I still think Woj is mistaken, both in his criticism of the historical materialist account of class (or the capitalist class) as outdated and in his proposed alternative of looking at who has "effective control" of economic decisionmaking or productive assets.
As Marvin says, the class characterization of the professional managerial "middle classes" -- I don't use this term in the ideological sense of "good, hardworking, normal Americans of moderate income" that it can also have, but to indicate a theoretical problem about the non-capitalist, non-working class groups that have become far more prominent in our time than they were in Marx's, is highly problematic, much more so than I allowed for in my reply.
Maybe it is to this that Woj was alluding when he said that Marx was outdated. The increase in these groups is certainly a development that Marx did not anticipate -- he thought that capitalist society would become polarized between a tiny group of capitalists and proletarianized working class. And Marx's toolkit offers no easy way to account for this group, unlike the case with the small proprietors, a group with whom Marx was quite familiar.
The PMMC have a lot of social weight, although they cannot be described as the ruling group in capitalist society. That palm goes to the capitalist class, defined roughly as I defined it.
The interests and power of the capitalists are the gravitational mass around which government, law, and social structure are warped in capitalist society. Their core interests are unchallengeable short of major social upheaval, whereas it is not even 100% clear what the core interests of the PMMC are, and maybe they are not, unlike the those of capitalist class, unitary.
To the extent that the PMMC have core interests in maintain and preserving their security in their status and comparative affluence, it is easy to see that this has been quite severely compromised in favor of the capitalist class, like that of every other social group. Neither do the PMMC dictate the baseline terms for social policy -- they are just another set of interest groups, maybe less organized than others.
Still, understanding the PMMC is an important and difficult question in the critical theory of modern capitalism and Woj is right, if that is what he means, that Marx offers little guidance here.
Unfortunately, neither Woj nor Marvin do a lot better. Woj talks about "effective control," but offers no metric for this. What is "effective" control, and how much do you need? He also offers no theory of the dynamics of societies where the effective control of social resources (of what sort?) is disproportionately in the hands of minorities. Such societies include all class societies, so an "effective control" theory runs together Homeric Greece, the Hanseatic States, communist Hungary, modern Holland, and the contemporary US. That's not to useful -- it suffers from the same problems as talking of "the rich."
Marvin tries to fit the dynamics of the PMMC into a historical materialist framework, which is at least historical specific, but I am not sure that except at the extremes the idea that you can predict political attitudes and behavior from the percentage of income derived from investments versus wages and salaries is persuasive. It doesn't do very well in explaining working class conservatism, and I don't think that accounts for the behavior of the PMMC, especially the education effect (which makes people more liberal regardless of the source of their income).
____________________________________________________________________________________ Boardwalk for $500? In 2007? Ha! Play Monopoly Here and Now (it's updated for today's economy) at Yahoo! Games. http://get.games.yahoo.com/proddesc?gamekey=monopolyherenow