Class - One Perspective

A criticism of the "third class" theory ( professional-technical-managerial class or PMC)) comes from Jean Cohen and Dick Howard who cite the work of Jurgen Habermas (Legitimation Crisis) and Clause Offe (Political Authority and Class Structures) . They concur that "all their analyses lead to the following consequence: the partial re-politicization from above (through state intervention) of both economic and socio-cultural life alters the fundamental presupposition on which Marx based his class theory: the separation of the state and civil society."

These thinkers are basing this political alteration on a change in modern capitalism, a change from liberal, laissez- faire, industrial revolution capitalism to "late" or "monopoly" capitalism. Because the state now intervenes in the economy a "political" dimension is opened which did not previously exist. In this scheme, "If the production and appropriation of surplus value and the determination of wages are increasingly dependent on relations of political power rather than market mechanism", classes give way to parties - "various groups struggling for the power to express their needs both within and outside institutions which provide for the public articulation of interests."

I am a believer in politics. But real "articulation of interests" is subverted by the hegemonic nature of capitalist ideology and the social relations it engenders. If we've learned nothing else it's that "democracy" where the system of production is excluded is a managed Spectacle, a commodity manufactured and marketed for mass consumption, like make-up or hamburgers. This then is the danger of identity politics. The black technical worker depending on state intervention (civil rights law, legislation, social spending, etc) to gain "equality" with the white manual laborer. He joins a Party which claims to represent his interests and assumes the state is somehow neutral and simply exists to express the will of the people.

A class is defined by it's oppositional, antagonistic stance to those who stand in it's quest for emancipation. All "contradictory class locations" will be resolved the day of a general strike. As Ken Kesey put it : 'You're either on the bus or off the bus."

We can only return to politics when class struggle has given control of the means of production to the society as a whole. Only then might such "institutions" actually be capable of articulating "public interests" and only then could a state find accomodation with civil society and justice, equality and democracy prevail.