On 2012-01-31, at 8:21 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
> More specifically, the last hundred or so years saw the rapid growth
> of the new social class - the "technostructure" (engineers, lawyers,
> doctors, managers, economists, etc.) as Veblen and Galbraith called
> them or the "intelligentsia" as they are known in Eastern Europe.
> This new social class - neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie as
> understood in the 19th century have different 'elective affinities"
> (to use Weber's term) as far as ideologies are concerned…
>
> ...We have plenty of proles to be sure, but
> nobody wants to be one or, for that matter adopt an ideology that
> identifiers them as such. They all aspire to the "professional"
> status that will make them a part of the technostructure. So if the
> class to which these "wannabe professionals" aspire have elective
> affinity to neoliberal ideology of free market, this means that this
> ideology will be accepted by a very large people who have nothing to
> gain from this ideology but their upwardly mobile social status.
>
> So if the left wants to be politically relevant again - by which I
> mean attracting some 40-60% of the voters - they must come with
> something different than old left ideologies glorifying the
> proletariat…
I have no disagreement that Marxism is best treated as a method (historical materialism) rather than a creed, and that the body of thought associated with it is in constant need of revision in light of changing historical circumstances.
That said, your assertion that the professional and administrative employees, who have come to the fore with the great expansion of the service and public sectors, represent a "new class" with a distinctive ideology is a debatable one. The working class has gone through successive changes in its composition as new layers with new skills for new occupations have emerged - from industrial workers to retail and white collar employees to today's fastest growing college-educated segment of the workforce.
Except for the self-employed and the very top level of these professions, where there has been the opportunity to join unions, teachers, nurses, social workers, computer programmers, journalists, researchers, lawyers, accountants, government program administrators, and other better educated and paid workers have typically done so to defend their interests as salaried workers. Some of these groups have a history of militant strike action. Most belong to the same labour federations as industrial workers. They tend towards the liberal rather than conservative end of the political spectrum, and are as apt as other workers in the large urban centres to support the DP in the US and the social democratic parties and their offshoots in Europe.
I appreciate your command of the sociological canon, Woj, but can you give us less textual and more empirical evidence to support your theory that the nature and outlook of this working class cohort is other than I've described above? My own reading and experience suggests otherwise.