end up being
more autonomous than airline pilots.  Now, one could regard this as a deep
discovery about the nature of the class location of pilots, in spite of its
apparently counter-intuitive character.  It is more plausible that it
indicates the problematic status of the claim that autonomy should be a
basic criterion for class.  (54-5)   *****

Unhappy with such problems as noted above, which he correctly sees as
arising from "the displacement of exploitation by domination in the concept
of class" (57), Wright then seeks to redefine "exploitation" in such a
fasion that his attempt to operationalize "classes" as categories to be
used in surveys of incomes, "class attitudes," etc. would generate the data
he wants (and recall the fundamental problem of individualist assumptions
that Kelley mentioned).

>he merely shows
>that while certain people may be exploited (still employing the labor theory
>of value, contrary to Yoshie's claim), they may also have very strong
>reasons to line up behind capital -- not just because of perception, but
>because of actual power they hold.

While Wright doesn't go so far as Roemer (to whom I attributed the total
rejection of the labor theory of value), he does think of the capitalist
appropriation of surplus labor as merely one instance of "exploitation in
general."  In the course of his explanation of what "exploitation" means to
him, Wright says: "To appropriate the fruits of someone else's labour is
equivalent to saying that a person consumes more than he
produces....[E]xploitation will be defined as an economically oppressive
appropriation of the fruits of the labour of one class by another."  Since
Wright thinks that under capitalism we capitalize on the control of "skill
assets" and "organizational assets," by his own definition ("what
exploitation generates is effective claims on the social surplus" [81]),
labor unions & social movement orgs that effectively deploy organizational
resources to capture larger chunks of the surplus than otherwise, for
instance, may be viewed as "exploiters" by the rest of the working class
who do not belong to them (whether or not Wright would agree that his
theory can be used in this way).  Here, recall the problem of focusing on
distribution that Kelley pointed out.  By his conceptual shift, Wright
effectively lost "class" as a meaningful category, except for the purpose
of sorting individuals into awkwardly defined groups.  That he calls such
groups "classes" doesn't mean that one can in fact sustain a Marxist
account of capitalism in his framework.  (And I haven't even begun to
discuss the problems of seeing "skills" as "inalienable assets" which a
group can effectively control over time.)

While I agree with you and Wright that high-level managers are unlikely to
become Marxist revolutionaries & that highly paid doctors have more stakes
in the status quo than orderlies, I don't see why you need to invent a new
& faulty concept of "exploitation" & a new & faulty "typology" of "classes"
to explain what we already know without them.  We just need accumulated
political experience (of ourselves and those who came before us) to know
that.  But Wright's typology makes us go much further than what our
political experience tells us.  To repeat: "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).  If you really think Wright's
right in saying so, why not join the RCP, which focuses on the poorest of
the poor and the Third World?

Yoshie