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January 07, 2011

A machine of class-differentiation

Ace argues there are some Victorian, nay, Marxist distinctions to be drawn in talk about an Information Elite. With a dramatic increase in the scale of urban bureaucries many could aspire to bourgeois social status by distinguishing themselves in manners and taste from proletarian labourers.

... that distinction has obviously persisted, even in America, with the ingrained sort of idea that a low-level associate producer making crap money and rote choices on an MSNBC daytime talk show was somehow "above" someone making real command decisions in his occupation, like a plumber. And this sort of idea is very important to that low-level producer at MSNBC, because by thinking this way, he puts himself in the league of doctors and engineers.

Doctors and engineers don't think the same way -- they don't think "Ah yes, I am in the same social class as that low-level line producer on MSNBC" -- but they are widely outnumbered by the more marginal members of that purported class, and those with the numbers make the rules.

Given Canada's chronic shortage in trades skills, plumbing is one of the few secure roads to financial security but try selling it as a future to students given the option of a BA in cultural studies. You can show students Monster or Workopolis and use "plumber" and "cultural studies" as search terms by way of comparison and it will not make the slightest difference. It is the same in the UK and, judging by Ace's commentary, the same in the United States. Our move to a "knowledge based economy" works for the owners of the means of cognition - intellectual property owners and mandarin regulators - but for most it has meant a move from work in stable industrial and engineering occupations to contract and part-time service industry work or permanent, multi-generational dependency. A stripe of utopian socialism might expect a growing sense of common feeling as globalization creates a levelling at the bottom that has transcended national boundaries. Yet, paradoxically, when social class becomes unmoored from its base in economic relations of power, markers of social class become more and not less important.

I have any number of disagreements with the Frankfurt School but they were right about one thing: the maintenance of social class is not only - not even primarily - about a relationship to the mode of production but about those factors Marx himself consigned to a dependent "superstructure".

Much more at the link.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at January 7, 2011 07:48 AM