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

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I sent this earlier but haven't seen it come through
so I am resending it. Apologies if it arrives twice.
Carrol

Debordagoria wrote:

> 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

Please note that I said not simply "tenured professors"
but "tenured professors at the great private universities."
It does make a difference.

A small marxist group, *The New Voice*, published
a book by Charles Loren: *Classes in the United States:
Workers Against Capitalists* in 1977.  That group went
out of existence long ago, but the book might be findable
through rare book searches. Since there are so few
rigorous attempts at class analysis of the United States
it   would be useful if some left publisher would reprint
Loren's book. It might at least trigger debate and discussion
on the left of this crucial issue.

Ruling classes alway have included marginal (or should we
say "honorary") members  who were not wholly proper
members in terms of personal wealth or property. Church
figures (and not just in actual theocracies) and other
selected intellectuals have often been such. Certainly the
main departments at Harvard, Stanford, etc. contain if they
are not wholly made up with such figures. Were U.S.
universities actually places based on scholarly merit such
people as Sweezy would not have been excluded from the
academy and (to take just one example at random) Martha
Gimenez would be a full professor of sociology at a
prestige university rather than an associate professor at
Colorado State University.

Other members of the ruling class "by appointment" as it
were would include Supreme Court judges,  near-lifetime
holders of under- and assistant-secretary rank in the major
government agencies, chief executives of the great foundations,
etc. etc. A class analysis needs to allow for recognition of
such special slots, but one must also remember that Hard
Cases Make Bad Law -- and so it is with class analysis. One
can get lost in special cases and marginal issues. How high
up in GM does one have to be for one's salary to be a share
of surplus value? It's not really worth being precise here.

I understand there is a newer edition of Domhoff's Who Rules
America. Everyone in the U.S. should acquaint themselves with
that work. It is excellent for identifying the internal structure
of the ruling class, its modes of operation, etc. There is also a
work from the '70s by a Soviet writer (I forget his name and
cannot find the book about the house), *Millionaires and Managers.*
It has a good deal of information on actual personnel of the u.s.
ruling class.

Carrol