“The considerable increase, throughout monopoly capitalism and its various phases, of the number of nonproductive wage-earners, i.e. groups such as commercial and bank employees, office and service workers, etc., in short all those who are commonly referred to as white-collar or tertiary sector workers. The particular question of these new wage-earning groupings will form the chief object of the following analysis. I shall refer to them as the new petty bourgeoisie, for what I am seeking to show here is that they belong together with the traditional petty bourgeoisie (small-scale production and ownership, independent craftsmen and traders) to one and the same class, the petty bourgeoisie. In fact, from this point of view, the traditional petty bourgeoisie (small-scale production and ownership) and the new petty bourgeoisie (non-productive wage-earners) both have in common the fact that they neither belong to the bourgeoisie nor to the working class. This is a common criterion which appears to be wholly negative. However, this factor assumes a quite different role according to whether it is considered in itself, i.e. as defining in isolation the places of the petty bourgeoisie or whether, as is in fact correct, it is considered in the context of class polarization. The question then arises as to what are the effects of this negative criterion. On the other hand, however, in looking at the question from the specific aspect of this polarization, it is clear that this negative criterion does not just have a simple excluding role; it actually produces economic similarities which have common political and ideological effects. Reference to political and ideological relations is absolutely indispensable in order to define the place of the petty bourgeoisie in the structural class determination. So far, we have established certain common characteristics of the class determination of the new petty-bourgeois groupings: wage earning employees who do not belong to the working class but are themselves exploited by capital, either because they sell their labour-power, or because of the dominant position of capital in the terms of exchange (services). This determination is chiefly a function of economic relations (unproductive labour). However, this common economic situation is obviously not a sufficient basis for us to consider these various groupings as belonging to a single class, the new petty bourgeoisie. We must also refer to their place in the political and ideological relations of the social division of labour, and this place will in fact reveal how far-reaching are the common determinations of these groupings. We have already seen the importance of the mental/manual labour division for the supervisory staff, and for engineers and technicians. This played a decisive role in so far as, by way of the primacy of the social division of labour over the technical, it excluded these groupings from the working class despite the fact that they too performed capitalist productive labour. I would in fact say that the mental/manual labour division characterises the new petty bourgeoisie as a whole, which in contrast to the working class is located on the side, or in the camp, of mental labour, either directly or indirectly. This new petty bourgeoisie, the product of the extended reproduction of monopoly capitalism itself, is located by the extended division between mental and manual labour that characterizes the capitalist mode of production in general. This means that it is located in a quite specific place in the reproduction of capitalist political and ideological relations.” Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, pp.193, 204, 206-207, 251-252 “We will argue that the middle class category of workers which has concerned Marxist analysis for the last two decades-the technical workers, managerial workers, culture producers, etc.-must be understood as comprising a distinct class in monopoly capitalist society. The Professional-Managerial Class (PMC), as we will define it, cannot be considered a stratum of a broader class of workers because it exists in an objectively antagonistic relationship to another class of wage earners (whom we shall simply call the working class). 8 N or can it be considered to be a residual class like the petty bourgeoisie; it is a formation specific to the monopoly stage of capitalism. We define the Professional-Managerial Class as consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations. Their role in the process of reproduction may be more or less explicit, as with workers who are directly concerned with social control or with the production and propagation of ideology (e.g., teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, writers of advertising copy and TV scripts, etc.). Or it may be hidden within the process of production, as is the case with the middle-level administrators and managers, engineers, and other technical workers whose functions, as Gorz, Steve Marglin, Harry Braverman and others have argued, are essentially determined by the need to preserve capitalist relations of production. Thus we assert that these occupational groups-cultural workers, managers, engineers and scientists, etc.-share a common function in the broad social division of labor and a common relation to the economic foundations of society. The PMC, by our definition, includes people with a wide range of occupations, skills, income levels, power and prestige. The boundaries separating it from the ruling class above and the working class below are fuzzy. Despite the lack of precise delineation of the boundaries of the PMC, by combining occupational data and statistics on property distribution we can make a very crude estimate of the class composition of u.s. society: by this estimate about 65 to 70 per cent of the U.S. population is working class. (We accept Bravermans conception of the working class: craftsmen, operatives, laborers, sales workers, clerical workers, service workers, non-college-educated technical workers.) Eight to ten per cent is in the old middle class (Le., self-employed professionals, small tradespeople, independent farmers, etc.). Twenty to twenty-five per cent is PMC; and one to two per cent is ruling class. That is, the PMC includes something like fifty million people. It is simultaneously with these developments in working-class life (more precisely, in the relation between the working class and the capitalist class) that the professional and managerial workers emerge as a new class in society. The three key developments listed above-the reorganization of the productive process, the emergence of mass institutions of social control, the commodity penetration of workingclass life-do not simply develop; they require the effort of more or less conscious agents. The expropriation of productive skills requires the intervention of scientific management experts; there must be engineers to inherit the productive lore, managers to supervise the increasingly degraded work process, etc. Similarly, the destruction of autonomous working-class culture requires (and calls forth) the emergence of new culture-producers-from physicians to journalists, teachers, admen and so on. These new operatives, the vanguard of the emerging PM C, are not simply an old intellegentsia expanding to meet the needs of a complex society. Their emergence in force near the turn of the century is parallel and complementary to the transformation of the working class which marks the emergence of monopoly capital. Thus the relationship between the PMC and the working class is objectively antagonistic. The functions and interests of the two classes are not merely different; they are mutually contradictory. True, both groups are forced to sell their labor power to the capitalist class; both are necessary to the productive process under capitalism; and they share an antagonistic relation to the capitalist class. But these commonalities should not distract us from the fact that the professional-managerial workers exist, as a mass grouping in monopoly capitalist society, only by virtue of the expropriation of the skills and culture once indigenous to the working class. Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class” en Between Labor and Capital, South End Press, pp.9-10, 12-14, 16-17 “However, instead of interrogating the Marxism which they only apparently transcend, the Ehrenreichs, like New Working Class theorists, presuppose all the fundamentals of Marxian class analysis in their otherwise inexplicable attempt to force the new middle strata into the straight jacket of class. The class theory is not reexamined but directly imposed onto the new social groups. While one can of course identify social classes objectively, according to their mode of labor, relation to the means of production and to other strata, one cannot impute a uniform, action orienting class interest to the variety of new strata: technicians, intellectuals, professionals, bureaucrats, managers, etc., merely because they compose a middle stratum between capital and labor. In the context of contemporary U.S. society the strata grouped under the class rubric of the PMC in fact seem to dissolve into conflicting interest groups rather than coalesce into a coherent class. At issue, then, is not the presence and importance of the new social strata between capital and labor, but the effort to conjure away ambiguity and indeterminacy through the dogmatic use of the Marxian notion of class. For us, however, it is thoroughly untenable to refer to the groups in question as a class at all! To lump together technical workers in corporations, college professors, state bureaucrats, managers with technical knowledge or those who are but corporate bureaucrats, professionals, et tutti quanti, as a coherent class of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production, whose function in the division of labor is the reproduction of capitalist culture, is absurd.” Jean Cohen & Dick Howard, “Why Class?” en Between Labor and Capital, South End Press, pp.76-77, 83 “The Ehrenreichs are quite aware of these gradations of positions within a single functional apparatus, and it leads them to argue that certain positions within the PMC are closer to the working class than others, while other positions are closer to the bourgeoisie. A registered nurse, for example, constitutes a position within the PMC close to the working class; an upper-middle manager in a corporation constitutes a position within the PMC closer to the bourgeoisie. The Ehrenreichs stress that the PMC is not a homogeneous class, but is characterized by an internal hierarchy of strata reflecting a range of structural locations within the common function of reproducing capitalist social relations. Now, to say that both a registered nurse and an upper-middle manager are both members of the same class (albeit at different ends of the class) implies that they are closer to each other than they are to any other class. If this were not the case-if in fact registered nurses are closer to workers than to upper-middle managers-then it would not make sense to see them as being within the same class. A registered nurse and an upper-middle manager might still have a certain commonality within class relations, but that commonality could not be understood as defining them within a single, coherent class. This is not a problem in the ambiguities at the boundaries of classes, but of the very logic of designating a set of positions within the social division of labor as a class. The question of whether the PMC can be considered a class can thus be re-posed as follows: does it make sense to consider a set of positions that are in some sense situated between the working class and the bourgeoisie, in which some of these positions are closer to the working class and others closer to the bourgeoisie, a class in the same sense that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are classes? There is a strong tradition within Marxism to assume that every position within the social division of labor must fall firmly into one class or another. H this assumption is accepted, then by default, all of the positions between the working class and the bourgeoisie must, of necessity, constitute a class. But there is an alternative: instead of insisting that all positions within the social division of labor fall firmly into classes, some positions can be seen as objectively torn between classes. H classes are understood as social relations, not things, this implies that certain positions have a contradictory character within those social relations. On certain dimensions of class relations they share the characteristics of the bourgeoisie, on others they share the characteristics of the working class. In this view, instead of seeing intellectuals as part of a distinctive class with its own coherence and unity, intellectuals would be understood as falling within a contradictory location within class relations.” Erik Olin Wright, “Intellectuals and the Class Structure of Capitalist Society” en Between Labor and Capital, South End Press, pp.202-203 “Las clases representan tan sólo, por decirlo así, zonas de la estructura social en la que cierta combinación de criterios se da con mayor frecuencia estadística. A) Estructura ocupacional de la población: habitantes clasificados por la categoría de ocupación. B) Jerarquía que se asocia a las diferentes ocupaciones según las pautas socioculturales dominantes, y formas en las que las ocupaciones se agrupan en clases de acuerdo con tales pautas. C) Tipo de existencia, nivel económico y características personales (especialmente instrucción) que caracterizan en promedio las diferentes ocupaciones o grupo de ocupaciones. D) “Autoidentificación” de los miembros de las diferentes ocupaciones con una o otra clase social. E) Características de diferentes sistemas de actitudes, normas, valores (personalidades sociales de status) que deberían presentar los grupos ocupacionales y distinguirlos entre sí (como para justificar su inclusión en distintas clases). Destaquemos en primer lugar que el sistema de clases de nuestro país se acerca al tipo de las sociedades occidentales industrializadas (…). Ocupaciones y clases en la Argentina; para este trabajo emplearemos la convencional clasificación tripartita en clase “alta”, “media” y “popular”. Se hablará, sin embargo, de “clases medias” y “clases populares”, en plural, para subrayar el carácter “compuesto” que poseen, en tanto que resultan de la conjunción de grupos ocupacionales dotados de cierta dinámica propia pese a las características comunes que justifican su inclusión en una misma clase. La característica esencial del nivel inferior de la clase media es el predominio absoluto de los grupos dependientes (más del 50%) y el hecho que más de la mitad se origine en el sector terciario. La pequeña burguesía en las sociedades industriales de la actualidad, y por lo tanto también en la Argentina, se compone sobre todo de empleados y una buena proporción de ellos corresponde a las entidades públicas. Estos “proletaroides” y “obreros de cuello duro”, como se los suele llamar, constituyen, justamente a causa de su ambigua posición dentro de la sociedad, un grupo de difícil ubicación. En las clases populares, no solamente se va separando el fuerte núcleo de los “trabajadores de cuello duro”, que se transforma en clase media, (…).” Gino Germani, Estructura social de la Argentina, Solar, pp.143, 146-147, 203-204, 220 https://youtube/watch?v=gscaCp8ESxI
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 21:40:47 +0000
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