[lbo-talk] some thoughts on the "precariat"

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 13 13:52:49 PST 2012


On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 3:27 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Random thoughts:
>
> 1. It's wage labor all the way down.
>
> 2. To divide the wc into salariat and precariat is to suggest that more stable wage slavery is what we all pray for.

[WS:] Not really. This is really the old stuff, far better researched by labor market economists such as Doeringer and Piore who introduced a more nuanced stratification of labor markets and guys like Veblen and Galbraith or Hungarian sociologists Konrad and Szelenyi who talked abut "technostructure" or "intelligentsia" as a new social class. This suggest that the proper distinction criteria are not wages or type of the work contract, but the amount of power and control of the organizational aspects of production.

For example, a grunt programmer and a business manager are both salaried employees, but the latter wields much more power and control than the former. Furthermore, being a board member may qualify as a "part time" position, but that does not mean the absence of power.

It seems to me that the functional-legal definition of social class (i.e. definition by the function in the production and legal ownership rights) that form the basis of old Marxist concept of class is passe today - which was the point raised by Bhaskar. Power and de facto control are far more central than nominal functions, legal property rights, etc.

Wojtek



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