>This still doesn't serve to illustrate that your coordinator class is somehow seperate from both capital and labour, with its own agenda. While coordinators might have this greater control you talk about, relative to "front line" workers, that doesn't give them a greater chance at "indispensibility." Any worker, coordinator or not, can be considered "indispensible" by the owner(s) or board of directors for doing an exemplary job, not making trouble, doing even more work than they're expected or paid to do, etc. But, in times of crisis, they could easily be let go, through no fault of their own (other than being workers, and, thus, disposable). Again, the mass layoffs of middle-management types we've seen in the past illustrate, I think, just how "indispensible" coordinators are.
To put it more concicesly and in more general form: the class interests of coordinators differ from workers in what replacements for capitalism it is in their self-interest to support. Coordinators, as a class can support extremely ineqalitarian forms of socialism - with a hughe distinction between order givers and order takers, and huge discrepenies in hourly compenstation. But if a fairly egalitarian socialism is proposed, with wages pretty much the same per hour, and enrichment of jobs to the point where as many manegerial functions as possible are distirbuted among ordinary workers, coordinators lose both income and power relative to what they have in capitalism. In short coordinators (as a group) are better off under capitalism than they would be under the more egalitarian forms of soicialism. Of course a lot of Marxists follow Marx in considering egalitarianism unimportant or even undesirable - which from my viewpoint reflects a Marxist tendency to be a coordinator
>I've known several managerial types, full-timers for variously sized businesses, even worked closely with one or two, and, while they definitely got lots of perks that didn't involve pay and they did get paid more than I did, they worked much harder, longer hours, and sometimes, at more distasteful jobs than most workers. "Pleasant and empowering tasks" don't make them a seperate class, assuming these tasks exist for them as a group. The impression I got was that they got paid "big bucks" for doing, basically, anything that came along that would inhibit production. If a worker's sick, the manager would either have to set aside his own assigned tasks to either find a replacement or do the job himself. I suspect managers, as representatives of your cooridinator class, get screwed for surplus value even worse than an average line worker, despite higher salaries and perks. Marx did say something about this involving "cages with bars of gold."
Let me put it this way. How many of these unfortunates, held by bars of gold, would trade jobs with a supermarket cashier or a floor sweeper - even if they could receive the same pay?
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>Not true. Does every new type of production machine require a
>revamping of
>the Marxist theory of the working class? The fundamentals remain >the same.
>Yes, they remain the same because Marx' theories didn't dwell, in the final analysis, on technology. His work was all about relationships, broadly speaking.
And the coordinator class reflects a relationship as well.
>It could be I'm not getting what you're saying because of my own limitations. Carrol's comments helped me, but how about someone else tossing in their two cents worth. I doubt very much that what you say, Gar, is the case, but I could be wrong. Will someone else contribute some more critique?
Hopefully in favor of coordinator class analysis. Poster against it already outnumber those in favor by a large factor. I would be interested in what James Heartfield has to say on this matter.