Re: marxism-digest V1 #1811-mental/manual,etc

[Debordagoria <phantasmagorias@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol's framework seems particularly appropriate in
the contemporary context of the proletarianization of
the professions and of mental labor generally.  And I
like the way the notion of "real status" allows  upper
corporate managers and tenured professors to be
included in the capitalist class.  Can anyone point me
to any recent Marxist-oriented literature on these
issues?
Michael Davidson

--- Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> Philip L Ferguson wrote:
>
> > I would assume there is much in it that you would
> agree with Carroll.  Do
> > you not agree, for example, that universities
> (certainly in NZ) are
> > underwritten by surplus-value?  And that it is the
> working class which
> > creates surplus-value?  And that it is the working
> class which is least
> > likely to be found at university (except as
> cleaners, cafe workers,
> > secretaries etc)?
>
> In the United States I would assume about 80% of the
> student body
> are working class. I have indicated before that I
> find the term
> "middle class" profoundly unmarxist and
> obscurantist. Your whole
> article seems based on that empty concept.
>
> Leaving aside the small class of petty producers
> (who retain all or
> most of the surplus value they create), not more
> than about 5% of
> the population belong to the capitalist class. As
> Marx predicted,
> advance capitalism has eliminated all the middle
> layers andf left
> us with two classes, workers and capitalists. The
> conception
> of a middle class (which on examination always turns
> out to be
> based on consciousness, a non-materialist criterion)
> obscures
> this fact.
>
> Computer analysts, technicians, chemists, unversity
> faculty,
> the vast bulk of supervisory personnel, public
> school teachers
> most (not all) of industrial technicians, nurses,
> growing numbers
> of physicians, dentists, accountants, engineers, the
> bulk of
> those a pair of non-marxists 30 years ago called
> professional-
> managerial, are parts of the working class.
>
> Most do not have working class consciousness.
> Neither do
> huge numbers of blue collar workers. They think they
> are
> middle class. The first step in giving the vast
> number of
> falsely labelled "middle class" working class status
> is for
> marxist activists and theorists to recognize that
> they are
> middle class.
>
> I recognize that juridical and real status are not
> always
> the same. At some point in corporate management one
> finds that what appears as salary is in fact a share
> of
> surplus value. The tenured professors at the great
> private
> universities in the United States are not workers,
> but
> they are not middle class, they are  capitalists.
>
> I notice that here is no niggling discussion in your
> post
> that some men are not working class but you choose
> to focus on the fact that some women are not working
> class. Disgusting.
>
> No one has made a study of what proportion of  the
> modern
> working class is objectively part of the aristocracy
> of labor,
> nor what part of that aristocracy of labor may be
> won to
> a working-class consciousness and what part must be
> treated
> as actual or potential class traitors. That is
> because using the
> absurd category of middle class those workers are
> verbally
> expelled from the working class and the problem is
> by that
> slight-of-hand swept under the rug.
>
> I am not a trained sociologist or economist, and the
> empirical
> detail of establishing class identity requires those
> skills. But
> one does not need a great deal of detailed analysis
> to recognize
> that with the virtual disappearance of the small
> farmer in
> advanced capitalist nations along with the huge
> number of
> petty producers, merchants, et cetera that primarily
> depended
> on agricultural petty producers for their customers,
> what
> we are left with are workers and capitalists, with
> only
> demographically insignificant middle layers. That
> must be the
> point of departure for an analyisis of the social
> position of
> students.
>
> And a discussion of student consciousness is
> irrelevant to
> this debate. Consciousness does not define class.
>
> Carrol
>
>
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