From: Peter Kells

Mr. Martin

I have been reading a number of your posts to straightgoods over the last while and you keep referring to this 19th century concept of the "workers". I also see that you are listed as a communications consultant. Since I have never met anyone in my life who was not a "worker", I am not sure what you are communicating by use of this term. Are you suggesting the early industrial distinction between hard physical labour and the genteel classes or what? Is a "worker" limited to a member of a trade union. Are self-employed farmers "workers" - they are not trade union members, but any of the ones I know sure "work" hard enough. How about, self employed carpenters - they can be trade union members but they "own" the business and are therefore "management".

Or on the other hand, middle and upper management salaried employees of large corporations don't own the business but often work longer hours and are subject to more stress than anyone else in the corporation - by what definition are they not workers? Is a writer such as yourself a "worker"?

In fact, as a communications consultant, do you have a definition of "work". I find that the use of the term "workers" in your writing is patronizing and simplistic to the point of becoming an obstacle to any serious debate. What other slogans of the 19th century do you want to wrap yourself in? One of the biggest obstacles to the spread of progressive socialism in this country is the reliance of so many socialists on the old concepts and the old slogans. If we really want to solve the problems of the 21st century then we will have to "think outside the box". The use of old slogans like "workers" is just another padlock on creative thinking and frankly I am getting bored by it!

· His analysis is historical and theoretical, using structural approaches from theorists such as Marx, Weber, and more recent Marxists.

· Economic forms of organization of the economy are key to understanding social structures and the organization of society. He argues that positions within the mode of production, and forms of and relationship to exploitation provide a way of describing and understanding social class.

· He focusses on positions within the society – locations and places occupied as a result of the manner in which production is organized. His analysis begins with the positions and locations, rather than the individuals who fill these positions and locations. Further, these form the basis for the social relationships people have those in other positions and locations. These relationships are part of a totality and are reasonably stable over time, with conflicting social relationships leading to change.

· Individual consciousness is related to position within the class structure. That is, the attitudes and behaviour of individual has a connection to the location they occupy within the division of labour and the contradictory locations that exist in capitalism.

Wright draws attention to a number of processes taking place in capitalism:

a. Loss of control over the labour process by workers
b. Differentiation of the functions of capital
c. Development of complex hierarchies

For Wright, there are three primary classes within the capitalist system of organization, the capitalist class, the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. The three "contradictory" class locations are

. small employers
· managers and supervisors
· semi-autonomous employees.

The analysis of Wright is similar to that of Weber – the class situation of Weber becomes the class location of Wright. Wright attaches contradiction to this, so he blends the Marxian and Weberian approaches.

So, Michelle’s example would be….”semi-autonomous employees”. Here is a longer description of that sub-class…

Semi-Autonomous Employees

These are employees that, for the most part, do not supervise others but are likely to have some autonomy in the work situation because they are professionals of have special skills or technical training. Some of these are engineers, teachers, professors, programmers, and some health professionals. These are people in occupations that have a degree of autonomy in terms of decisions related to the job, and while subject to orders, are likely to fill positions that requires their own judgment concerning production and related decisions.
The semi-autonomy is described by Wright as being
certain degree of control over their immediate conditions of work, over their immediate labour process. In such instances, the labour process has not been completely proletarianized. .... they can still be viewed as occupying residual islands of petty-bourgeois relations of production within the capitalist mode of production itself. (Giddens and Held, p. 127).
While there are always attempts by employers and managers to limit the autonomy of the semi-autonomous employees, the technical expertise of the latter does give them a degree of bargaining power. In most cases, this expertise is required, and this has allowed these workers to maintain considerable flexibility in the workplace, and considerable control over the actual work process.

My notes are all borrowed from the Synopsis for a second year Sociology course:

Sociology 250 notes

[ 04 August 2004: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

Can I change my babble name to petty-bourgeois ???

[ 04 August 2004: Message edited by: JamesR ]

quote:

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However, aren't they "the dream", really?

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