--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> 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.
Where I am from, when people's position titles got upgraded to "supervisor" or "manager", we referred to the maneuver as an "Irish promotion". (Take the PC offense under advisement.) It was seen as more of a strategy to co-opt would-be leaders, often charismatic fellows, for usually little or no more pay, but, hey, you got to boss people around and tattle on them.....
--adx
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.
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