>Todd Archer wrote:
> >
> > Gar said (in reply to me):
> >
> > >
> > >I suspect that Kelley , if she wanted to and was able to make the time,
> > >could tell you some stories about the relations between workers and
> > >coordinators that would illustrate my point.
> >
> > So can I, but it still doesn't mean that coordinators are a seperate class.
as far as i can tell, Gar hasn't been saying that. in so far as class is defined as the rel. to the means of production, he has said that they are waged labor like everyone else. what he said was that coordinator class--professors, managers, technical writers, graphic user interface designers, essayists, novelists, designers, architects, etc.--have a different relation to the conditions of their daily labor, than do people who do jobs we often consider working class (factory workers, cooks, retail clerks, etc)
Marx made quite clear how such a concrete class analysis proceeded in The 18th Brumaire. The point was to ask about how different interests in revolution were shaped by the social conditions under which people labored. Late in life, when asked about socialist revolution in Russia, he advised a path different from the one taken--voila!--because he felt that people labored under social conditions that meant that a top-down state socialism was a bad idea . (i'll look up the ref.) Similarly, consider his discussion, below, re: peasants. Further, he referred, throughout his work, to more than two simple classes--yes, even in Das Kapital. I've quoted this material here often but don't have time to search the archives. It is quite clear from reading his work that he recognized _several_ classes. In the German Ideology, too, he goes on to show how intellectuals are a kind of "floating" class. It's hard to tell which side they'll be on as people responsible for generating ideas in society.
"Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi's significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat. With so complete a difference between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the political figures produced by them can likewise have no more in common with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High Priest Samuel." http://web.infinito.it/utenti/c/communism/classici/marx/en/brumai/preface.htm
or
"The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France's poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself."