Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> The whole point of the "middle" class is that they're between things.
> Most of the managers in the BLS classification aren't big capitalists
> or senior execs - they're people who both boss and are bossed. That
Being merely between can hardly fill in as a class marker. Again, the figures give no basis whatever to determine how many of those "managers" are actually even on the track to a possible upper management position and how many are simply labelled managers for the purpose, mainly, of denying them overtime. Until someone comes up with persuasive figures I will assume that the title "supervisor" or "manager" in the fast majority of cases merely indicates a position from which more absolute surplus value (longer hours with no additional pay) is extracted. The same is true of those labelled "professional": on the whole it merely means that they are more subject to the extraction of absolute surplus value, not that they get to keep some of their own surplus value, as do petty producers and independent professionals. And an increasing share of physicians, for example, are rapidly becoming either small capitalists, extracting surplus value from a large mass of technicians, nurses, clerks, etc., or working class themselves, from which hospitals extract surplus value (to pass on to the insurance companies).
And incidentally, assume that value theory is of no use in determining prices or income; it still is an essential pointer to class relations under capitalism.
> puts them in the middle. Their identifications run both ways, though
> it's a reality of the human psyche that people are more likely to
> identify up than down.
You have such an incredibly static conception of social relations, confusing snapshots with such relations at a particular moment in time with any actual information in respect to the reality of those relations or their political importance. Like your mentor, Freud, you are a mechanical materialist at base.
Carrol
You're just wrong to say there's no
> demographically significant middle class in the U.S. It's about a
> third of the working population and probably half the electorate.