Proletariat, Working class?

[StoneFrog]

I am having some trouble with the definition of Proletariat, is it still with its definition applicable to modern times?

Not being paid for their labor but their products(Programmer can go both way tho, i know some who work for a company and some who sell their own products)

-Programmers
-Artists
-Writers

Are they petty-bourgeoisie?

Also what about white collar workers in general, developed countries seem to have more white collar workers than blue collar. Yet i have heard from some that they are not "working class" what are they then?

Are they petty-bourgeoisie?


Also why is it that there is hostilities to people who come from a "upper class" family?
If they support the left, and see the failings within their own class, are they comrades?

[Broletariat]

The proletariat is the working class that owns no Capital and is forced to sell its labour in return for survival.

If it matches that definition it is proletariat.

If you support the proletariat and the left in general I'll be glad to call you comrade, regardless of if you're Bill Gates or the janitor from my school (though it has to be genuine support not just lip-service)

[BAM]

I wouldn't worry about this to be honest. There have always been, within and between classes, many variations, so no social class has ever existed in a pure form.

It is true that within the "first world" the industrial part of the working class has declined, overall worldwide more people are involved in industrial production than ever before. The global proletariat and the reserve army of unemployed labour, is the biggest it has ever been.

White collar workers are still working class. You may work in an office in administration, for example, but you still have to sell your labour in order to buy the commodities you need in order to live, even if the standard of living where you live means your wages enable you to take a foreign holiday or buy some small luxuries. It's common to hear people say that people are a bit more affluent now, so they're no longer working class, but this is just defining class according to the pattern of consumption.* (Having said that, I don't think you can just discount people's subjective opinions on their own status in society and how this influences the way they think.)

I'd say artists and writers, etc., were not petty bourgeoisie, and that goes for many self-employed people, unless they themselves were employers. Like I said, the sociological need for classification of people according to their jobs is rather beside the point when you want to get rid of the whole system of wage-labour altogether.

*EDIT: of course the point not to be missed here is that while the subsistence utility of the wage has increased, its proportion of the overall value in society has declined. Gains from increases in productivty have gone to capital rather than labour.

[which doctor]

What needs to be distinguished here is the difference between working-class and proletariat. To put it simply, the working-class is a sociological category, defined in Marxian terms as the class that is compelled to sell its labour-power in order to earn its subsistence. The proletariat, while often used synonymously with working-class, actually has a specific definition for Marxists, who define it not as a class or group of people per se, but a political category, with a certain consciousness, and endowed with the unique position of being able to overcome capitalism. This distinction is an important one for Marxists, because it means that the working-class is not an emancipatory category in-itself, and it can just as well be downright reactionary as it can be revolutionary. It is not merely enough to be pro-working class, because this is not the route that leads to the self-abolition of the working class as a class formation. One could say that National Socialism was a variety of working-class politics, but it was not a proletarian politics. For instance, a proletarian politics, with its intent to raise bourgeois politics to their highest limit, and thus succeeding them, is not merely interested with advocating the material interests of a single class, but must seek to raise humanity, at the level of totality, to the next level.

By the way, the distinction between blue collar and white collar is a superfluous one for Marxists. What changes may be the settings and manners in which people work, but what essentially stays the same, is the expenditure of labour-power into capital.

[BAM]

What needs to be distinguished here is the difference between working-class and proletariat. To put it simply, the working-class is a sociological category, defined in Marxian terms as the class that is compelled to sell its labour-power in order to earn its subsistence. The proletariat, while often used synonymously with working-class, actually has a specific definition for Marxists, who define not as a class or group of people per se, but a political category, with a certain consciousness, and endowed with the unique position of being able to overcome capitalism.

I have never come across that distinction before.

On the other hand, there is the "class-in-itself", what you call "working class", and there is the "class-for-itself", what you call "proletariat".

[S.Artesian]

What needs to be distinguished here is the difference between working-class and proletariat. To put it simply, the working-class is a sociological category, defined in Marxian terms as the class that is compelled to sell its labour-power in order to earn its subsistence. The proletariat, while often used synonymously with working-class, actually has a specific definition for Marxists, who define it not as a class or group of people per se, but a political category, with a certain consciousness, and endowed with the unique position of being able to overcome capitalism. This distinction is an important one for Marxists, because it means that the working-class is not an emancipatory category in-itself, and it can just as well be downright reactionary as it can be revolutionary. It is not merely enough to be pro-working class, because this is not the route that leads to the self-abolition of the working class as a class formation. One could say that National Socialism was a variety of working-class politics, but it was not a proletarian politics. For instance, a proletarian politics, with its intent to raise bourgeois politics to their highest limit, and thus succeeding them, is not merely interested with advocating the material interests of a single class, but must seek to raise humanity, at the level of totality, to the next level.

By the way, the distinction between blue collar and white collar is a superfluous one for Marxists. What changes may be the settings and manners in which people work, but what essentially stays the same, is the expenditure of labour-power into capital.

The above is a perfect example of superficiality masquerading as sophistication; of prosaic, and pedestrian, word play pretending to be insightful analysis.

First, the distinction posed between working class and proletarian is an idealist fantasy, neither working class nor proletarian are emancipatory categories in themselves. It's in the struggle with capital, capitalism, that the class becomes emancipatory. And the ability, actually, the necessity of the working class, or the proletariat to ovecome capitalism arises not from its consciousness, not from its political categorization but from its critical, essential position in the reproduction of capital... like, wage labor IS the source for the expansion and overthrow of capital. Consciousness comes from that social organization, not vice versa.

And to say National Socialism is a working class political formation is just plain, and totally, fucking stupid. Where is there one National Socialist movement that originated in the working class politics?

As we used to say back in the day: "Dear Lord, save us from our officers and we'll handle the rest." Save us from our oh-so-erudite Marxists, and we can handle the rest.

[AK]

What needs to be distinguished here is the difference between working-class and proletariat. To put it simply, the working-class is a sociological category, defined in Marxian terms as the class that is compelled to sell its labour-power in order to earn its subsistence. The proletariat, while often used synonymously with working-class, actually has a specific definition for Marxists, who define it not as a class or group of people per se, but a political category, with a certain consciousness, and endowed with the unique position of being able to overcome capitalism. This distinction is an important one for Marxists, because it means that the working-class is not an emancipatory category in-itself, and it can just as well be downright reactionary as it can be revolutionary. It is not merely enough to be pro-working class, because this is not the route that leads to the self-abolition of the working class as a class formation. One could say that National Socialism was a variety of working-class politics, but it was not a proletarian politics. For instance, a proletarian politics, with its intent to raise bourgeois politics to their highest limit, and thus succeeding them, is not merely interested with advocating the material interests of a single class, but must seek to raise humanity, at the level of totality, to the next level.

By the way, the distinction between blue collar and white collar is a superfluous one for Marxists. What changes may be the settings and manners in which people work, but what essentially stays the same, is the expenditure of labour-power into capital.
National Socialism is Bourgeois politics force-fed to the working class. It acts in the interests of the Bourgeoisie, but is made to appeal to the working class. Is this what you mean?

[graymouser]

The working class, sociologically, is composed of individuals who do not own productive property and work for others to make a living. The petty bourgeoisie, sociologically, is composed of individuals who have the autonomy to make their own living working but not to hire others (or only a few others). Thing is, the working class has different strata, which have complex relations, and there is motion between working class and petty bourgeois. Let me give you an example.

I'm a computer programmer, which itself I'd argue is a job that has both working class (white collar, myself included) and petty bourgeois (independent contractor) workers. One of the things I've done is work on a system for tracking the efficiency of legal discovery, the review of documents in a legal case. This is a job that has to be done by lawyers, but the fact is that lawyers who have jobs at law firms tend to be expensive per hour. So they have outsourced discovery, with firms that basically have lawyers who do nothing but review these documents and note whether or not they're relevant. These people make dramatically less money than lawyers working directly for a law firm. Lawyers are a traditionally petty bourgeois professional job, but in the United States there is such a glut of trained individuals that most lawyers are out of the field within 5 years. This has created the conditions where layers of these lawyers (usually young, with tremendous student loans) are pressed into a micromanaged field where they are literally generating surplus-value by doing this document review. There is a tendency for capital to push everything into the working class, even jobs that used to be petty bourgeois. This goes for most professions today.

[syndicat]

"petit bourgesoisie" literally means "small capitalists." So self-employed producers who have no employees can't be "petit bourgeois" since they have no employees. they're outside the capital/wage labor relation.

What's missing here is to understand class in terms of the "social relations of production," that is, the relations of power of some other others. ownership of means of production is one way...the dominant way in capitalist society...for people to have power over workers but it's not the only way.

Middle managers and the high-end professionals who assist them -- lawyers, industrial engineers (who define jobs and work flows), top accountants and top engineers and so on -- have power over workers day to day. They are our bosses, hence they are a boss class. I call this class the bureaucratic class.

The group who seem to be the hardest for people to understand are the layer i call lower level professional employees -- school teachers, RNs, librarians, dental hygenists, physical therapists, ordinary newspaper reporters and other writers, technical illustrators, application programmers.

I would argue that this layer is part of the skilled section of the working class. All workers have some skills but there are some jobs that require longer periods of special training to acquire expertise and credentials. This includes not only lower level professional employees such as those I've listed above, but also highly trained blue collar workers...aircraft mechanics, diesel machanics, electronic techs or electricians.

All of these groups tend to have, to varying degrees, a bit more autonomy in their work than workers with lesser skill and also tend to be paid more. Also, their autonomy can be subject to attack by employers...this is clear nowadays in the attacks on school teachers for example.

[graymouser]

"petit bourgesoisie" literally means "small capitalists." So self-employed producers who have no employees can't be "petit bourgeois" since they have no employees. they're outside the capital/wage labor relation.
This is simply incorrect. The term "petty bourgeois" (or, petite bourgeoisie, s'il tu prefères parler français) derives from the original "small" members of the old middle class out of which the bourgeoisie, which was a middle class in feudalism, originally arose. In sociological terms it refers to both the self-employed and the professional layers of society - doctors, lawyers, small shop owners etc. - who are constantly being pushed down into the proletariat. They are outside of the direct production cycle but deeply impacted by it.


What's missing here is to understand class in terms of the "social relations of production," that is, the relations of power of some other others. ownership of means of production is one way...the dominant way in capitalist society...for people to have power over workers but it's not the only way.

Middle managers and the high-end professionals who assist them -- lawyers, industrial engineers (who define jobs and work flows), top accountants and top engineers and so on -- have power over workers day to day. They are our bosses, hence they are a boss class. I call this class the bureaucratic class.
This is not a class. Calling them such muddles the definition of the word. Classes are based on the ownership of means of production. This is because it is an objective means of classifying members of society with relation to the production process. Calling any group that has "power" a class is to make class relations completely subjective. This is important, because the implications are that this class exists with a certain relation to means of production when it is about a relation between workers. (Your definition sounds curiously like Michael Albert's "coordinating class" in his "parecon" theory; are you familiar with his work?)

Understanding this is somewhat complex. Managers, accountants, etc. are members of the middle, professional classes who have been pushed into wage labor (the Marxist working class) but whose role in the production process is of a secondary nature. They create surplus-value - that is, their salary is less than the value they add to the production process through the generation of what Marx described as relative surplus-value - but to a greater or lesser degree they form several strata of the working class that are "professionalized." In many cases they see their own fortunes as being tied not to that of the working class but to that of the ruling class, and in some cases this is actually true. However, these layers are constantly pushed toward the large, solid core of the class. The whole field of information technology has been premised on increasing the relative surplus-value from the work performed by these strata.


The group who seem to be the hardest for people to understand are the layer i call lower level professional employees -- school teachers, RNs, librarians, dental hygenists, physical therapists, ordinary newspaper reporters and other writers, technical illustrators, application programmers.

I would argue that this layer is part of the skilled section of the working class. All workers have some skills but there are some jobs that require longer periods of special training to acquire expertise and credentials. This includes not only lower level professional employees such as those I've listed above, but also highly trained blue collar workers...aircraft mechanics, diesel machanics, electronic techs or electricians.

All of these groups tend to have, to varying degrees, a bit more autonomy in their work than workers with lesser skill and also tend to be paid more. Also, their autonomy can be subject to attack by employers...this is clear nowadays in the attacks on school teachers for example.
Some of these people are working class, and some aren't. If you're a programmer and you do consulting work on your own, you are petty bourgeois. If you're a programmer and you work for a large company (whether a tech company or a more general firm), you are working class. There's nothing particularly complex about it.

Autonomy in work does not relate to class relations as Marx laid them out, and trying to work it into a theory of class is simply asking for a complete muddle.

[syndicat]

The term "petty bourgeois" (or, petite bourgeoisie, s'il tu prefères parler français) derives from the original "small" members of the old middle class out of which the bourgeoisie, which was a middle class in feudalism, originally arose. In sociological terms it refers to both the self-employed and the professional layers of society - doctors, lawyers, small shop owners etc. - who are constantly being pushed down into the proletariat. They are outside of the direct production cycle but deeply impacted by it.



You're being dogmatic. If you want to provide a rational defense of this view, you need to respond to the argument i gave. If the "bourgeoisie" are the capital owners who stand on the other side of the capital/wage labor relation, it logically follows that no one is a capitalist...hence no kind of "bourgeoisie"...if they have no employees.

Certainly the early capitalists were often people who developed out of the self-employed artisans and farmers. In medieval times there were masters and apprentices and journeymen and this system continued into the early 1800s to some extent. In this arrangement each apprentice or journeyman could look forward to becoming a master someday.

But because the master had employees, that's why there was a capital/wage labor relationship here.

Doctors and lawyers have a completely different basis for their class position. It isn't based on ownership of physical or financial capital such as a workshop or a store or land. It's based on their expertise.

But their relationship to the economy has changed as capitalism has developed because people who possess expertise useful to capital are then employed by capital in various ways, sometimes in ways that imply a degree of subordination like other workers...the situation of school teachers or RNs. Sometimes they control other workers or work with management to define and control other workers, as corporate lawyers and industrial engineers do.

It isn't whether they have their own practice or are direct employees that matters. That is confusing a legal formality with the actual power relation. Class is about the actual power relations.

Yes it is true that autonomy in work does not create a separate class category, nor did I say that it did. The key thing is having power over others.


Classes are based on the ownership of means of production. This is because it is an objective means of classifying members of society with relation to the production process. Calling any group that has "power" a class is to make class relations completely subjective. This is important, because the implications are that this class exists with a certain relation to means of production when it is about a relation between workers.

Ownership is a legal term. Underlying it are the actual powers. The power of the capital owner is, as Marx would say, that he can go out onto markets for "factors of production" and buy or hire all the factors -- workers, managers, land, buildings, equipment.

But no profits can be made unless workers are forced to exert themselves in ways that increase productivity and lower expenses. For this in the era of big capital, a layered bureaucratic structure is necessary. And this is where the managers and high end professionals have a certain amount of power. Because the capitalists can't do without them.

Thus if it is the power that the capitalists have in production in virtue of ownership that makes them a class, the bureaucratic class also is a class in virtue of its power over the working class.

And your claim that it is only ownership that defines classes is shown to be purely dogmatic.

The point to the hypothesis of class is that it enables us to explain the social reality we experience and the actual struggles that take place. If managers and high end professionals were not a class antagonistic to workers, why aren't they on workers sides ever? Why are they constantly trying to get rid of unions? Why do they want to exclude the working class from their tony neighborhoods? Etc. Your theory of class can't explain this adequately since this class...the bureaucratic class...aren't owners of the means of production in the places where they preside.

The state is also a sphere of power for the bureaucratic class. Who are the owners of the means of production there?

And, yes, I'm familiar with the "coordinator class" concept. It's basically what i call the bureaucratic class. The best piece on this by Albert & Hahnel is "A Ticket to Ride" in the anthology "Between Labor and Capital."


If you're a programmer and you do consulting work on your own, you are petty bourgeois. If you're a programmer and you work for a large company (whether a tech company or a more general firm), you are working class. There's nothing particularly complex about it.


Sorry but this is crap. being a contractor does not change class status. Are FedEx's truck drivers petit bourgeois because they're contractors? You're confusing a purely defacto legal category with a social power relationship. Legal categories for Marx are part of the superstructure, not part of the base.

saying someone is "bourgeois", whether petit or haute, means they own capital, and it means they have an antagonistiic relation to proletarians. so if a programmer is hired on contract, what capital does he own? who are his employees? for example, in the high tech sector where I work, companies will often hire contractors to do programming or writing of manuals because they won't want to commit to that person as a long term employee. I've worked as both a staff writer and a contractor, and if anything the contractor position is weaker because the position is more insecure.

You can of course choose to simply regurgitate the usual Marxist formula that every other dogmatist asserts. But that is not providing a reason to accept that view.

[graymouser]

You're being dogmatic. If you want to provide a rational defense of this view, you need to respond to the argument i gave. If the "bourgeoisie" are the capital owners who stand on the other side of the capital/wage labor relation, it logically follows that no one is a capitalist...hence no kind of "bourgeoisie"...if they have no employees.
Your "argument" was entirely based on an incorrect etymology of "petty bourgeois." I gave the correct etymology. This isn't being dogmatic, you're trying to argue based on inaccurately decomposing a word that is a term of art in a certain kind of economic discourse. We aren't just making up these words on the fly or encountering them for the first time on an internet forum.

To be clear: the "bourgeois" in "petty bourgeois" does not refer to their status as employers, but the common origin of the grande bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie in the feudal middle classes. "Petty bourgeois" by definition refers to independent artisans, professionals or peasants. "Bourgeois" by definition refers to capitalists.

In any case, if you're arguing that "petty bourgeois" means a capitalist who doesn't hire that many workers, all I can say is that you are under a deep misunderstanding. The capitalist who hires more than a few workers is a bourgeois - no pettiness involved. The petty bourgeois, by definition, is a class that is constantly being forced downward into the proletariat.


Ownership is a legal term. Underlying it are the actual powers. The power of the capital owner is, as Marx would say, that he can go out onto markets for "factors of production" and buy or hire all the factors -- workers, managers, land, buildings, equipment.

But no profits can be made unless workers are forced to exert themselves in ways that increase productivity and lower expenses. For this in the era of big capital, a layered bureaucratic structure is necessary. And this is where the managers and high end professionals have a certain amount of power. Because the capitalists can't do without them.

Thus if it is the power that the capitalists have in production in virtue of ownership that makes them a class, the bureaucratic class also is a class in virtue of its power over the working class.

And your claim that it is only ownership that defines classes is shown to be purely dogmatic.
All you've described so far is the separation between manual and mental labor that Marx critiqued in his earliest writings on economics; there is nothing profound in this. Your attempt to redefine class in terms of "power" is idealist and rotten to the core. What makes classes is not power, but relationship to means of production.

You attempt to redefine ownership as "power." But ownership is not just some abstract "power," it is a literal right enforced by the state, in a way the "power" of your so-called bureaucratic class is not. If my boss yells at me, he doesn't have the sanction of armed men with prisons backing him up to enforce any threats. The most he can do is to exercise a fundamentally delegated power to punish or fire me - he is literally an arm of his employer, tied to the employer's needs more directly. The idea that this excrescence of the capitalist class is, itself, a class with its own common interest is laughable.


The point to the hypothesis of class is that it enables us to explain the social reality we experience and the actual struggles that take place. If managers and high end professionals were not a class antagonistic to workers, why aren't they on workers sides ever? Why are they constantly trying to get rid of unions? Why do they want to exclude the working class from their tony neighborhoods? Etc. Your theory of class can't explain this adequately since this class...the bureaucratic class...aren't owners of the means of production in the places where they preside.
That privileged individuals, who are the executive arms of the bourgeoisie, defend their privileges to an almost irrational extent doesn't change their relationships to the means of production. All of what you listed here are purely subjective factors in your idealist notion of class. They are never on the side of the workers because they know where their paychecks lie. This means that they are a layer of the working class, like the police, 99% of whom are irredeemably on the side of the ruling class. It doesn't make their actual relations to the production process different, and when they cease to be of use to the bourgeoisie they are dropped with no fewer tears than would be shed over a wage worker.


The state is also a sphere of power for the bureaucratic class. Who are the owners of the means of production there?
The executive of the state is a committee for deciding the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie; paraphrased, roughly, from Marx. State employees do not engage directly in the production process but in its peripherals; police in maintaining bourgeois order, soldiers in securing the right to profit at home or abroad, teachers in maintaining the reproduction process of labor-power (i.e. training new workers), transit workers in keeping the modes of transportation up and running, social workers in maintaining the elderly and reserve army of unemployed, regulatory agents in monitoring the contracts the whole bourgeoisie has agreed to, etc. Except for social security - won by the labor movement essentially as a mass concession from all employers - they pretty much just monitor these secondary matters. AND they get the workers to pay for a significant part of it, neat trick.


Sorry but this is crap. being a contractor does not change class status. Are FedEx's truck drivers petit bourgeois because they're contractors? You're confusing a purely defacto legal category with a social power relationship. Legal categories for Marx are part of the superstructure, not part of the base.
I was talking about professionals, not workers who've been put into the same category as professionals for totally illegitimate reasons. Trust me, there are real independent "contractors" who genuinely do own their own means of production and face firms as owners.


saying someone is "bourgeois", whether petit or haute, means they own capital, and it means they have an antagonistiic relation to proletarians. so if a programmer is hired on contract, what capital does he own? who are his employees? for example, in the high tech sector where I work, companies will often hire contractors to do programming or writing of manuals because they won't want to commit to that person as a long term employee. I've worked as both a staff writer and a contractor, and if anything the contractor position is weaker because the position is more insecure.
Well, a programmer owns a computer, means to acquire electricity and communication, the ability to reach markets, and the software required to do the work - and that's not a tremendous amount of capital but it is real. Your notion that the petty bourgeois must employ someone is simply misusing the terminology. The class is constantly being pushed into the proletariat, which is a violent process and often unsettling - but that doesn't change the class nature of being a petty bourgeois.


You can of course choose to simply regurgitate the usual Marxist formula that every other dogmatist asserts. But that is not providing a reason to accept that view.
You don't get to be that highbrow when the best you can offer is a mushy idealist concept of "power" that can't tell the difference between a manager's delegated authority and bourgeois right to property.

[syndicat]

In any case, if you're arguing that "petty bourgeois" means a capitalist who doesn't hire that many workers, all I can say is that you are under a deep misunderstanding. The capitalist who hires more than a few workers is a bourgeois - no pettiness involved. The petty bourgeois, by definition, is a class that is constantly being forced downward into the proletariat.

you're being merely pedantic. the word "petit bourgeois" has been used also to refer to small employers. they are capitalists, that is true. but there is a fundamental cleavage between small employers who manage their own handfuls of employees and larger companies with hierarchical managerial structures.

if you want to insist that "petty bourgeois" refers to those whose power lies on their ownership of their own tools, like a self-employed plumber, I can simply give you that phrase. But in that case I'd point out that a contract programmer or an industrial engineer working as a management consultant do not have a different class status from an industrial engineer or lawyer employed by a company. trying to assimilate them to a self-employed plumber or street vendor who owns a van is absurd. and it comes back to your obsession with legal forms rather than looking at the actual power relations over others in social production. also, law firms and doctor's practices typically have employees, so by your definition they'd have to be capitalists.


All you've described so far is the separation between manual and mental labor that Marx critiqued in his earliest writings on economics; there is nothing profound in this. Your attempt to redefine class in terms of "power" is idealist and rotten to the core. What makes classes is not power, but relationship to means of production.

no i have not. first of all, all labor involves some thought, all work involves intellectual labor to some degree, and intellectual labor often involves some physical labor of some sort. it's a vague and inaccurate distinction.

for a corrective, from a marxist point of view, I recommend reading "Labor and Monopoly Capital" by Harry Braverman.

You apparently don't know what the word "idealism" means. It refers to a philosophical view that reality is made up of consciusness, that there is not a separate reality of forces independent of human conceptions.

but power that some exercize over others is in fact a real power that has a reality independent of particular human conceptions of it. what we're talking about here are the "social relations of production" which for marx are part of the mode of production, that is, part of the material base of society.



mpt to redefine ownership as "power." But ownership is not just some abstract "power," it is a literal right enforced by the state, in a way the "power" of your so-called bureaucratic class is not. If my boss yells at me, he doesn't have the sanction of armed men with prisons backing him up to enforce any threats. The most he can do is to exercise a fundamentally delegated power to punish or fire me - he is literally an arm of his employer, tied to the employer's needs more directly. The idea that this excrescence of the capitalist class is, itself, a class with its own common interest is laughable.


First of all, the power of capital isn't created by the state. According to marx the state is the superstructure, remember? second, this class can exist without being subordinate to the capitalist elite, as we saw in the case of the USSR where they were the ruling class.

And the power to hire and fire is a power over workers without them having to bring in the police. If they fire me, they can call in their security guards to escort me from the premises. Moreover, that isn't the only power that the bureaucratic class exercises. they also supervise and track workers, plan out the work, give us direct orders.

your suggestion that they aren't a class is just more recourse to dogma.

[graymouser]

you're being merely pedantic. the word "petit bourgeois" has been used also to refer to small employers. they are capitalists, that is true. but there is a fundamental cleavage between small employers who manage their own handfuls of employees and larger companies with hierarchical managerial structures.

if you want to insist that "petty bourgeois" refers to those whose power lies on their ownership of their own tools, like a self-employed plumber, I can simply give you that phrase. But in that case I'd point out that a contract programmer or an industrial engineer working as a management consultant do not have a different class status from an industrial engineer or lawyer employed by a company. trying to assimilate them to a self-employed plumber or street vendor who owns a van is absurd. and it comes back to your obsession with legal forms rather than looking at the actual power relations over others in social production. also, law firms and doctor's practices typically have employees, so by your definition they'd have to be capitalists.
I'm insisting that the "petty bourgeois" is its classical definition, which is the small producers, artisans and professionals.


no i have not. first of all, all labor involves some thought, all work involves intellectual labor to some degree, and intellectual labor often involves some physical labor of some sort. it's a vague and inaccurate distinction.

for a corrective, from a marxist point of view, I recommend reading "Labor and Monopoly Capital" by Harry Braverman.
The idea that capital creates a division between manual and mental labor is so far from "vague and inaccurate" that it's mind boggling. Entire categories of specialists have been eliminated by capitalism in its day. Mass production by definition separates the two, although the separation is never complete, it is a perfectly valid part of Marx's early theory of alienation from labor.


You apparently don't know what the word "idealism" means. It refers to a philosophical view that reality is made up of consciusness, that there is not a separate reality of forces independent of human conceptions.

but power that some exercize over others is in fact a real power that has a reality independent of particular human conceptions of it. what we're talking about here are the "social relations of production" which for marx are part of the mode of production, that is, part of the material base of society.
My point is precisely that this notion of "power" you create exists only in the realm of human conceptions, while bourgeois property rights require the backing of an entire state to enforce them.


First of all, the power of capital isn't created by the state. According to marx the state is the superstructure, remember? second, this class can exist without being subordinate to the capitalist elite, as we saw in the case of the USSR where they were the ruling class.

And the power to hire and fire is a power over workers without them having to bring in the police. If they fire me, they can call in their security guards to escort me from the premises. Moreover, that isn't the only power that the bureaucratic class exercises. they also supervise and track workers, plan out the work, give us direct orders.

your suggestion that they aren't a class is just more recourse to dogma.
The bureaucratic caste in the USSR was not a ruling class in any sense of the word. Like all bureaucracies, it was a parasitic excrescence on the means of production, in this case the circumstances of a working class that nominally held power in its hands but lacked the technical capacity to organize production for itself. The bureaucracy was a form that could not stand independent of the transitional workers' state that had been formed at the time; it was forced to defend nationalized property, central planning and the monopoly on foreign trade. It was delegated certain rights as a temporary measure - and solidified those rights by a reign of terror - but this was bonapartism, an unstable society that eventually led to the restoration of capitalism. Hardly a case of a "bureaucratic class" standing on its own. Just as the bourgeois state does not stop being bourgeois under a dictatorship, neither does a workers state become something else.

It leaves class relations as a muddle, because it is trying to form a fundamentally stable class out of a fundamentally unstable layer wedged between classes. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat are the fundamental sectors of society; they have institutions, in the case of the bourgeoisie a whole government (since they are a minority but control most of the wealth), and the actual relation to material production cements them in their positions. The bureaucracy in capitalism exists at the will of the bourgeoisie, as its operative arm. Its actual power is taken from the real ruling class, even in the USSR when that class was unable to exercise its political rule. To make classes out of such layers, which are destined to collapse into one of the primary antagonistic classes in society, makes a mockery of class analysis.

[syndicat]

My point is precisely that this notion of "power" you create exists only in the realm of human conceptions,

this claim here, by the way, makes you an idealist. that's because the view expressed in this sentence is idealist...it denies the reality of social forces. "materialism" in the 19th century is what philosophers of science nowadays call "realism"...the view that we need to look at actual forces to have explanations of things that we observe. when we talk about, say, the atomic structure of physical substances, this is part of a physical theory used to explain the behavior of physical substances.

similarly when we look at the structure of power in society this helps us to explain social phenoneman and events. this includes structures like the pattern of sistemic racism or sistemic gender inequality as well as the class structure. these are all about power relations between people.

as to the rest of your post, you're just regurgitating formulas, not providing rational arguments to defend a perspective, as is consistent with your generally dogmatic approach. you're just preaching to the converted fellow vulgar marxist dogmatists.

[graymouser]

similarly when we look at the structure of power in society this helps us to explain social phenoneman and events. this includes structures like the pattern of sistemic racism or sistemic gender inequality as well as the class structure. these are all about power relations between people.
Your notion of power in society remains thoroughly idealist. The bureaucracy that you want to look at as a free-moving part of society with its own will and interests is nothing more than an appendage of the capitalist class, and exercises what power it has only in the interest of that class and within the parameters they define. You muddy the waters by comparing this to the actual control of the capitalists over the means of production, and then expect something profound to fall out of this so-called class analysis.

In Marx's base/superstructure metaphor, you are effectively claiming that an element of the superstructure - in this case, the capitalist production process and the bureaucratic excrescence it creates - is part of the base. Yet in the final analysis it is not an independent factor in the process, as a class must be, but a superstructural layer involved in the extraction of relative surplus value. We can tell that this "power" is not something independently possessed by the bureaucracy because, as soon as they cease to generate sufficient relative surplus value, they lose the power. That something is superstructural does not mean it is unreal or unimportant but it cannot be considered part of the bedrock economic foundation of the capitalist system. And so there is no basis to call it a class.

[Blake's Baby]

However, there can be situations where the capitalist class itself excercise its power as a bureaucracy, such as in the USSR; this doesn't mean that this was a 'new class' merely that its organisation as a capitalist class was bureaucratic.

[graymouser]

In thinking about it, the relationship between the capitalist class and the bureaucratic layer that it creates is not the sort of stuff out of which social classes can be made. The role of the management layer in capitalism is the creation of increased surplus-value. They increase the rate of relative surplus-value by streamlining the production process and keeping in order all of the factors that make profit for the capitalists. And to some extent they increase the rate of absolute surplus-value by keeping workers disciplined and finding "extra" time for them to work off the clock (shortened break periods, coming before/staying after shifts, etc., the type of thing Marx critiqued in the famous chapter on the "Working-Day" in vol. 1 of Capital). But this function is subject to the same fundamental laws as any other part of the production process; effectively they constitute part of the "variable capital" even though their contributions are not direct, and as such the capitalists attempt to derive surplus value from them. Working in programming you should understand - the entire field of information technology is intended to proletarianize white collar work. Joan Greenbaum's "Windows on the Workplace" is a great study that demonstrates this process quite graphically. Jobs that were before prestigious and "professional" are increasingly squeezed into the working class, relative surplus-value (computers for efficiency) and absolute surplus-value (longer working hours) are operative on their work.

Attempting to derive class status from the purely delegated "power" instead of how management and professionals approach capital is to focus on the incidental form which social relations take, that is the superstructure. This is deeply important in day-to-day relations, because such individuals see their well-being as tied to the boss's, and therefore take his side; but at the end of the day, in the base, they find they are wage workers despite all their power. As I said, some of these are thoroughly reactionary (as are cops) and, when they enter the labor movement, do so for reactionary reasons. But theorizing a bureaucratic class means, for instance, giving up the fight to organize office workers and professionals who are being constantly proletarianized. And I reject that.

Additionally, it's deeply misleading to call this a "bureaucratic class," because different bureaucracies have different social functions. The corporate bureaucracy is primarily involved in the secondary aspects of the production process (increasing efficiency etc). The government bureaucracy is primarily involved in several aspects of social reproduction - training new workers, maintaining the "reserve army of the unemployed" at a low level, keeping order and maintaining the common means of transport and distribution (airports, roads and so forth). Merging these into a "bureaucracy" with common goals is at best an act of sleight of hand.

[Blake's Baby]

Yes indeed, and this a major problem with the analysis of a 'new managerial class', which both alibis the USSR as a 'new form' that isn't capitalist (when of course it was), and as you say simultaneously consigning white-collar workers to being a 'new managerial class' instead of the workers that they are.

This is one analytical aspect where I find Anarchism very week. The theories of a 'co-ordinator class' or new managerial/bureaucratic class are a terrible hangover of trying to explain the bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union and the nationalised industries in the west emerged out of, on the one hand, the failure of the Revolution, and on the other, social democracy. They don't explain things half as well as state capitalism, in my view.

[syndicat]

Your notion of power in society remains thoroughly idealist. The bureaucracy that you want to look at as a free-moving part of society with its own will and interests is nothing more than an appendage of the capitalist class, and exercises what power it has only in the interest of that class and within the parameters they define. You muddy the waters by comparing this to the actual control of the capitalists over the means of production, and then expect something profound to fall out of this so-called class analysis.


Just a lot of mumbo jumbo. As Ellen Meiksins Wood points out, "base/superstructure" is just a metaphor...and one that she abandons as not essential to marxism.

managers are bosses. they obviously have power over workers. to try to assimilate them to the working class is an attempt at apologetics for the bureaucratic class regimes. so at least the working class can know where you stand...as a defender of a class enemy.

the state also facilitates the accumulation of capital. for example, the value of real estate in downtowns wouldn't be there without the labor of transit workers irrespective of whether transit agencies are subsidized.

i notice also that you have pointedly not provided any definition or explanation of what the terms "idealist" and "materialist" mean. i think for you "idealist" is merely an insult to toss at people who don't subscribe to your quasi-religious dogma. as Engels pointed out, reproduction is as much a part of the material base as is production. and many state activities, such as education, are involved in the reproduction of class/race/gender unequal society. this also means that the family and its relationship to the economic system is a part of the structure of the society. the state's means of destruction are also a power base for dominating classes, as is quite clear from history. This is another reason the base/superstructure metaphor isn't worth keeping.

as is well known, the capitalist elite at the top of the big corporations don't have the expertise or detailed knowledge to work out the day to day planning of companies. the salaried managers and high-end professionals thus have a lot of independent power in virtue of the knowledge they have and controlling the levers of decision-making day to day.

if you don't see the relationship of the bureaucratic class in the corporate sector to the working class as a relation of class domination, then what reason can you offer for doing away with it? or do you, like Lenin and Trotsky, want to keep it...replete with managers appointed from above and taylorist/fordist detailed division of labor? but this is all part of the way the working class is oppressed and exploited within capitalism.

[graymouser]

managers are bosses. they obviously have power over workers. to try to assimilate them to the working class is an attempt at apologetics for the bureaucratic class regimes. so at least the working class can know where you stand...as a defender of a class enemy.
There is no bureaucratic class, so it can have no regimes. I'm not going to start a debate on Lenin and Trotsky with you, because without an understanding of class and the relations of material production, you cannot understand class regimes.

Managers are, in terms of Marxist class relations, a detached stratum of the working class that is welded to the bourgeoisie. Like the police, they are frequently thoroughly reactionary and given over entirely to the defense of the bourgeois class on who they depend, and form the core of reaction in a revolutionary situation. Your attempt to conflate professionals (who are part of separate strata, and subjected to proletarianization, and capable of moving either toward the working class or toward the reaction) with managers into a fantastical class, based entirely upon your notion of "power," just goes to further your mockery of class analysis.

Base/superstructure may be a metaphor, but it is one that was formulated exactly so we can understand problems like this. (And for the record, I don't consider Wood to be an authority worth listening to on Marxism.) Your "structures of power" are the superstructure, and don't go to the roots of the capitalist system. Managers, the state and professionals are dependents of the bourgeois order, and cannot exist without them. To say that there are classes that exist solely in this superstructure is to turn class analysis upside down, and analyze bourgeois society from its effects rather than its causes. This is good for an anarchist who wants an alibi from actually defending working class revolutions of the past, but does nothing for the cause of revolution today.

[Blake's Baby]

It's also a very useful tool for defending the USSR, because the theory of the 'new class' can be used to explain (away) why the USSR wasn't capitalist. If the Soviet bureaucracy is a 'new co-ordinator class' of technocrats, it doesn't have to be capitalist, and it can claim to be any kind of structure it wants.

Greymouser is right that the bureaucracy represents the interests of a class rather than being a class itself - where (as in Russia) the bureaucracy has the appearance of a class, it's because the bureaucracy and the capitalist class are the same thing not because there's a bureaucratic class and a capitalist class. Engels explained all of this in the 1880s when talking about joint stock companies and the personification of the national capitalist.

That's why state capitalism is a more sensible theory than 'new co-ordinator class'. I know Stalin was a state capitalist (and therefore reactionary). You can't be sure that the USSR wasn't an improvement (otherwise, where does the revolutionary 'new class' come from?) - Syndicat, I'm surprised at you, an anarchist, apologising for Stalin like that.

[syndicat]

That's why state capitalism is a more sensible theory than 'new co-ordinator class'. I know Stalin was a state capitalist (and therefore reactionary). You can't be sure that the USSR wasn't an improvement (otherwise, where does the revolutionary 'new class' come from?) - Syndicat, I'm surprised at you, an anarchist, apologising for Stalin like that.

you're an ass. to say that the USSR was a bureaucratic mode of production is to say it had a dominating and exploiting class, and thus that the working class was a dominated and exploited class.

the bureaucratic class has its own distinctive interests and ideology. its ideology is the idea of meritocracy, that those with knowledge and expertise and the right credentials should be making the decisions. Leninism, with its emphasis on the vanguard party and its character as an intellectual leadership, fits in with this.

within the corporate capitalist sector its well known that decisions about the technical organization of production cannot be explained in terms of profitability. this is because things like job enrichment and worker control schemes can actually raise profits, due to higher worker productivity, but management invariably works to get rid of these schemes, which they hate, as they challenge their prerogative.

the plutocrats at the top simply lack the knowledge to effectively control everything that goes on in the firm. they have the power to guard against a decline in profitability but can't really ensure that profits are actually maximized.

[graymouser]

Greymouser is right that the bureaucracy represents the interests of a class rather than being a class itself - where (as in Russia) the bureaucracy has the appearance of a class, it's because the bureaucracy and the capitalist class are the same thing not because there's a bureaucratic class and a capitalist class. Engels explained all of this in the 1880s when talking about joint stock companies and the personification of the national capitalist.
I don't agree with Tony Cliff's theory of state capitalism (I believe his attempt to locate the operation of the law of value in terms of international arms competition simply doesn't hold water) but Blake's Baby does point out correctly that these layers are not a new thing. There were whole layers of servants who were welded to the feudal aristocracy, and many of them complex, some taking on the cause of their masters, others revolting in the end. Trying to find class dynamics in the layers of administration and hangers-on means that you are, in a reactionary way, writing off entire layers of workers (who are in the process of proletarianization, a very disorienting thing) who are in fact vulnerable to fascist demagogy.

[Blake's Baby]

I don't hold with Tony Cliff's theory of State Capitalism either. I agree with Lenin, Ossinsky, Bukharin, the SPGB, and Wilhelm Leibknecht on State Capitalism. What I disagree on with Lenin in particular was whether it was a good thing.

Syndicat - right back at ya. Are you really so wedded to the idea of the 'new co-ordinator class' that you issue apologies for Stalinism? The bureaucracy in Russia was not a new class. It was an old class, a class of capitalists. Honestly, form and function, form and function. The bureacracy in the USSR was the agent of Russian capitalism just like the bureaucracy in the west was (is) the agent of British or American or French capitalism. There is no seperate managerial/co-ordinator class, because there is no group that stands in a seperate relationship to the means of production. 'Class' doesn't just mean 'social group' - the capitalist machine in Russia ruled through the bureaucracy. The bureacracy didn't stand sperately to the machine, it was the machine.