> 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).
=====================================
So-called "professional" employees - economists, social workers, computer
programmers, teachers, chemists, biologists, statisticians, accountants,
engineers, journalists etc. - are defined in most jusrisdictions as those
who have a four-year post-secondary education. They are a large and
rapidly-growing component of the major part of the wage-earning population
which is no longer employed in factories.
Even if we are having difficulty on this list, History (if you'll allow me) has already rendered its verdict concerning the class character of these latest entrants into the workforce. Like the white-collar clerical and retail workers who preceded them, professional and administrative employees have welcomed the right to organize and bargain collectively where they have won it in the large (mostly public and para-public) institutions which employ them. They may choose to differentiate themselves by exercising this right in the guise of "employees" rather than "workers" and by describing their organizations as "associations" rather than "unions", but they have been driven by the very same impulse to exercise their collective power to negotiate their pay, benefits, and working conditions as previous generations of industrial workers.
In the postwar period, the vast increase in the size of government at all levels, as well as in health, education, mass communications, and other fields was matched by the corresponding development and growth of trade unionism, including of the most militant kind, within these sectors so that today the shift from the industrial to the service economy is reflected in the composition of the main trade federations. It's true that reactionary labour laws, new forms of work organization, and a long crisis-free postwar period of rising living standards, has left most of this new working class unorganized, but I think the evidence is that if most professional and administrative employees in large enterprises were freely afforded the opportunity to unionize, without threat of reprisal, they would do so.
I've worked alongside, organized, and represented industrial, technical, and professional employees, and I think the differences in attitudes and behaviour between these strata can be exaggerated, notwithstanding the differences in education, income, status, and working conditions. In general, if they work in large organizations and live in cities rather than small towns or rural settings -which is true of the mass of the working class - they tend to be socially and politically liberal, which both reflects the cosmopolitan culture of their workplaces and neighbourhoods as well their material needs as workers for laws and public spending which protect and extend their workplace rights and health care, retirement, and other social benefits.
By the same token, I still maintain you can, if not with 100% accuracy, reliably predict contrary political behavior from those who derive their income from investments rather than wages and salaries. Those who rely on their investments will generally have an interest in seeing that their personal taxes are not increased nor the value of their investments eroded by inflationary public spending directed at the wage-earning population, or by labour, environmental or other regulatory standards and higher levels of corporate taxation which erodes the corporate profitabity on which their income depends.
Bill Bartlett writes:
> At 9:43 AM -0400 6/6/07, Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
>>Small producers like farmers and small distributors like corner grocers
>>are
>>simply small capitalists.
>
> This is such a vague assertion. What do you mean by "small"? If you
> include self-employed, contractors etc who employ no one else in
> their business within this definition, then you would be quite wrong.
===========================
Yes, I would be. But I don't consider the self-employed to be "capitalists"
in any meaningful sense. The self-employed artisans of the 19th century were
not capitalists, although some became such while others were forced into the
factory proletariat. I think many of today's self-employed are really
so-called "dependent contractors" - workers without a desk or benefits tied
to a single firm, often the same one which previously laid them off to save
on labour costs and improve operational flexibility.