"New Class"? Weber Redux!

[Michael Hoover]

> 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) 
> 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.  
> Yoshie

Actually, Wright's starting point is comment in _Class, Crisis and the 
State_ that as sociology grad student he was expected to frame his ideas 
such that non-marxists would take him seriously.  I guess he's been 
pretty successful at that given he's director of research center and 
titled professor (Vilas Professor of Sociology) at U of Wisconsin.

Don't forget Serge Mallet's 'new working class': engineers/technicians/
technologists/educated labor forming principal labor force but not 
exercising direction and supervision.  SDS's Carl Davidson was doing 
similar theorizing about this in late 1960s, including grad assistants 
and junior faculty in his grouping.

Of course, Marx refers to middle class a couple of times in _Theories of 
Surplus Value_, criticizing Ricardo for failing to focus on:

'...constantly growing number of the middle classes, those who stand 
between the workman on the one hand and the capitalist and landlord
on the other.  The middle classes maintain themselves to an ever
increasing extent directly out of revenue, they are a burden weighing
heavily on the working base and increase the social security and
power of the upper ten thousand.' (TSV, vol. 2, p. 573)

and suggesting that Maltus hopes:

'...mass of the middle class should grow and that the proletariat
(those who work) should constitute a declining proportion (even
though it increases absolutely) of the total population.  This,
in fact, is the *course* taken by bourgeois society.' (TSV, vol. 3, 
p. 63)

M also refers to 'middle and intermediate strata [that] obliterate
lines of demarction everywhere' in chapter on "Classes" in _Capital_,
vol. 3 but, as we know manuscript was not finished.

And both _Class Struggles in France_ and _18th Brumaire_ are replete
with various classes and class fractions.

Awareness of and comments by Marx about social stratification, 
notwithstanding, he emphasized class polarization.  He might have
eventually offered us stricter definition of class but it seems 
unlikely that he would have become theorist of 'non-polar 
classes'.  Those, who in recent decades have prioritized looking
at them have engaged in exercises in despair caused, variously, by 
'failures' of working class movements, emergence of new groups on left,
disenchantment with what used to be called 'actually existing'
socialisms, and (in likes of Wright's case) pressures of 'academic
marxism.'    Michael Hoover