[Marxism] DISILLUSIONED WITH MARXMAILers!

[Haines Brown]

> Consideration the doctors and lawyers and others discussed as petty
> producers, I find it bizarre that anyone would object to grouping
> teachers there historically....
> 
> Now, of course, it's almost entirely bullshit.  Doctors, lawyers,
> teachers at all levels work for employers and get what amounts to a
> wage for their work.  And only those far removed from reality can
> assert that the wages are particularly high or that you're dealing
> with anything more than the same old exploitation of labor....
> 
> What anyone decides to call these groups weighs about as much as the
> numbers who support nuclear power...or why...

Of course, you might well argue that professionals are becoming
proletarianized, but at this point that trend seems only
incipient. University professors are beholden to their colleagues, and
decisive intervention by deans or presidents seems
exceptional. Lawyers and doctors seem still primarily involved in
private or associative practice. However, I don't know to what extent
staff doctors in hospitals have no private practice and are subject to
a chief.

Unless you are sure that in fact professionals on the whole really are
proletarianized, I'd leave aside quibbles such as these. For example,
to suggest that professional salaries are not really high is ambiguous
and not easily resolved. For example, I've known professionals who
find it hard to pay their bills, but on the other hand their standard
of living is higher than my own. A professor I gather might typically
make 70,000, but that strikes me as a very decent income indeed; it
seems far above the average working-class income in the US. But these
are secondary issues, as I'll suggest below.

You say that these professionals are paid what "amounts to a
wage". And you say their wages are not high as is supposed, and their
labor is indeed exploited. I believe you are on shaky ground on all
three points.

1. I presume a "wage" is what you are paid for your labor time (as an
   input factor in someone else's production, who then appropriates the
   resulting surplus value); while a "salary" is a contract for the
   sale of a good or service created by yourself (your outputs), and so
   in principle is an equitable exchange, but often cranked up to
   an artificially higher level by professional associations that
   restrict access to professions, etc. If you don't care for my
   definition, you need to offer an alternative, for I believe my own
   is fairly standard. As long as my definition holds, wage labor and
   salary are contradictory concepts, and so I can't figure out what
   your "amounts to" specifically means. I do admit there is a growing
   grey area in which a "salary" for ordinary workers is really still
   selling your time but subject to greater intensification of labor,
   and in which professionals are increasingly held accountable and
   subject to forces other than colleague pressure. This grey area may
   represent a trend, but not one that has yet become characteristic
   of the present state of affairs.

2. A problem is that what counts in a Marxist perspective is
   relative exploitation (the ratio of surplus value to wages), not
   absolute (how much money is made), and so one can't by definition
   transfer the notion of exploitation to the petite bourgeoisie or to
   capitalists unless they really are proletarianized (directly or
   implicitly paid for their time). Of course you are welcome to
   reject the Marxist definition, but on this list such a rejection
   must be made explicit and justified. The conventional empiricist
   definition that defines class in terms of income levels,
   life-styles, etc., is hopeless subjective (useful for social
   engineering, but not social science) and is alien to Marxism.

I sense that you have some sympathy for the petite bourgeoisie and
feel they should be brought into a new definition of working
class. Well, many do deserve some sympathy, although I could say the
same about some capitalists. However, sympathy based on how hard you
work for a given income is irrelevant here. While a class alliance
between a bourgeoisie and working class has often existed, such a
marriage of convenience is not the same as saying the petite
bourgeoisie are really part of the working class. From a Marxist
viewpoint, as long as they have a different relation of production,
they are a different class. While you might not care for the
conventional Marxist perspective, you are obliged to define and
justify any other that you might prefer.

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM