Seems pretty correct-it seems the coordinator class is what is meant by middle class, which certainly have different interests than workers. What percentage of the population would you say is each class-worker, capitalist, coordinator?
Gar Lipow <lipowg at sprintmail.com> wrote: Ian said
> >====================
> >
> >To be binary:
> >
> >The top 1-5% vis a vis everyone else. That's right even if you
> >make $100k with a family of 4 with mortgage, car payments and the
> >like, you're working class. So get over it.
> >
> >Ian
That is a good Marxist view on class. But the anarchists have some comment on this too. And I think class is one of the issues Marx got wrong and left-anarchists got right.
You can start with one of Marx's brilliant (and I mean this non-sarcastically) observations - that capitalists buy labor time, not labor. (Yes there are exceptions.) The capitalist class is not large enough to personally extract as much labor as possible during work time, so they have to hire supervisors and managers. They need coordinators. A lot of people we would not think of in this context fulfill a coordinator function. For example engineers and software designers help create the workplace, and indirectly play a large role in this type of control. Artists and writers and educators are a means of controlling the flow of information to workers, and help shape how easy they are to control.
The very top of this group is so highly compensated for this that they end up as capitalists. But the key here is that coordinators have interests that differ from both capitalists and from workers as a whole. Coordinators to capitalists are an expense, a labor cost. They want to minimize the cost of coordination. Whereas coordinators want to be indispensable. For example, when self-management schemes are tried, they usually arise from the either owners or from the very top managers who have become part of the capitalist class (via stock ownership and huge salaries). Those managers who are still management and not capitalists are usually the primary source of resistance. And in general coordinators hold a monoply on the most pleasant and empowering tasks.
Yes coordinators remain subordinate to capital; they have much less power than capitalists. But they also have a great deal more power than ordinary workers. So why look at them as class rather than say a caste or special example of workers? Because they are an economic group with distinct interests that differ from those of the working class as a whole and from the capitalist class at a whole. These interests remain consistent over time; so even though the coordinator class has the same relation to the means of production as workers, it constitutes a seperate class due it's relation to work. I know the idea that a class may be defined on some basis other than relation to the means of production is extremely counter-intuitive to Marxists. But if you look on Marxism as a theory rather than a theology you may want to consider it.
BTW, as a non-anarchist, I have to wonder - do any of the anarchists on this list prefer this classic anarchist class analysis to the Marxist version?
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