Whats the difference between professionals and workers?

[The Machine]

In the loose American sense a professional is someone with a "career" rather than a job, but who are professionals in the communist sense and how do they differentiate from workers? Is there a concrete distinction or is it just income based to refer to high paid workers as well as bourgeois without regard to their class in the communist sense.

[Blanquist]

In the loose American sense a professional is someone with a "career" rather than a job, but who are professionals in the communist sense and how do they differentiate from workers? Is there a concrete distinction or is it just income based to refer to high paid workers as well as bourgeois without regard to their class in the communist sense.

This is a good topic. I think there are many things to consider.

1. Many 'professionals' don't create value but work to appropriate it, to get themselves and their respective firms a bigger slice of the surplus value. This includes people in fields like; law, marketing etc.

2. Many professionals, I think can be classified as workers (example: IT workers), the problem is because they receive such high salaries they are less inclined to care about socialism. They don't have to have big stock portfolio's or business interests but they are quite comfortable.

I hope people have some thoughts on this. What have recent Marxists had to say about it? Specifically the new categories of workers.

[ckaihatsu]

Obviously the word 'professional' has both positive *and* negative connotations to it. I'll agree with Blanquist, and add that in the positive, generic sense, a 'professional' would do knowledge-intensive, intellectual-sided work that many / most others would *not* readily do, and that actually provides value generally to many people.

It's on the last part there that we see the real difference between a "professional" of today, and a 'professional' of a potential socialist society. Today people *may* provide value generally through high-level work, or they may not, but either way they will most likely want to privatize compensation from such work, whatever it is. We also can't ignore the sheer *political* aspect to "professional" work, in which those who profess and show fealty to the powers-that-be are providing a political "service" to elitism.

This is actually a hot-button issue for revolutionary theory, and I'll say that much can be seen about a person's politics depending on their take on this question of high-level labor -- there's a very good discussion that covered it recently:


The doctor argument against communism

http://www.revleft.com/vb/doctor-argument-against-t147012/index.html

[Firebrand]

Maybe that a lot of professionals are freelancers. They don't have a boss, they are not directly exploited, so it is a lot harder for them to open their eyes to whats happening. Some professionals are not freelancers but are paid highly enough that they identify more with the ruling classes than the working classes.
A lot of jobs that used to be considered professional jobs are now white collar working class though, e.g. teachers.