|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Scott Martens
||
(...)
|| Now, I'll admit I'm a recent refugee from Silicon Valley, so I
|| may have a
|| distorted view of reality, but the rhetoric about the "knowledge class"
|| seems to have its points. At a company, the guy with the most
|| secure job
|| isn't the CEO, it's the engineer who actually understands how
|| the company's
|| products work. In start ups, the chief engineer is often the best paid
|| employee, including the boss. Even in big firms - at least big
|| successful
|| firms - it's always clear who has the skills and who doesn't.
|| At one point,
|| it was actually harder to get technical talent in California than to get
|| capital.
||
|| Has capitalism produced a new class other than the proletariat that is
|| "destined to overthrow it"? Are we headed for (or already in) a
|| technocracy, where the ruling class dominates not by virtue of
|| any monopoly
|| on capital but by a monopoly on specialised knowledge? (...)
||
|| Scott Martens
The "knowledge class" has to be able to pay upwards of 50 grand to acquire that knowledge and gets stock options in exchange for it so there's no question of it overthrowing a system it's a shareholder of. I've always found my highly educated lefty coworkers' image of themselves as proletarians very amusing. Marx is a little to blame for the confusion as he is rather vague about whether science and technological knowledge belong in the means of production or merely the superstructure. Saying that the only science is history doesn't help much either.
Which is not say that there isn't a power struggle. There is a significant gap between the interests of noncompetitive US defence and oil giants who owe their profits to the US government, and techy firms who do very well in the global market with or without its backing. The oil and defence dinosaurs have the political upper hand at the moment, as the NASDAQ crowd are still suffering from shell shock. Still, even oilie Dubya had to pay Bill Gates his respects when he was unelected, by getting him promptly off the DoJ's hook.
Hakki
Hakki