Quoting me:
>>So you need a class in between labor capital, a middle class, a
>>bureaucratic/technical/managerial/academic class. This class
>>performs a great many functions. There is directly policing workers
>>to extract work from them. There is shaping the work environment,
>>both to increase productivity per hour, but also to deskill labor
>>and make it more measurable, easier to police. There is the shaping
>>of the workers, suppressing some types of creativity while
>>encouraging others - with the aim of making obedient little agents,
>>but something more than drones, something that does not require
>>micro management.
>
Yoshie herself said:
> Is Catherine a dean or a provost or some such thing? In that case, I
> might agree with you that her main job is to police "workers to
> extract work from them." If she is just a college professor, though,
> she is no different than a public school teacher, though she might
> not believe that she is just a worker.
>
> I don't know why leftists should insist that college teachers are
> managers in a class of their own, rather than part of the working
> class. It makes no sense to speak of an "academic class" bundling
> presidents, provosts, and deans with professors, adjuncts, and GAs.
> It's capital and the state that supports it that want to classify
> collage professors into a "managerial class" and say that we are not
> in need of unionization:
>
I reply
Academics have three sets of functions. One is the actual teaching of
skills, and doing of research. Another is playing their part in the
shaping of the consciousness of various classes; capitalist,
coordinators, and workers. Education is segregated enough by class that
a teacher will either teach mainly capitalists, and ambitious
coordinators who intend to end up as part of the capitalist class; or
they will teach mainly coordinators and ambitious workers who intend to
end up as coordinators; or they teach mainly workers. (People who work
in media, advertising, PR, some managers, and those working in the arts
have large roles in shaping consciousness too. ) And academics are not
in a class of their own. They are part of a same class as managers, not
managers. That does not mean that some academics are not highly
exploited. How exploited you are in a capitalist society depends on your
bargaining power. Coordinators are not part the capitalist class any
more than they are workers. Coordinators need unions too - to defend
them against capitalists. But it is not unknown for coordinator unions
to act against the interests of workers; for example the AMA campaigns
against Single Payer Health, and helps limit the number of people
admitted to medical school.
>
>
Grant Lee: saud
>
Quoting me
>
>>It was the existence of the Coordinator class that prevented it.
>> Given the genius of M&E it is a great pity they missed it.
>
Grant replied
> Huh? There were foremen/overseers/etc in M&E's time. This is what the term "aristocracy of labour" covers, among other things.
Marx and Engels were well aware of the *functions*. But they missed the existence of a broad coordinator class; they thought that the middle class was a transitory class of small business owners, lawyers and such who would end up either becoming true capitalists or being absorbed back into the working class. They did not see managers (for example) as part of the same class as lawyers, but as a type of skilled worker. In general they did not a historically significant coordinator class with it's own self interest different from that of workers and capitalists both. Even when they fulminated against the petty bourgeois (Engels more than Marx), it was as a transitory class that needed to merge into the working class as soon as possible anyway.
And on the efficiency question, I did not suggest that direct control by owners was more efficent that coordinator rule. (Though it might be. I've worked in family run businesses and big corps both, and don't neccesarily find the family run worse. Family run tend to be worse on average because they are smaller. I worked in a 400 million dollar family business once, and it was not worse than anyplace else I've worked. I think that small businesses are worse (on average; there are exceptions) regardless of whether family run or not.) I suggested that a bargain between the owners and workers, where the workers truly self managed the business, and simply paid a ransome to the owner for his ownership of the means of production would be more efficient; that the reason this almost never happens is that if did, then the old Marxist expectation would indeed come true; workers would ask themselves and one another "what the hell are we paying a huge share of our output to this guy for?"
I'm curious as to what Catherine thinks of all this - since a lot this discussion was in answer to her question.
Since JKS is still understandably offended by what I said earlier, I guess I need to repeat the apology. It was not primarily directed at any one person, and did not single out market socialists. It was a reaction to a long time sore spot. And I should not have said it. It was not only rude, but intellectually flawed.