On 12/11/06, Sean Andrews <cultstud76 at gmail.com> wrote:
> To say that they are a class, to me, assumes that they
> all have the same relationship to capital. But I guess you talk more
> about this below.
I realize Marxists generally define class with respect to capital, and have only two classes. However, that's a pretty impoverished model; certainly now, and possibly even in Marx's day.
Obviously, we don't need the hundreds of classes which a marketing professional needs, but two classes does not explain basic daily observations.
Let's view things from the perspective of a fastfood worker in a national chain. The real owners are largely invisible. But you do have contact with managers who dictate your speech and actions. The corp hired engineers to design the workplace such that employees are replaceable cogs; marketing professionals design the store's campaigns and appearance; lawyers write contracts. Outside, police watch and sometimes confront you. If you go to school, teachers/profs grade you like beef and dictate your learning environment; a bureaucracy determines class schedules and academic paths.
You may tease out a class of people who have relatively self-directed jobs, who may significantly affect other peoples' lives. Their positions largely come from what's in their heads: knowledge and attitudes. They are not rich, but are relatively privileged.
Take one of them, say an engineer. Maybe she writes software to schedule peoples' days, automate jobs, entertain, etc. She can largely dictate her day and participates in decisionmaking. She works in an office, at home, or sometimes even a cafe. In exchange for having the correct attitudes and confidentiality, they hand her powers and private information which can make her costly to replace.
During her day, she might browse to literature from engineer culture. It often shows disdain for nontechnical decisionmakers, like interfering CEOs. Consciousness of the lowest classes is generally absent from her workday; they're either faceless "users" and customers which she usually never communicates with, or random people who serve her coffee and scrub the toilets.
> As for the cushier-ness, I think this really depends on how
> you're defining it. Many adjuncts who work 4 jobs at three different
> schools, miles apart, grading papers late into the evening and all
> weekend long--who might be part of the university employees you'd
> throw into the same class--have very little latitude in their jobs.
> [...] Though it
> might have a different connotation than being a waiter, it's pretty
> much the same kind of jobs that will be created: uncertain, seasonal,
> and, for the most part, focused on serving a certain consumer. Even
> if this isn't the norm, the threat of it becoming the norm is real.
In any given class, there's distinctions, like unionized factory workers are more fortunate than sweatshop workers. And some class' economic fortunes change with time.
Barbara Ehrenreich recently claimed that for the professional-managerial class: "there's just more leakage at the bottom, people falling out of it. In 1989, college education had expanded a lot, but not as much as today. Now, so many jobs insist on a college education. I have no idea why. I think they're just training people to sit quietly for long periods of time. Obedience training I guess is the phrase..."
> > I doubt there's anything precise about the social sciences. Even in
> > the hard sciences, physicists point out their knowledge is necessarily
> > imprecise and approximate. And mathematicians didn't pin down concepts
> > like "functions" except when necessity required more clarity, if I
> > understand my history correctly.
>
> Yeah but they try to be as precise as possible. They don't start out
> from the position that concepts can't be precise so why try.
(Actually, I am told that scientists caution against overly precise arguments, when it leads to thin chains of logic.)
That said, I think the most incisive definitions come from Hahnel and Albert.
Class: "groups of people who play the same economic role as one another, but enter into economic relationships with other groups of people playing a different role, with whom they have conflicting interests of one sort or another."
Their term for this third class is the "coordinator class." It's roughly the professional-managerial and technocratic class.
"Some waged employees monopolize empowering conditions and tasks and have considerable say over their own work situations and those of other workers below. Other waged employees endure only disempowering conditions and tasks and have virtually no say over their own or anyone else's conditions. The former try to maintain their monopoly on empowering circumstances and greater income while ruling over the latter. Class struggle.
"Within capitalism, in this view we have not only capitalists and workers, but, in between, there is a coordinator class of empowered actors who defend their advantages against workers below and who struggle to enlarge their bargaining power against owners above. But even more, this coordinator class can actually become the ruling class of a new economy with capitalists removed and with workers still subordinate. That is, Marxism obscures the existence of a class which not only contends with capitalists and workers within capitalism, but which can become ruler of a new economy, aptly called, I think, coordinatorism."
> All of this, in other words, takes us completely away from a
> conversation about ideas or methods --which I agree we should still be
> debating about--and into a crude kind of default delegitimation of
> anything so-called intellectuals say in their own defense or in
> defense of their ideas or methods simply because they have now been
> dubbed the same thing as anyone else who provides any intellectual
> assistance to the status quo or has a similar relationship to capital
> as the professional managerial class. Doesn't matter what you think
> or what you say: you're workin for the man, man.
More like strawman, man.
I actually like to quote some capitalists, because I think they're correct on many issues. Like Bill Gates Sr, Warren Buffett, and Jack Welch. That does not imply ignorance of their class interests, nor the ideological framework which underlies their often brilliant insights.
Tayssir