The Ruling Class and the Coordinator Class

Heres a thread I found a bit of an eye opener on this Terry -
http://libcom.org/forums/thought/forgetting-the-bureacracy-as-a-class

I’m confused as to the apparent irrelevance of the question. I also don’t think I’m using the ‘individual classification’ model of class, I’m trying to use the ‘antagonistic social relationship’ model. A pretty large slice of the economy here is foreign direct investment from pretty big companies which are officered by people who are employed (and yes paid enough to also have a lot of shares - but that is not what their position derives from), one could even say they are exploited (they are producing surplus value - as Marx said of the capitalist when he plays a role in production). They are ’the bosses’, and also ’the rulers’ (eg I‘m sure the wheeling and dealing with Fianna Fail is done by them, not the most significant shareholders).
Share holding can be far more diffuse. For sure they are ‘agents of capital accumulation‘, constrained by the ‘needs of capital’ in what policy they enact, but isn’t what those needs are in any particular situation a matter of interpretation and doesn’t there have to be someone doing that interpretation?

Seeing as we want to build a social movement based on class (that is the class in itself becoming the class for itself and the class for itself) isn’t this a question of import to us, we want a more widespread subjective identification as working class (which isn’t an automatic facet of the class struggle) which is hard to see coming via a definition of working class which would, it seems to me at this moment in time, include ’the bosses’ and ’the rulers’.

It's inevitable.

Doesn't follow. The immediate producers can be exploited in a variety of ways, through a variety of structures or "modes of production." The basis of the coordinator class isn't ownership and accumulation of capital, and expansion of that capital through purchase of factors of production on markets and then sale of commodities on markets.

I think there are two axes of exploitation of labor within capitalism as it develops. There is the division between wages and profit, but there is also a division in power over the labor process. The emergence of the coordinator class with the corporate form of capitalism at the end of the 19th century meant that the old artisanal methods of production were broken up, and new industries emerged organized on a different basis. instead of the technology being based on craft tradition and in the heads of skilled workers, there were more elaborate hierarchies and huge expansion of professional occupations like engineers, lawyers, accountants. Knowledge and discretion that formerly would have developed in the working class was separated off into the coordinator class, as a means of gaining greater control over the labor process. so the working class end up being ripped off in two ways. the exploitation by the coordinator class is only partly in their higher salaries, but also in their accumulation of control.

actually there have been numerous studies that show that sometimes the coordinator class will make decisions about technical or organizational methods in production that are less efficient, and maybe even generate less profit, because it will entrench their power viz a vis labor.

and your argument here begs the question because you assume as a premise Marx's two-class labor/capital model. but whether that model is accurate is the very question in dispute.

strictly speaking, captialists are not defined by their "ownership" of capital in Marx's theory. that's because property law is part of the "superstructure." it's rather the "underlying" power relationship that is the class relation, the power relation that is legally codified in property ownership.

capital ownership is a structural feature of society that gives massive power advantage in social production, and thus is what we call a "class" relation, as a relation of relative monopolization over ownership of means of production. similarly the coordinator class is defined by a relative monpolization over empowering tasks in the hierarchies governing social production.

all class boundary lines are fuzzy. it's therefore no refutation of a class theory to point to the existence of people on the boundary line, such as assistant managers with little power. there are also those who own their own means of production but are quite subordinate to some company, such as a truck owne-operator, and there are other self-employed workers with no employees, such as someone who owns a stretch limo and drives it for a living. Their way of life may be no different than somene who works as an employee.

Because they own means of production there is always the possibility they could expand their ownership and take on employees and become a capitalist, but as a self-employed worker/owner they're in an ambiguous position. And if you regard the small business class as a different class than the plutocracy, the big capitalists, how much capital exactly determines whether you're in one rather than the other? I think i'd draw the boundary on whether they have to manage workers themselves versus having layers of managers between themselves and the immediate producers. but it's not a sharp boundary line.

They will do so in expectation of greater proit later. but the coordinators do not accumulate the profit. what they accumulate is power. there have also been studies that show that having the cushier jobs and the greater control in production is associated with living longer, having less stress, less chronic ailments that are signs of stress, etc. the coordinator class has its characteristic benefit or gain from its position and this is not the same as the capitalists.

the capitalists had to cede a realm of power to the coordinator class because (1) their ventures became too big for them to manage the production process, and (2) the system required increasing state intervention in various ways, and the hierarchies of the state are also peopled with the cadres of the coordinator class.

this is why state socialism tends to be a coordinatorist ideology, it empowers the coordinators.

the coordinator class also tends to have a different ideology to justify its position: meritocracy. systems of credentials, university degrees etc are supposed to be indications of greater aptitude and thus justification for them being the ones to make the decisions.

the coordinator class also does not pass on its position via inheritance of property. they tend to live in exclusive areas and focus, nowadays rather obsessively, at least in the USA, on education for their children. it's thru the more unreliable process of education, social cohorts and networking that they have a higher probability of ending in an elite class position, not actual inheritance of money-capital or capital holdings.

overeeing of capital accumulation is divided between the higher level strategic decsion making about allocation of capital to ventures, profit making strategies, versus overseeing the actual labor of production and management of the ventures, and of the state.

profit-making is an external constraint on the coordinators, not internal to their class situation.

SyndicalistCat (and everyone else): could you reply to my post (#2)? I'm curious to hear your opinions on it.

I fundementally disagree with this. The working class cannot be exploited 'in a variety of ways', it can only be exploited in one way, the expropriation of its surplus labour. The variety of legal forms of ownership are not different 'modes of production', they are the same 'mode of production', capitalism. The existence of 'the co-ordinator class' is the thing under question, so assuming its existence and then positing its basis outside of the economic basis of society is a non-starter as far as I'm concerned; if it's not an economic class, it's not a class at all; it's merely a form of organisation of capitalism.

Again, assuming the existence of the co-ordinator class seems an odd way of arguing for its existence. As to the 'division in power over the labour process', I think that's a red herring. Was capitalism before the end of artisanal production not 'really' capitalism then? Or is it capitalism now that isn't 'really' capitalism? Or, conversely, was it all capitalism, just organised in different (non-essential) forms?

Apart from referring to 'the co-ordinator class' again, I don't have much of a problem with this; I would argue that the 'basis' of the new industries wasn't different, however, being based on the exploitation of the working class, but the form, the organisational method, was different. Certainly, capitalism was able, through increasing specialisation of labour and increasing mangerial control, to excercise more control over the labour process, but this doesn't institute new class relations, merely tightens and re-organises the hold that the bourgeoisie already possesses. Again, it's all capitalism, just organised in different forms.

Yet again with the co-ordinator class already. It's not a class, it's a form of organisation of the bourgeoisie. At no point can I see in your posts any demonstration of the existence of a 'new class'.

And again...

Hmm, I thought the question in dispute was the existence of a 'co-ordinator class' that you have assumed exists no less than five times up to now, but whose existence you've as yet failed to demonstrate.

I referred to the basis of capitalism as being in the exploitation of the proletariat, of the working class, the addition of surplus value through collective labour, and in economic power giving legal rights; not in 'ownership of capital' - that's a strawman on your part, I think.

I thought I'd made it clear (perhaps I didn't) when I said "... a particular legal form of property, as state-owned industries in the Soviet Union or private companies in Europe or the US" that I was treating actual formal 'ownership' as a secondary, superstructural factor. I apologise if this wasn't as clear as I thought.

Again, constantly repeating its name can't summon it into existence if it doesn't exist.

So, now 'ownership' is the deciding factor after all?

...but it doesn't stand in a unique relationship to the means of production. Yet again, it's not a class, it's a superstructural method of organisation.

which isn't what you're doing. I'm positing the existence of people on the boundary line. You're positing the existence of a new class, and therefore two more boundary lines, in order to move all those at the boundary into into one catch all category, which you persist on defining as a class with the special characteristic that the new class does not stand in a unique relationship to the means of production, therefore it is a class like no other; or in the opinion of those who believe that classes must have a unique relationship to the means of production, not a class at all (ie it's only a 'class' because you have changed the meaning of the word 'class' to fit your theory).

I'm not sure of the relevance of these examples to either you theory or mine. A self-employed truck driver is, in the end, part of the petty-bourgeoisie. He or she may be treated no differently from an employee, but so what? I could spit at a Company Director, that wouldn't make him part of the underclass.

I also don't think that the difference between the petty-bourgeoisie and the 'haut'-bourgeoisie is one of 'how much capital', that's another strawman. It's about relationship to the means of production. Someone who owns a machine that they use themself - like the lorry-driver - is petty bourgeois; someone who owns 200 aircraft but has no pilot's licence (or maybe only flies balloons) is bourgeois. The owner of a fleet of lorries, who sometimes drives one but has 10 employees who also drive them, is bourgeois, though they may still think of themself as petty-bourgeois.

If they are wage labourers for capitalists, then they are working class. If they own their own means of production, which they hire out to capitalists, they are petty-bourgeois; if they own means of production, which they use to derive added (surplus) value from the working class, they are bourgeois.

Agreed, boundaries are places where things get messy, but even so.

What's the problem? Again and again, I fail to see the necessity to 1 - change the nature of 'class' in order to fit in a new ctegory, the 'co-ordinator class', and 2 - explain all managerial functions in terms of it. Some managers are bourgeois; some managers are in fact workers. Their consciousness is another matter, but let's have that argument on a different thread...

it seems to me that slothjabber doesn't understand how theory works. a theory is a set of hypotheses. we come up with hypotheses to explain what we observe. hypotheses posit causal structures in the world as part of an explanation. you can't "prove" hypotheses. it's a question of whether they provide the best available explanation of what we observe. trying to shoehorn the class structure of mature capitalism into Marx's 19th century box ends up not accounting for or predicting reality very well. when we posit a class structure, this is a causal hypothesis. we're supposing there is a certain structural relationship, a power relationship, between people based in social production. whether we are warranted in accepting a particular class conception depends on how well it explains the facts that we observe.

having no theory of the coordinator class is one of the things that makes it likelier that a revolution would end up generating a coordinatorist mode of production. if it's only ownership of means of production that generates class division, then why wouldn't change in ownership be sufficient to liberate the working class? but we know from the entire history of revolution in the 20th century that this was not the case.

of course those who have more "human capital" (expertise, university degrees, skills, etc) may not like a theory that proposes that we ensure not only an end to monopolization of ownership of means of production but monopolization of the more empowering work.

Terry:

It's not necessary to accept participatory economics to agree with the three-class analysis of mature capitalism. Workers Solidarity Alliance agrees with the three-class analysis but in terms of its vision for a post-capitalst society WSA is neutral as between participatory economics and more traditional conceptions of libertarian communism, but accepts what they share in common.

The coordinator class isn't defined by any occupational category. Some lawyers or engineers may be part of it, some not. It depends on their power/role in social production. I work in the computer industry. There are usually high level engineers, sometimes called system architects, who usually work very closely with management, help decide how the work is to be split up, what the product will look like, who should be doing what. And then there are programmers whose work is often Taylorized, coding only some small piece. The system architect is part of the coordinator class but the programmers are in a more ambiguous area, more like Erik Olin Wright's "contradictory class location."

A lawyer as such is not a member of the petit bourgeoisie. That's because they own no capital separate from themselves that they could sell off. To the degree they have acquired things like pieces of property, which lawyers sometimes do, then they become petit bourgeois, but that is as a property owner, not as a lawyer. The father of a friend of mine in college owned a factory in south-central Los Angeles that employed maybe 50 workers salvaging used auto parts. When he retired, he could sell that factory because it had an exchange value, capital that could be converted into money-capital, independent of him. He was a small capitalist, that is, a member of the petit bourgeoisie.

But with a law firm typically the "value" of the firm lies in the expertise and connections of the lawyers. Their economic power is coordinator power even if they have organized themselves formally into a separate firm. The legal difference between having a separate firm or being employed by a corporation doesn't change their class position. It's the basis of their power in social production that determines that.

However, in large law firms nowadays often young lawyers out of law school are put to work in a highly taylorized sort of work environment where they don't do any trial work but are focused narrowly on things like researching case law. They don't have the traditional autonomy of lawyers. These taylorized law workers are analogous to the taylorized engineers i referred to above, that is, they are in a "contradictory class location" which is typical of the lower-level professional groups in mature capitalism.

The reason that occupational titles don't tell us class position is because the logic of capitalism continually works to destroy the autonomy of formerly skilled, artisanal occupations. Groups are continually in the position of being pushed down into the proletariat. For example, there is a current struggle going on in the USA among school teachers. There are capitalist consultancies that sell packaged curricula and job design schemes to school boards, to facilitiate the school board gaining greater control over the content of education and the work of teachers. Nothing is left to the discretion of the teachers. Their traditional professional autonomy is stripped away. This is another example of a process of proletarianization.

Now, if we go back to the 18th and 19th centuries, we're talking about the period when capitalism was still working on the basis of a somewhat pre-capitalist technological level or work organization. Historically for thousands of years the artisan and farmer owned the technology, they had it in their heads. The technical methods of production were passed down thru craft tradition and things like apprenticeship. Early capitalism simply made use of this technical level, this pre-existing skills among the population. In the 18th century the low level of direct intervention or control of the work process was manifest in the putting out system for example. In that case the merchant capitalists would advance the materials to the artisans who would work in their cottages or workshops. from a capitalist point of view this had the disadvantage they couldn't control how hard or how long the artisan worked, nor could they keep a keen eye on the materials. and artisans would steal or make use of scraps of materials for their own production to augment their income. the factory system enabled the capitalists to control materials, and how hard and long people work. that was an early move in the efforts for increasing control.

but it wasn't til the end of the 19th century that there was the transition from the "merely formal domination of capital" to the "real domination of capital." this is when capital began to break up the unity of conception and autonomous discretion, on the one hand, and the physical labor, on the other other, which is characteristic of the artisanal form of labor, which had been inherited from before capitalism.

but in breaking the conceptual, design, decision-making tasks from physical labor and putting them into two different groups of people, capital's logic of intensifying control over the production process splits apart the workforce into two separate classes, a class that executes commands, that carries out the physical tasks, and a class that controls the design and decision-making tasks for the labor process, the managing of the ventures and the managing of the state.

to posit a separate class of controllers of social production, who can still have their power over the working class if private ownership is done away with, fits the empirical facts better than the 19th century two-class labor/capital model, and does a better job of accounting for what the mode of production was that existed in the so-called "Communist" countries.

terry:

within capitalism the coordinator class is subordinate to capital, yes.

and the theory of the coordinator class is not based on any notion of class as income stratification. it is based on the idea that class is a structure of power in social production, and thus derives from the tradition of radical political economy.

Hmm, I thought that was what I said... what did you think I said?

Ok Sollers there are three major problems with this (apart from the misrepresentation that people are talking about class and sub-classes and sub-sub-classes when the discussion partly revolves around a three main class model versus a two main class model).

(One) It is analytically meaningless, I skip the bus queue on the way to work I’m exerting power and so I’m up the scale, on the bus the driver has power so I’m down the scale, I work in a dole office so I have authority over others, up the scale, when I’m mugged by a doler after work I’m down the scale again. (note this is for explanatory purposes I don’t work in a dole office).

(Two) Not all authority should be seen as problematic at all.

(Three) Most fundamentally it has no relationship to what we mean by class. Class is an antagonistic social relationship rooted in production, which relates to a theory of contentious collective action (we see it as based on class) and a theory of agency (we see it that the working class has the power to bring about socialism). It is not a measurement of hierarchy or authority, but is a theory about different social groups who we see as being engaged in conflict, inherently, a conflict at its most apparent in the heart of the system (the workplace), but also found elsewhere, and which, we believe, has the capacity to radically transform society and bring about socialism, because the very basis of the existing society is the exploitation of labour. At times of highpoints in this conflict the working class starts to move from being the ‘class in itself’ (basically just a category of people) to the ‘class in itself becoming the class for itself’ and consciousness and movements expressing this antagonism and looking at going beyond the existing state of affairs are developed, the politics you find on this site are derived from these times. I’m asking what definition of class is useful in that context of conflict. Basically the centrality of class is not that it is a bad thing but that it is a bad thing that can end bad things.

Forgive me if I’m wrong here, slothjabber, but doesn’t that make Terry Nolan, deputy managing director of Shell Exploration and Production Ireland, hired employee of a multi-national company, the section of which he part runs he doesn’t own, and who seems to have worked his way up the ranks, working class?

Here are some links on Mr Nolan:
http://www.shell.com/home/content/ie-en/exploration_and_production/eeil/news/News_Archive_2006/sepil_20060602.html

http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2006/12/20/article-by-terry-nolan-deputy-managing-director-shell-ireland-a-lot-done-on-corrib-but-a-lot-more-to-do/

Doesn’t that seem to, therefore, lack precision as an analytical tool, and perhaps to be not quite politically useful. I don’t think he is a borderline aberration. Like the nearest big employers to where I’m sitting are big multi-national corporations whose sections and sub-sections are run by Terry Nolans, who seem more widespread than your Tony O’Reilly type.
See: http://www.rte.ie/business/2007/0515/Independent.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_O'Reilly

OK this is what I disagree with in the ‘coordinator class’ theory, it defines working class around deskilling, routine work, closeness of supervision, with those parts of the workforce not fitting into that becoming part of ‘intermediate strata’ with a contradictory class position, or lower level professionals, or the ’coordinator class’, but skilled labour has always existed as part of the working class, and still does, why should a white collar position be someways outside of that (or in a process of becoming proletarian), but seemingly not all the skilled labour involved in construction - carpenters, block layers, steel fitters, plasterers, painters, roofers. Some of which, like block layers, can also be in supervisory positions, albeit over few people.

You also mention university, but according to figures from 1989 only 12% of managers in Britain had attended university, whereas now at the current rate of growth I’m told that soon 50% of school leavers will have, while in the republic as many people are now post-graduate students as were students at all 20 years ago. This is a long long time after fordism, and given the numbers I wouldn’t say this reflects a process of deskilling (unless we wanted to postulate this as occurring on an international basis).

“Proletarianize” is a term which was applied to the dispossession of peasants and artisans and their turning into wage labourers, irrespective of skill, Braverman misuses it in ‘Labour and Monopoly Capital’ I think.

In addition how does this relate to our managing and deputy managing director. For sure I can see that if thousands and thousands of workers go through a process of deskilling you will need a smaller workforce of engineers to make up for the soon to be lost knowledge (or as part of a process of making that knowledge into more of a commodity). However your managing director and the like do not take over part of the role of skilled labour now appropriated, they take over part of the role of the capitalist entrepreneur in running the company, and so their existence must be related not to deskilling but to the size of many modern companies, and the existence of ’joint stock companies’ (or state run industries).
In the case of Shell Exploration and Production Ireland, they came into being in 2001through taking over a much smaller entrepreneur run ’Enterprise Energy Ireland’ and their direct workforce, excepting the employees of sub-contractors, appears to veer towards the skilled and professional end of things.

Anyways can you point me in the direction of some writings on this either from the WSA or from the Parecon lot or from anyone else, specifically relating to the ’coordinator class’ theory that is.

Knightrose, can you define control in this sense?

Well actually I find it a pain in the ass to be trawling through threads that are hoping from one subject to the other, in this case from the class structure of the contemporary West to the Soviet Union. It isn't the primary issue, the primary issue is the de-coupling of ownership and control in today's major companies (or state run industries for that matter). I would read a thread about the 'theory of the coordinator class in relation to the Soviet Union' but if half the posts were about the software industry in California it would make reading it, following the arguments, more difficult and the whole show more convoluted.

I'm certainly having trouble with the way your theory works, syndicalistcat.

Allow me to precis my understanding, then you can tell me where I'm getting it wrong.

1 - capitalism is only capitalism when owners are their own managers (say, between Arkwright opening his first mill, and opening his second, when he would be forced to hire a manager).

2 - after this, capitalism becomes something else.

3 - therefore, capitalism not only doesn't exist, it hasn't for a long time.

4 - ownership both is and isn't the determinant of class position.

5 - the Soviet Union wasn't capitalist.

6 - it was socialist.

7 - this is hardly surprising as Stalinism is the ideology of the managers.

8 - except when they're university educated meritocrats.

9 - anyone who tells another person what to do is part of the same class, eg a team-leader and a CEO.

10 - whereas a CEO is not in the same class as the sole owner of a company who excercises no direct management functions.

Whereas I would argue that having a theory of the co-ordinator class makes it more likely that the revolution would never happen.

OK, for the third time, formal ownership is a superstructural, legal formation. I did not refer in my first post to ownership as the determining criterion, I referred to exploitation of the working class which may take place under a variety of legal forms. As we know from the entire history of revolution in the C20th, the continued exploitation of the working class by the state reproduces capitalism, not, as you seem to think, socialism. Those who derive their wealth from the expropration of the working class's labour are bourgeois; those who are exploited are workers. Nothing I have seen in your arguments has improved on that definition.

More to follow...

So from your point of view then slothjabber it is both control of capital and 'salaries' that are derived from surplus value, correct?

don't know any good writings, though i think Albert's 'parecon' book where he advocates a 3-class co-ordinator theory is online at znet

controllers do have someone above them, sometimes. i think what's at issue here is the ontological inversion whereby capital, an object, becomes a subject in its own right. the shareholder model of ownership is a means of doing this, as the concrete individual wills of individual bourgeois only find commonality once abstracted - in the need for accumulation, thus expressing the 'will' of capital itself. to this extent, owners to are alienated by the 'self' expansion of capital, most likely appearing to them as 'market forces.' so, i don't think the fact a controller may have a real human person above them is all that significant in inter-class terms (maybe intra-class, as knightrose says).

in terms of defining control, well i guess there's pretty much a spectrum from the completely rote work of the factory janitor through to the top-level strategy of the board. plenty of people occupy positions somewhere in the middle with tendencies pulling in either direction - i know a pizza hut 'manager' with hire and fire powers on £6.50/hr who struggles to pay the rent. indeed toyotism is based on minimising struggle by extending such contradictory positions to a core of workers. what with 'team leaders' and the like there are many who have some control of capital (i.e. labour-power) who may well be on our side of the barricades; i'm not trying to draw a definitive line down the middle somewhere but establish that the social relation is bipolar.

It is a bit different though Knightrose, as if you are CEO and the major shareholder, or the company isn't quoted on the stock market and is owner run, the boss has a degree of control above that of a managing director of a sub-section of a major company, which is why I'm going for primary control or a major part of the control. That may seem a bit pedantic, but I want it totally clear in my head.

The question for me after all started out with:

....in the context of arguments against the 'new middle class' theory.