This is a lot harder than you make out, Marvin. If the matter were this easy, Eric Olin Wright and all those people who have spent 25 years on the PMC have been wasting their time.
A very substantial number of wage earning workers with no investment income are conservative. Union households are different but there the key variable is obviously union membership.
And (Doug, correct me if I am wrong), but liberal politics is very strongly correlated education regardless of the source of income.
Virtually all statement beginning "history has already rendered its verdict" are as false as they are pretentious.
--- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Andie writes:
>
> > 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.
>
>
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