-----Original Message----- From: Hakki Alacakaptan <nucleus at superonline.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Monday, December 31, 2001 1:48 PM Subject: RE: A new ruling class?
>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.
Well, I spent some 50 grand paying for an education in nuclear physics and French. I spent far less on my programming education - maybe $2000 in books and classes, and my stock options were worth a lot more last year than this year (about 20 times as much), so I'm not sure that makes me very vested in the existing scheme. I know I'm not the only tech with this story to tell.
Besides, to my shock and amazement, I've alreay received a job offer in Belgium from a company I'm interning with (although I plan to say no) on the basis of my skills and despite my lack of European papers, although I do have unique skills in some unusual lines of work that are bigger in Belgium than elsewhere.
I think the past victories of high-tech capitalism are overstated, and the loss of bargaining power of the technically skilled in the post-crash world are equally overstated. But I have no statistics to back it up, just anecdote.
>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.
Well, let's imagine for a moment we were having this argument in 1650 as the bourgeoisie was starting to rise. Who had the most wealth and power in 1650, the nascent capitalist class, or the declining feudal class? Clearly the feudal class. Yet the Marxist analysis says that a class revolution was already underway in 1650, and the bourgeoisie was well on its way to winning.
It still seems to me that there is a new class here, whose interests neither coincide with the working class nor the capitalist class. Certainly (and much to my displeasure as a fourth generation socialist and great-grandchild of a disenchanted Bolshevik) I found myself increasingly pleased by the low cost of services whose costs are most closely linked to wages (like fast food), and equally displeased by the political and financial power of the super-wealthy who owned the companies I worked for but understood little about what I was doing (like Larry Ellison). At least while I lived in Silicon Valley. Here in Belgium, I'm trying to adapt to a social democratic state, such as it is.
I'm trying to marshal better against this point of view then that the rich are still rich, because I'm not convinced that those are good enough arguments. You, Carrol Cox, Cian O'Connor and others, I think, have all basically made that argument.
Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, for all that they are ridiculously rich and willing to do most anything to stay that way, are mortal. The interests of the class that they started in aren't necessarily their current interests, and for each victory they gain, there are significant ideological losses. The idea that intelligence and education ought to get you somewhere, rather than wealth, does run deep among the rank and file in the tech industry. It runs, perhaps, as deep as the Lockean notion of liberty did in the bourgeoisie in the 18th or 19th centuries.
Argument by analogy suspect, and I don't expect to convince anyone this way. Indeed, I'm not out to convince anyone, I'm just trying to see where the weak points are.
Scott Martens