class analysis- "the middle class"

Nice, unfortunately you wordiness have outed you as thoroughly middle class I jest

The question is if the problem of the "middle class" is of a different class (pun intended) than the problem of authoritarianism or even fascism that can be present in the working class proper. If it is the third class it is required if it isn't it isn't.

I agree here. And for further provocation, I would argue that Marx would not consistently agree. That at least in a large portion of Marx's work, there are a number of other classes. And that when he talked about other classes dying, he was wrong, in the sense that the world's population hasn't ever been more than 50% production workers and that the trend isn't headed that way. The world is more and more wage laborers, a group which I would say has the potential to transform into the proletariat, those who have nothing to lose but their chains and know it.

You can find "the one class, the proletariat" in some parts of Marx's wide researches. But that's different from saying that he consistently propounded the proletariat.

I have no idea of percentages, but there's a lot of small businesses that aren't retail but are also not just sole traders doing wage labour. Whether it's small restaurants/take-aways, pubs (depending on the ownership model), builders who employ other people, design/print/web shops etc.

http://www.fsb.org.uk/stats says 4.5m SMEs accounting for over 50% of private sector employment, however that includes both sole traders and companies with up to 250 staff. Various people who are sole traders at one end or who employ 250 staff at the other are not going to be petit-bourgeois, but I don't think it's a segment of society, and neither a category of employment that should be completely written off.

That doesn't mean it's useful in terms of a 2/3 class analysis, but from an organising perspective it does make a difference. I've had jobs with small businesses where I was working side by side with my boss on day-to-day work (i.e. in situations where they were doing regular work as opposed to managing), and public sector jobs where my line-manager was 2-3 miles away and I saw them about once per week.

According to Marxist economist Howard Sherman, small to medium-sized business owners make up 6 percent of the economically active population in the USA, and the big capitalists, that is, the major owners of the big firms, who are insulated from workers by layers of managers and professionals, are about 2 percent. So the whole capitalist class is about 8 percent.

Debates around the size of the working class in the USA usually diverge over the question of what to say about professional employees. For example, Michael Zweig, who is a Marxist, says that the working class is about 62 percent. This is because he excludes all professional employees who he sees as having more "autonomy", which he views as a middle class (petit bourgeois, in traditional Marxist lingo) characteristic. I personally don't agree with this because historically a lot of skilled blue collar workers also had some autonomy in their work. I would say that the issue is whether you are a boss in relation to other workers, or have significant power to define their work, remove them and so on. This would exclude not only managers but corporate lawyers and other high-end professionals from the working class.

Where I disagree with Zweig is that i think lower level professional employees are sufficiently similar to other skilled workers as to be regarded as part of the skilled section of the working class. This would shift about 15 percent to the working class column...RNs, school teachers, programmers, librarians, ordinary working artists & working writers. Thus the working class would be about 3/4 of the population in the USA.

Thus my estimate of the size of the bureaucratic class would be about 17 or 18 percent. Statistics indicate that the size of this class varies quite a bit between different advanced capitalist countries, with the "Anglo-Saxon" countries having a much larger bureaucratic bloat, probably due to less reliance on corporatist forms of labor control and more reliance on managerial repression (guard labor).

Class is most usefully defined as a social relation of exploitation. When we talk of class societies we mean those forms of society in which one section of the population receives most of its sustenance and wealth through the appropriation of the surplus produce of the other section. Class then is always the relation between exploiter and exploited. Previous class societies have been based on diverse relations such as those between master and slave, lord and peasant, Brahmin & Kshatriya versus Vaishya and Shudra, and so on. But the common link between all class societies previous to capitalism is the unity of the political relation of domination with the economic relation of exploitation (indeed the political/economic dichotomy and the use of those words to express it, does not occur before the modern era). The corollory of which is that the class struggle between these classes is coterminous with the clash of their interests. But with capitalist class society we see a (partial*) separation of the political relations of domination and the economic relations of exploitation. Along with all the consequents that we are familiar with (commodity fetishism, anonymisation/mystification of power) something peculiar happens in relation to the contending interests of the two classes. In effect the emergence of capital (self-valorising value) as a third non-human social force which erodes the autonomy of the interests of the capitalist class. The class struggle between labour and capital is no longer the simple conflict between the interests of the working class and those of the capitalist class. While the working class still retain their autonomy as to what their interests are, the capitalist class does not, because it is forced to conform with the "interests" of capital itself. This is the point behind my "one class" riddle. Our enemy is no longer an opposing class of people, but the system (of social relations) itself.

In past class societies, the route to freedom for the exploited class was obvious enough, simply throw off the shackles (literally, in slave societies) of the exploiting class and destroy their power - if all else fails by destroying them physically. In capitalism our problem is both less obvious and more difficult, and yet for those same reasons, more fundamental. That is, to consciously grasp (both conceptually and organisationally/physically) the social relations of production and collectively create new ones, artificial ones formed by our own design, rather than by "god", or "nature" or "history", as the basis of the freedom of all (and an end to the destruction of our own biosphere). It's a non-trivial task, but it holds out the prospect of ceasing to be the prisoners of history and becoming its creators in a way no previous class struggle ever could.

But I digress. Returning to the problem of the "middle class". My submission is that there is no "third way", i.e. a third set of interests that unites the middle class against the interests of both labour and capital. Lacking the ability to articulate any particular interest of its own, the middle party (in the broad sense - or middle subjectivity if you prefer) becomes the champion of the "general interest". The "general interest" is a reactionary conceit whose aim is transparently reformist and conservative, its only horizon is the overcoming of the egregious conflicts of the present so as to better to preserve the ongoing existence of capitalist society.

I say party or subjectivity, because in my view the existence of intermediate strata in the technical composition of production (including society as a whole, n.b.) does not constitute a class unless that potential category is able to compose itself politically and economically as a force able to intervene in the class struggle on it's own behalf. Both the working class and the capitalist class have organisational bodies (no matter how much, in our case, they may become degenerate, bureaucratised or recuperated) to aid their composition. The capitalists have endless conferences like the World Economic Forum, Bilderbergers, the G20, and so on, alongside the formal political and economic bodies such as NAFTA, ASEAN, EU, UN, WTO, etc. Our own class have unions, tenants and other neighbourhood groups, local village campaigns against primitive accumulation or environmental destruction by corporations or state civil engineering projects, and so on. What are the organisational foci of the middle class? Again, they have none specific to them. Instead they try to infiltrate those of the other two classes, in order to create their "civil society" utopia, true voice of the "general interest" again. To the extent they succeed in capturing or subverting working class organisational bodies then they are the vectors of the decomposition of our class. But that does not make that activity the composition of their own.

For the sake of argument we could look at professional bodies like the Law Society or Medical Council which defend the rights of their members against capitalists, the state and members of the general public, as examples of prototypical "middle class" organisational bodies. But I would argue that although quantitatively different in their accumulated power, influence, and privilege of immunity, they are qualitatively not that different from any other self-serving trade or craft body - i.e. once again, simply an exaggerated form of the degeneration or decomposition of sectional interest producer groups.

Getting back to the question of the SMEs. The capital labour relation penetrates throughout our society, almost fractally. Many small employers earn no more than the average industrial wage (often less) and not only lack autonomy in the somewhat abstract or metaphysical sense above, but in practical terms are nearly completely prisoners of market forces. The distinction has to be made between the micro or molecular level of the relationship and the macro or molar level of class composition at society level. So not every minor boss or small employer in Ireland could reasonably be said to be a member of the Irish capitalist class - in the practical sense of having a say in determining the interests and programme of that class.

[Having said that, they do have a class organisation - ISME (Irish Small and Medium Enterprise Association) - to which a lot of SME's pay subs in return for which they get legal representation in labour disputes and confidential briefings on dirty tricks to deprive their workers of their statutory rights (a lot of the casework of our union at the moment is dealing with this kind of crap - so I'm not talking in the abstract here). But that in turn relies on the support of it's big brother, IBEC (Irish Business and Employers Confederation - the big boys club) and the actual influential players in the local capitalist class. (Bearing in mind, of course, that relative to an international context, "big" in Irish capitalist terms is more or less insignificant in UK or US terms).]

* Language problem. I don't mean complete separation as in the cleaving into two entirely independant spheres. But rather the concept of "distinct but not separate" or "autonomous but not independant" dualism that doesn't fit neatly into the platonic "one that becomes two" classical logic.

Heh. It's a fair cop guv, I plead guilty to having read far too many nerdy "theory" books

Unfortunately the language I tend to use when thinking aloud, in "inquiry" mode, tends to fall into unconsciously mimicking the dry tone and over technical language of many of said books. OTOH sometimes when you're teasing out ideas the most important thing about a word or phrase can be it's precision rather than it's readability. Writing in "exposition" mode (i.e. articles for a newspaper, leaflet, etc), however, is a completely different discipline. Then the most important thing is communicating with the audience and how to tell the story, concisely and in accessible language. What is intolerable though, imo, is when people sit down to write a book or article and instead of writing accessibly, just write in "inquiry mode" jargon either because they're used to writing for academic-only outlets and are too lazy to change mode, or worse, because they think it makes them look clever and/or "serious".

I don't quite get the sense of the last sentence here. "it is required" for the workings of the production process (like the Burnham-style managerial/bureaucratic class as monopolisers of vital production knowledge), or in another sense?

Well, I've tried to present an 'accessible' outline of the core of our exploitative society, a three-class model in which their relations to property and each other are central.

Why can't someone else do the same for their ideas, rather than carping on about precise 'percentages', or having a 'co-ordinator' class which is not related to 'economic exploitation' but 'political power'.

We can all see that there are other classes beyond these three, and that 'political power' and the state need to be taken into account in a sophisticated analysis.

But for the purposes of clearly showing the kernel of our exploitative social system on this planet, and making an explanation 'accessible' to those newly coming to our ideas, what's wrong with my three-class model?

This query is not particularly directed at you, ocelot; you just happen to have made the point above, that I profoundly agree with.

ocelot:

"Class is most usefully defined as a social relation of exploitation. When we talk of class societies we mean those forms of society in which one section of the population receives most of its sustenance and wealth through the appropriation of the surplus produce of the other section. Class then is always the relation between exploiter and exploited."

LBird:

"Since I define a class by its relationship to an exploitative economy, I don't see how 'co-ordinators' can be a class."

Because they manage the relationship defined above.

Thanks for your reasonable question, Ernestine.

The key here is 'manage'.

A maitre'd 'manages' a restaurant. They have real power to seat, ensure good service, favour some and not others, turn some away, etc.

But they are not the central relationship: that is between the owner and the customer.

The owner can sack the 'manager'; the customers can refuse to use the restaurant, and the maitre'd loses their job.

Real power lies outside of the maitre'd, notwithstanding appearances when one is waiting for a seat and trying to catch the manager's eye.

A 'co-ordinator' class is nothing of the sort, from an 'exploitation' perspective. From a Weberian perspective of appearances, perhaps.

But we're Communists, aren't we? Not liberal sociologists?

Exploitation presupposes a social relation of subordination. Certainly Marx thought so. Within capitalism there are two institutions which make for a different basis for class power:

1. a relative monopolization over means of production & means to acquire means of production.

2. a relative monopolization over decision-making authority & expertise needed to its exercize in control of social production

The second may be usually subordinate to the first (tho not always) in capitalism but they are distinct forms of power. Capital possessors don't have the means to do management and often lack necessary expertise & information, which gives class 2 some leeway & autonomy in relation to them.

Class must be a relation which leads to resistance to it by the immediate producers, by workers, it must be an antagonistic relation around which class struggle surges. Both 1 and 2 fit this requirement.

2. also indicates that the bureaucratic or coordinator class do have an independent institutional basis for their class position.

hmm we are, arent we? then why did you come up with the petty bourgeoisie as a specific class? did you mention a third side of the social relation wage labour - capital? or did you fall over the quantity of work / profit someone does as a specific for class distinction? you decide yourself whos the liberal sociologist here coz i really cant stand to flame you anymore because you seem to be such a nice person

Yes,

One of several threads going through Das Capital is that the capitalist class needs to actively enforce capitalist relations though actively extracting the labor of the workers. As the narrative unfolds, he sketches both economic exploitation and hierarchical domination - in the large production of physical commodities. And the point is that here he is sketching a working class that isn't too different from the classical syndicalist working class.

As I read the argument of Das Capital, as the various well-read posters here have expounded it, the example of the restaurant is not central to capitalist relations in Marx's terms. The restaurant combines producing food commodities with producing an ambiance. A more ideal model is a factory where the labor power of hundreds of workers is extracted to produce some pre-prepared stuff for the masses. Here, the supervisor discards any of the niceness of a restaurant maitre'd and is more or less the active hand of the owner and quite likely has some investment interest in the company (through stock-options or otherwise).

That is one Marx. This Marx didn't sketch a world where the market itself is the main whip hand spurring labors to sell themselves. Rather, the "free laborer" is pretty tightly bound to the labor process.

Notice, however, that I am saying that Marx's sketch is wrong here. And this isn't said as some jibe against Karl but because the scenario of the production workers taking power has simply not worked out the way the classical workers' movement imagined.

Now, if we recognize the failure of the earlier model that (among other things) rather strictly sorted individuals into different classes (at a time when society also sorted people much visibly between classes), then we have to talk about the ambiguity of the modern world.

Here, we should first recognize that "Middle Class Revolts" sure as hell exist. These could roughly be defined as revolts by managers and would-be managers for the purpose of making capitalist society better managed. The "Orange Revolution" in the Ukraine and the many colored revolutions elsewhere.

However, the point is that the situation today is ambiguous. If the "two class" model was true in the sense of class system of the 19th century, then "we are the 99%" would be an unambiguously revolutionary slogan and the Occupation Movements could make an uninterrupted march to victory (perhaps with the re-election of Obama). But certainly, we can't accept "the 99%" as being able to come together in their present form as revolutionary.

Now, if one calls any variety of technocrat "middle class", then the teachers, office workers, maitre'ds, dog-catchers and so-forth of the advanced capitalist world would qualify and a large portion of the population (much more than 5%) would be middle class. And it is very important to see there is some truth to this. In the US, you could probably find enforcers of capitalist relations than you could find production workers.

I still would claim that a "proletarian revolution" is also possible in these circumstances. The question is whether one winds-up with a formation which aims to improve the management of capitalist relations or destroy them. In this context, I'd see the American Occupation Movement or the wild cat teachers' strikes in Wisconsin as ambiguous. There are many today who are simultaneously enforcers and managers of capitalist relations and barely surviving those same capitalist relations (Teachers are a fine example of this).

And the situation creates an ambiguity that we need to be aware of.

Indeed a little more sorting-out is needed. While I would defend a form of the "two class" approach, I think the two class system that takes takes the old workers movement's forms at face value and then dismisses the possibility of "Middle Class" opportunism wind-ups even worse and indeed rather poisonously opportunist.

OK, reasonable request. I'm going to switch the order for reasons that will hopefully become clearer later.

See this immediately reminds me of Trotsky's association of Fascism with the threatened petit bourgeoisie. Now never having been anything politically (other than the usual spotty teenage nihilist) before becoming an anarchist, I haven't really read Trotsky properly (other than the bits anarchists recommend each other to read as ammo against the Trots, which is hardly a fair shake). I do however remember being recommended from more than one antifa comrade back in the day that, whatever his other faults, Trotsky on fascism was the better part of his writings and worth a look. Sadly the full collection of his writings on the topic was out of print when my com showed me it 20 years ago, and doesn't seem to have made it back into print since. All I have to go on then is the somewhat hack-job pamphlet "Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It". However, it does show a couple of basic problems. The first is specifically the use of the term "petty bourgeois"

So you can see the problem - we're not just talking about small employers here, we've got peasants, artisans and the dreaded labour aristocracy. Now whatever argument you may make that, formally at least, there is a coherence there with the orthodox marxist definition of the petit bourgeoisie as being in possession of their own means of production, it does not correspond to your usage:

Your definition of the middle figure here is clearly that of "small employer" - which has nothing to do with Trotsky's movable feast of the petit bourgeois. I suggest that this old French 19th century term comes with so much baggage, that it should be banned in English. Either use "small employer" or "small capitalist" (the direct translation) if you want to be precise. Trots use petty bourgeois precisely because it allows them to be as promiscuous (and unanalytical) with the category as Trotsky. This practice should be stamped out as fundamentally dishonest. And lets face it, if you wanted to start over with a fresh attempt to get a clear unambiguous working definition of class you wouldn't start with the man who said that the CP bureaucrat rulers of the USSR had to be a "caste" not a class, because, er... he said so, now would you?

I have to say anecdotally from my experience of over twenty years of fighting nazis, not in the abstract, but concretely, that in terms of sociological composition, a more working class bunch of people you couldn't hope to meet (or beat, by preference). Of shopkeepers, small business men and other classical "petit bourgeois" I found practically none. Similarly here in Ireland, despite a relative dearth of nazis (this side of the border, anyway), the nationalist politics of republicanism has a far more working class - in sociological composition - base than any of the left groups.

That people from the more empowered fractions of the class tend to rise to leadership positions in working class organisations, particularly politically reactionary ones, is not news. I have to say, until I've seen some proper historical research (which no doubt has probably already been done in Germany over the last 20 years - references welcome), Trotsky's blaming fascism on the petit bourgeoisie still seems to me a case of "well he would say that, wouldn't he". But I stand to be corrected if someone has wind of more solid evidence.

But I return to my original point, even according to Trotsky the intermediate layers can only side with us or with the bourgeoisie, they can't side against both of us on their own behalf. They can certainly do damage by being on the wrong side of the class war line, but they can't change the two-way nature of that war. There is no "three way fight".

I entertain the notion that in order to be classed as working class you must worship the ground Karl Pilkington walks on.

Yes. But what is specific to capitalism is the main compulsive force is the threat of poverty - which is an anonymous force, external to the relationship between employer and employee. The boss can always use the excuse that he or she is not forcing you to work for them, you are free to leave at any time if you don't like the conditions...

OK, the bit in bold is you signaling that you are aware of the issue, but... I still don't get it.

I'm happy to see the 2 forms as distinct, but I don't see how you jump from: recognising that form 2 is (as a rule, subject to occasional exceptions) subordinated to form 1 - in that if the technical specialist does not do what the CEO or other reps of owners/shareholders tell them too, they get sacked; to the "independent [...] basis for their class position".

How can it be independent if, when you get into conflict with ownership power, you lose every time? I know a good number of engineers, they're forever railing against the ignorance of the bosses overruling technically-informed decisions with brain-dead measures they think (in their ignorance) will be a short-cut to quicker profit. The monopolisers of technical production knowledge do not appear, on the face of it, to have independent power over the production process.

What am I missing?

The 'service' industries - by which I don't mean restaurants, which we can choose not to use. It is the managers of social relationships in education, housing, health and council facilities, and the choices they make over whether and how to serve either the ordinary people OR the interests of their political and financial leaders which is the crux of the matter.

Often these choices involve compromise - the 'we'd like to do better ideally but this is the best we can do within the system that exists' tendency for example. These people are middle class and are afraid that undermining our existing social/political structures will result in the breakdown of decency - what you might call 'mob rule'. Their best justification is probably fear of facism, their worst being fear of falling house prices, when they have worked so hard to get on the property ladder. They are people who continue to work in jobs that may prop up the system of exploitation but have basically good opinions of themselves, and often good intentions too. They are reformists.

There is another type of middle managers whose behaviour is more hateful. These are the ones who act from the standpoint ' we don't like poor people, they drink and swear and are ill-educated, and we want to break up their communities in case they get the urge to organise to overthrow the system that keeps us in comfortable jobs and lets our children go to better schools because we can afford to live in posh areas.' They do not have a social conscience and are motivated not so much by fear of mob rule but by fear of losing their own tiny power base within this corrupt system that they have allowed to corrupt their own lives. They are parasites and thrive on the divisions that they actively perpetuate. Collaborators, scum, worse than the most callous career criminals because they have no excuse for being the way they are. They are well educated after all. They treat us with more or less open contempt.

Then there are the merely stupid. They would follow anyone who offers an apparent 'quick fix' - whether it is the mismanagement of engineering and production for short-term profit, or the Lib-dems with the bright idea of holding the balance of power to bring electoral reform, or the Thatcherite 'right to buy' council homes. Perhaps stupidity is genuinely classless - it is undoubtedly dangerous.

This is true in terms of my own experience at least.

At the level of an individual project, decisions are generally made by people like product owners, user experience, designers etc. - often themselves imposed upon by management/owners. Those people may have been programmers in the past but the same can be said for the owner of a large construction firm that they used to be a brickie.

One exception is that commercial software projects are often based on open source software projects or standards and a subset of the engineers will work on both. Of course part of the reason people work on software/standards in their free time is because it offers the autonomy that generally can't be found with paid work - but to the extent that feeds back into commercial projects it can at a very macro level determine how things get done. A lot of the conflict within software projects is on a 'craft' level - that stupid management decisions, bad work organisation etc. lead to crappy code for example, and less around raw workload/pay etc.

Ironically a former radio producer at a major station. Professions don't get much much more "middle class".

Well, I can follow your arguments against the notion of a 'petit bourgeoisie' class, though I don't agree with you, and I think you're methodologically wrong to damn it by association with other ideas of Trotsky's (which should be a separate issue), but I'll let your critique stand as it is.

My problem is that no-one else has attempted to outline an understandable model of a two-, three- (different from mine), or four-class (or more) model of the central relationships of exploitation that form our socio-economic world, today.

We all know there are more than 'my' three classes, we all know that political power and the state have to be accounted for, but I suspect the real problem is elsewhere.

I'm not sure that everyone here actually agrees that economic exploitation is (or should be) at the heart of our explanations, but that political oppression should be.

I disagree with the latter. For me 'exploitation' explains 'power', and 'exploitation' is an political economic category, not 'being nasty' to someone, or a vague feeling of 'being dominated'.

Once again, I think we should be able to produce a simple guide to our fundamental idea of 'class', based on 'exploitation'.

The details and arguments (which of course are needed) can come later, once more workers have a grasp of this basic concept.

LBird, what I'd like to see you do is to derive your class categories from the processes of capitalist production. You say you put exploitation at the heart of your analysis. That seems fair enough, if a little bit of a moralistic starting point. But I don't see how it chimes in with a clear cut distinction between large and small employers. Surely the manner in which they exploit labour is identicle, and whether they engage in commodity production as well themselves is external to the exploitative relation with their employees. Wouldn't it be better to say the small employers you identify occuppy two class roles, one, buying the commodity labour power to extract suplus value and, two, engaging in independent commodity production without exploitative relationships, in the same way a one person enteprise might. I don't think it should be at all problematic for a single person to embody more than one 'class role' should it?

I think you are sympathetic to the idea that class is about social relations, not groups of individuals. But I don't see how this fits in with your model of class.

You'd like people to provide an alternative. I don't know if I have a good one, but how about something along the lines of identifying the various roles played in capitalist productive relations, and then if you want to map individuals onto that you can. I'd suggest these roles are something like:

-Sale labour power for capitalist production (here's were surplus value, and exploitation, comes from)
-Sale of labour power for capitalist organisation and enforcement (management, decision making, cops)
-Sale of commodities produced outside wage relation (people who own the comodities they produce, and sell them themselves)
-Capitalist enforcement outside wage relationship (the owner who manages his own enterprise for example, but not shareholders)
-Rentier* (rents out buildings, machines, intellectual property. This is why Bill Gates is rich)
-Owner of means of production, purchaser of two types of labour power.* (The traditional role of 'the capitalist': owns the means of production, makes profit off the surplus value. Can be shareholders, don't even need to know what they own to play the role.)

*The roles of rentier and owner of means of production can, interestingly, be played by non-humans as they are fundementally unproductive and legally defined. The state or things like charitable trusts can play these roles absolutely fine.

It'd be possible for an individual to occupy every single one of the roles all at once. There are a couple more to add once we expand into the sphere of reproduction too.

The above schema would only be a partial description of one aspect of class society, but hopefully, as far as it goes, it is fairly firmly grounded.

I know this crops up every once in a while but Jesus, it never ceases to be dull eh?

I think you know Red that there is are social roles tied in to a two class analysis as a given. Workers and managers are both dispossessed in the respect they've only their labour to sell but they still have vastly different interest. Class isn't meant to be a set in stone thing nor a magnifying glass for individuals. In the case of generating enough capital to invest elsewhere, I guess they no longer have just their labour to sell*. Ironically, for all the palava made on the idea of three classes, it's never clear how this makes things easier.

*though even people on fair wages can rent places out too.

I think you are correct that the differences between our two conceptions and that of the "co-ordinator class" folk does revolve around the relationship between domination and exploitation.

If I understand you, your position is that exploitation alone can explain everything and all talk of domination is irrelevant or confusionist.

The co-ordinator class people (trinitarians, like yourself) instead say that the economic power of exploitation and the political power of domination are both distinct and relevant and lead to two separate classes who represent the control over each.

My own (unitarian*) position I have already outlined above, but I'm going to go back on one particular aspect of it because I think it's important and perhaps not immediately obvious.

As an intro, let's take another Trotsky quote from that pamphlet:

Here the implication is clear and seemingly just common sense. It's a numbers game, there's just far too few capitalists relative to the mass of the proletariat for the former to "enforce its domination" without a mediating group - the petit bourgeoisie.

In all previous class societies this simple arithmetical logic would be correct. Where the economic relation of exploitation is united together with the political relation of dominance as one, then a tiny minoritarian exploiting class needs the support of a Janissary class, for enforcement purposes.

But, as I already proposed, capitalism is radically different from all pre-existing class societies in the disjunction between the political and economic relations of dominance and exploitation. Further that the dominant social power is no longer a class of humans - the capitalist class - but Capital itself**.

When Marx talks of the capitalist being "Capital's representative on earth" or being "merely capital personified" he is, imo, signalling this historical particularity. Here the real mediating class between the dominant social force (Capital) and the proletariat, is the capitalist class itself.

Even though this class is hugely minoritarian***, it does not need the aid of Janissaries to enforce its domination, because Capitalism has market forces to do this job.

The true situation is actually far worse than the picture of a middle class that acts as mediators, representing the interests of the capitalist class to the proletariat. That is, through the labour market, we are all potentially for hire to represent capital for each other. Even those of us who for cultural or moral reasons refuse the obviously purely repressive roles of cops, screws, soldiers, etc. and even the more ambiguous softer roles of social worker, probation officer, unemployment office inquisitor, teacher, etc, the ever-expanding share of the service sector in the workforce means more and more workers in "customer-facing" roles. And whosoever is employed to "face the customer", even through the dreaded call-centre, is to some degree representing capital to that person.

Of course I'm not siding with Thatcher in her ideological assertion that "We are all middle class now". But the extent to which the role of mediating between capital and proletarian is restricted to a clearly definable, small minoritarian sub-section of the workforce becomes ever less tenable in the era of real subsumption.

So, in summary, my position is that like the pareconnies I do accept that relations of exploitation and domination are distinct, but unlike them I see their very disjunction in capitalism gives rise to the apparently anonymous market forces that convey the relations of domination directly. Although not without the backup of our urban environment being increasingly transformed into a veritable open air panopticon of omnipresent CCTV, cops and security guards, as the other side of that coin.

* not literally, ovs

** This is always what makes me laugh about the "singularity" people. They look to the future possibility of human dominance being overcome by some new, artificial non-human lifeform that will rise above us and enslave us. The singularity already happened, it's called Capital. Duh! (although, technically it's not a lifeform, but you get my point).

*** To the degree that we restrict the capitalist class proper to those capitalists big enough to have a place at the table in their councils of war, whether at regional, state or international level. i.e. the class as able to politically compose itself for determining its course of action.

CEOs are often not part of the big capitalist class, and are themselves subordinate to the big owners. You do have some CEOs who are also big owners, like Larry Ellison at Oracle, but other CEOs who have been sacked when they got into disagreements with the big owners.

The point is that the big owners don't have the information or expertise to challenge or remand particular decisions in the running of the company or the managing of workers. At most they can deal with certain broad strategic financial questions.

Many engineers are merely skilled workers, not part of the bureaucratic class, in my opinion. When i worked in large engineering departments, there would be a "system engineer" or something like that who would advise management, decide which engineer should work on what, how the work was to be organized. That head engineer was a part of the bureaucratic class, but the others were not.

The bureaucratic class also includes state managers, head police & military officials, politicians and judges. The state is a bureaucratic machine that is not simply a direct expression of the big capitalists.

Especially in cases where the state acts as owner in which case managers act independently of the capitalist class.

I think it's a very important debate, this one. I find the whole question of the 'middle class' vexing and intractable at times, and my views on it are constantly shifting. I find a lot of Ocelot's arguments convincing, but I do think a crucial part of contemporary class composition is the crucial role that managerial labour, along with the diffusion of discipline throughout the class, play in imposing work and austerity (and of course reproducing class relations).

One theory that some people might be interested in is E O Wright's one of contradictory class locations - I see some are coming close to this analysis, perhaps, as if i recall right Wright is arguing there is not a separate class between capital and labour, but instead several murky and ill-defined contradictory class locations which merge at one end with the capitalist class and at the other end proletarians, but really cant be called classes in themselves. (Tho he is ambiguous on this, as he states that those in petty-bourgeois, superivsory and managerial roles are not part of the working-class).

I find Wright's work to be very sociological though, clunky and theoretically unclear, and his empirical estimations seem way off to me (he estimates that the working class proper is only about 40-50% if i recall right - studies i've seen using his categories come up with something close to syndicalistcat's estimations). Funnily enuf, Wright later distanced himself from this analysis precisely on the grounds that he was seeing things as a product of relations of domination, rather than exploitation, and this represented a shift away from Marxism into something else. Anarchism, perhaps?

I take your points that there is not a three-way struggle between capital, the managerial 'middle class' and labour, and the market is a disciplinary force, and that a managerial 'class' is very hard to define etc - in that so many of us in our jobs represent to some degree the face of capital, and also have some degree of control over other workers. (The latter point reminds me of the criticism voiced against the councilist - Castoriadis/SouB, Solidarity, Situationist - analysis of order-takers and order-givers, namely that so many workers are both order-takers and order-givers it is hard to see where one 'class' starts and the other ends.)

But, and i know i'm on shaky ground here as it's based on anecdotal evidence, how under this analysis do you account for the continued role and even expansion of a distinct managerial layer under neoliberal capital? By this i mean middle-management and above, who actually have quite a lot of everyday power over other workers (disciplinary power, ability to hire and fire, ability to affect wages if you're on performance pay, have the power to set what task you work on, make you speed up your work rate etc), not just a call centre worker or a low-level 'manager'/supervisor at McDonalds or someone watching a CCTV screen - all of whom don't really have much power over other proles, and except a fleeting and temporary power. I mean, isn't neoliberal ideology inextricably bound up with the whole rise of a weird managerialist/'human resources' (yuk) ideology and practice, one that has very real implications in the workplace, and for all the neoliberal talk of getting rid of bureaucracy, it has actually increased it and entrenched it (tho with current austerity measures some cuts have been made, however from my experience managerial layers seem to avoid cuts better than others).

As an aside, part of the problem is that under neoliberalism many proles get their jobs rebranded as managerial eg. shop/store retail workers become 'assistant shop managers' etc, while not having any real managerial power.

What i'm trying to get at is that the rise of managerialism is not just confined to the past, to the period of the mass worker/'first phase of real subsumption' (if you like) when mediation to the capital-labour relation played a crucial part. Neoliberal capital does need a distinct managerial layer to implement and enforce its attempts to speed up the work rate (eg. by constantly introducing different managerial techniques, even absurd ones like the seattle fish market fish slapping bollocks, to see what works and to divide and conquer other workers) while at the same time implementing cuts to resources. From capital's perspective, if you've got a stressed and over-worked workforce constantly under pressure to deliver more output with lesser resources - which the current working conditions i see around me - then surely you need not only diffuse control but also a specific managerial layer that is ideologicallly well-trained and well-heeled and internally coherent? (Human Resource Departments are pretty important in all this as well, they act as a sort of union for management).

So i'm setting aside the question of whether this layer is a class or not here - and its perfectably possible if you are an anarchist to see class as a product of both relations of domination and exploitation, it's more a problem for Marxists how to account for relations of domination - it just seems to me as i think about this that a distinct and coherent managerial layer has been crucial to the imposition of neoliberalism since the 1970s, not just impersonal or diffuse forces (though I haven't read anything on all this, my views are just based on my experiences in the workplace).

What I'm attempting to do is present a rather simple model which captures the essence of 'exploitation' within our capitalist society. The purpose is to allow workers newly coming to our Communist ideas a 'hook' into the way we see the real world, as opposed to bourgeois views of the market and individual consumption. It stresses classes based upon exploitation.

This is a bit like drawing a skeletal 'stick-man', to illustrate a human's shape. It's not meant to contain further, totally necessary to real life, details such as heart and lungs, brain, etc.

Once again, I'm driven to the conclusion that 'domination', and not 'exploitation', is at the kernal of Anarchist-inpired views of our society; on the contrary, for Marxists socio-economics provides the 'skeleton' upon which to hang the 'flesh' of reality.

As so, it's 'not a problem for Marxists how to account for relations of domination'; it's just that for Marxists an account of 'relations of domination' is based on an analytically pre-existing framework of exploitation.

If I'm wrong, according to others here, fair enough. But I think that they should in return produce an introductory framework similar to my three-class effort, for the benefit of those new to some very complex ideas.

I'm not sure, ocelot, how you can draw this conclusion from what I've written.

Exploitation provides the possibility of domination. Without exploitation, domination can't happen. Often, domination is how we experience the unseen mechanism of class exploitation. 'Theory determines what we observe', to quote Einstein.

Perhaps I'm just shit at explaining.

Is this what the problem is?

'Exploitation' is an economic category, not a 'moral' one. I'm using it in the sense employed by Marx, not day-to-day usage.

Because 'size matters', mate. There is a qualitative difference between owning 1,000,000 shares in a multi-national corporation, and owning a small business. Of course, both bourgeois and petit-bourgeois are engaged in exploitation (in an economic, 'theft' from workers sense), but the power that derives from quantity counts, I think.

The following has been hailed the definite solution to that problem. It also incorporates class struggle themes all in one fell swoop. I've been trying to say it's vanguardist but no one listens...

Your words make as much sense as your diagrams, mate.

Thanks for your help, anyway.