THE NEW CLASS: DOES IT EXIST? : SKEPTICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT A FASHIONABLE THEORY
Wrong, Dennis
I want to argue three propositions about the social phenomenon called the "new class": (1) it may be a class, but it is not new; (2) it may be new, but it is not a class; (3) it may be both new...
...The evidence is scarcely overwhelming...
...In its recent incarnation the very term "new class" was borrowed from political dissidents in the Communist world, notably from Milovan Djilas's courageous 1957 book with that title...
...492 business and the bourgeois ethos...
...In the past few decades, the ranks of doctors, lawyers, professors, public and private administrators, accountants, journalists (including those using the new nonprint media), applied scientists and technicians, social workers, nurses, psychotherapists, artists and entertainers have all swelled considerably...
...If I may quote another older authority, completely free of any conservative taint, Hans 18 Gouldner, The Future of the Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, p. 31...
...574-87...
...and "intellectuals" who are salaried professionals in the nonprofit sector.' The latter "new class" is, of course, the bete noire of the neoconservatives...
...What has been called a "new class" does correspond to a real social phenomenon...
...By contrast, the sudden elimination of the country's leading craftsmen, scientists, and artists would transform the nation into a "lifeless corpse" that would require at least a generation to revive...
...The locus classicus was Nietzsche's attack on the "educated philistines...
...For the neoconservatives, the rejection of traditional bourgeois values is part of a political attack that a new class has launched on capitalism...
...I have avoided such blatant self-contradiction only by conditionally accepting one claim while rejecting the next...
...MANY OF THE OCCUPATIONS of the new class have a long history antedating the rise of capitalism...
...Dissent, Fall 1979, p. 447...
...In addition, Hacker and Bell are, not by coincidence, among the few contributors who cannot be classified as neoconservatives...
...Have not these attitudes become increasingly hostile toward ' Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), p. 266...
...Nor are they Old Believers, whether of the left or the right, convinced that the traditional division between owners and workers remains the fulcrum of the class structure of capitalism...
...In short the relative or absolute autonomy of corporations vis-a-vis a dominant propertied class—their relation to the state raises questions of a different order—does not mean that we live in a postcapitalist society...
...Alvin Gouldner, on the other hand, adduces precisely a common culture, which he calls the "Culture of Critical Discourse," to support his conception of intellectuals, both East and West, as a true new class...
...The public/ private distinction, however, "brings the state back in" (in Theda Skocpol's phrase) with a vengeance and the state was, of course, always there when the new class concept was applied to Communist societies...
...Neoconservatives, on the other hand, have attributed dark "statist" aspirations to the educated but propertyless members of the new class whom they see as their political adversaries...
...89-100...
...B. Bruce-Briggs, "An Introduction to the Idea of the New Class," in Bruce-Briggs, ed., The New Class?, pp...
...New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), pp...
...New York Review of Books, May I, 1975, pp...
...see also Bazelon, "How Now 'The New Class,' ? " 496 is especially true of Marxists eager to grant at least a "relative autonomy" to the state as they abandon the economic reductionism of traditional Marxism...
...16-17...
...He made them seem more weighty and autonomous even than the Leninist or Gramscian conception of intellectuals as bearers of doctrinal truth seeking attachment to a larger plebeian class that under their guidance would be capable of becoming a force for revolutionary change...
...495 minable debate over the significance of the separation of ownership from management under corporate enterprise...
...The interests and political outlook of this class are evidently more diverse and ambiguous than the American neoconservatives suggest...
...Capitalism may still require rationality and work discipline but, Lasch and Bell notwithstanding, I see no reason why someone cannot work hard all day at the office or laboratory and go to an orgy in the evening...
...Bell identifies six distinct groups: intellectuals, mainly scientists and scholars...
...A few years later, however, responding to the beginnings of the New Left, Mills rejected the "labor metaphysic" of "Victorian Marxism" and proclaimed "the intellectuals" (although he had contemptuously titled the chapter on them in White Collar "Brains, Inc...
...Not only do they never mention its namesake and possible counterpart in the Communist world...
...see also Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980), pp...
...How many men can Norman Mailer or Walter Cronkite set in motion when he picks up the telephone compared to Harold Geneen or to What's-His-Name at the top of IBM...
...Classes, in other words, are always partly ideological constructs, although there are good grounds for thinking that this is even more the case today than in the past...
...Nietzsche, like Dean Acheson and my maternal grandfather, was the son of a Protestant minister...
...The Protestant Ethic, whatever they may have made of it, was a living reality to all of them...
...1° As indicated by Nathan Glazer, "Lawyers and the New Class," in Bruce-Briggs, ed., The New Class?, pp...
...The interests of the two groups converged in abolishing exclusionary privileges, territorial monopolies, and rigid social hierarchies unrelated to function...
...Several of them—doctors, lawyers, journalists, some kinds of teachers, municipal officials—have always been regarded as representative members of the bourgeoisie, which never consisted solely of merchants, tradesmen, and manufacturers...
...Dean Acheson, for example, a friend of my family who was always described as "aristocratic" in bearing, was of Anglo-Canadian origin through both parents...
...Hacker, "Two 'New Classes' or None...
...7 See Dennis Wrong, "A Note on Marx and Weber in Gouldner's Thought," Theory and Society 11 (1982), pp...
...HAVE CREDENTIALS and the declining importance of private property produced a genuine new class rather than a congerie of diverse interest groups...
...I shall touch briefly on them in closing, drawing on the contributions to the Bruce-Briggs symposium by both Andrew Hacker and Daniel Bell...
...this "genteel tradition" provided one basis for the Progressive movement early in the century...
...Evoking Marxist echoes, he even suggests that it is a "universal class" supplanting the proletariat, albeit a "flawed" one...
...Inevitably, many of the issues these surveys touched upon are less salient today...
...One may doubt whether the educated and relatively affluent remain as indifferent to concerns of economic growth and the standard of living in general...
...9 It scarcely makes sense to draw, with the neoconservatives, a class line between those employed by the public or nonprofit sector and those working in the private or profit sector when so many members even of the old professions —for instance, law"—move back and forth between the two sectors...
...Today neoconservative new class theorists lump owners and managers together as the embattled old capitalist class under challenge by a "new class" of the intelligentsia...
...they also favored busing and affirmative action to achieve racial integration, and less defense spending...
...The collectivity that wields power is the organizational structure itself in which the managers hold high positions, not a ruling class that uses and controls this structure in the service of its interests...
...Put so bluntly, these propositions are reminiscent of the Jewish joke Freud told to illustrate the psychic mechanism of rationalization...
...Since the New Left failed to last very long, Mills's intellectuals were transmogrified or, as it were, "Marxified" into a new class, both by former New Leftists anxious to find a more solid social base for a radical politics than the student movement and by the neoconservatives who were seeking to identify a collective agent responsible for all the changes they deplored in contemporary politics and culture...
...also in "Cutting Classes," New York Review of Books, March 4, 1976, pp...
...And therein lies the major relevance of this saga to my subject...
...There are even structural preconditions for the changes reflected in the new lifestyle differences, although hedonistic self-fulfillment and tolerance of sexual variety are continuous with the values of sexual therapists and reformers, bohemian countercultures, and the onetime literary avant-garde dating back at least to the late 19th century and the Edwardian era...
...On the other hand, writers who have taken a more approving view of the latter fail to distinguish sharply between managers and the professional/ scientific intelligentsia, though separating both from old-style owners...
...Asked by a neighbor to return a borrowed pot, the borrower replied, "First, it was badly cracked when you lent it to me...
...my paternal grandfather was himself a minister before becoming a professor of history...
...Andrew Hacker, who with Gouldner has made by far the most sensible case for the importance of the trend toward managerialism under capitalism, bluntly affirms that "Mills's term, 'elite,' is clearly preferable to 'class,' since it refers to individuals only for as long as they remain the occupants of particular institutional positions...
...The bureaucratization of capitalism severs the linkage between productive property and family stability that took the form of permanent marriage and fixed rules of descent and inheritance.' The erosion of puritanism and Victorian morality fits in well with the way credentialism has replaced both accumulation and hereditary transmission of private property as the basis of class position...
...But until fairly recently it was regarded as part of the overall growth of what has been variously called "the new middle classes," "new intermediate groups," the "salariat," and "white-collar" or "black-coated" workers...
...This, of course, was the source of Mills's appeal to the early New Left, which then as later was primarily a student movement...
...In the 1960s, strands of the antibourgeois "adversary culture" were taken up by young people and then commercially exploited...
...54-63...
...Since the beginning of the 20th century, the increase of this stratum has been seen as a challenge to traditional Marxist views of the class structure under capitalism and its future course of development, as in the debate over revisionism in the German Social Democratic party before the First World War and the later writings of neo- or post-Marxist German sociologists in the 1920s...
...In White Collar, he devoted separate chapters to managers, the old professions, and intellectuals, locating these groups at the top of a "new middle class" that did not "make up one single compact stratum" but formed "a new pyramid within the old pyramid of society at large rather than a horizontal layer...
...Yet his view of intellectuals elevated them into more weighty and politically autonomous actors than the once fashionable view of them as "alienated" pure spirits eternally criticizing from the sidelines...
...Although I shall concentrate on the democratic capitalist societies, those groups described as a new class in both the capitalist and the Communist worlds do have common features...
...Is It a Class...
...s Frank Parkin, "System Contradiction and Political Transformation," in Anthony Giddens and David Held, editors, Classes, Power, and Conflict (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), pp...
...70-79...
...The parochially American ideological preoccupations of the neoconservatives are revealed by their failure to look beyond the borders of the United States when they employ the new class concept...
...For one thing, the differences are not very great except on the moral or "life-style" issues and, to a lesser extent, on environmentalism and economic growth...
...Yet much the same outlook prevailed among the learned professions in New England and the Northeast in general...
...It was, however, a transitory moment and recent interpreters scarcely agree on its significance...
...appliers and transmitters of knowledge organized in the old and new professions, and managers and bureaucrats, or the old version of the new class.' These groups not only differ, but each group is internally differentiated...
...Bourgeois values themselves just as much as antibourgeois values can be turned against capitalism or neocapitalism, as Lasch's example demonstrates...
...Daniel Bell, The Coining of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp...
...It has never made sense to treat the learned occupations as mere adjuncts to a ruling capitalist class...
...as the new "historic agency of change" in the West...
...Therefore he did not denominate the intellectuals as a class, just as he chose for well-considered reasons to call the dominant groups in American society a "power elite" rather than a "ruling class...
...Burnham himself has pungently remarked: "Who hires and fires whom...
...I think not...
...This seems to me a much more authentically institutional, or "structural" to use that muchabused word, view than the notion of a propertied ruling class held together by family ties and a common upper-class subculture...
...Hacker, Maurice Zeitlin," and others have also noted that there are no marked differences in economic behavior between corporations classified as ownership-controlled and those seen as management-controlled...
...Hacker and Bell are alone among the contributors in forthrightly rejecting the new class concept...
...A little historical perspective goes a long way, even if presented in autobiographical form...
...do not constitute a class...
...899-905...
...Indeed, the proletariat was the original new class assigned the mission of realizing a new social order by expropriating private owners of the means of production...
...Bell provides a more detailed analysis of the irreducible heterogeneity of this alleged new class, although his earlier writings had been widely, if incorrectly, understood as supporting what he now calls a "muddled concept...
...On foreign policy, the more educated, in sharp contrast to the past, were more isolationist, showing a greater inclination to oppose American commitments abroad and to doubt that "communism" threatened the United States...
...Since his father was Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, he was also born a member of the disestablished American counterpart of the original Establishment...
...What about the political and cultural attitudes of the new class that account even more than the growth of its occupations for the recent attention it has received...
...Bell concludes that "the idea of a 'new class' . . . cannot be located in social-structural terms...
...also Parkin, "System Contradiction," pp...
...A matter-of-fact, often grudging acceptance of capitalism based on its manifest success in raising standards of living, the work imperatives of everyday life, and fears of revolutionary disruption have been more potent conservative forces than any ideological belief in the ultimate rightness of the system...
...Perhaps they reflected the blend of aristocratic and bourgeois culture for which England is noted...
...Their directorates interlock with those of other corporations and of banks and financial institutions...
...Individual corporate organizations are not, of course, autonomous actors...
...59-62...
...205-207...
...Like the flush toilet —which was, to be sure, invented—capitalism may be accepted as a utility needing to be tinkered with, or as an unfortunate necessity for which no palatable alternative is available...
...See also my earlier review of Gouldner's The Two Marxisms (New York: Seabury Press, 1980) in The New Leader, May 19,1980, pp...
...If "postindustrial" capitalism has really produced a formidable new class with political aims that express its interests, then, like the old bourgeoisie and the old working class, it is presumably not confined to a single country...
...Statistic from Hacker, "Cutting Classes," p. 15...
...In a privately printed "Chronicle of a Family," he noted that the Wrongs have never displayed much aptitude for making money, although their ranks have included doctors, lawyers, professors, clergymen, and civil servants—a veritable roster of old "new class" occupations...
...The New Class: Is It New...
...It is, first, an interpretation of the manifest increase in the number of people pursuing certain occupations, some of them old, a few even ancient, access to which depends on educational credentials...
...Some Marxists have even written of a "state bourgeoisie" in both Communist and capitalist societies, an oxymoron that surely confuses more than it illuminates...
...news and entertainment workers —usually designated as "the media...
...There remains the question of what the social phenomenon called "new class" is, even if it is neither new, a class, nor of major explanatory importance...
...Some of the imputations to the new class of coherent and shared political and economic interests already sound dated...
...The social transformations since the 16th century have involved not only the triumph of capitalism but also the process that Reinhard Bendix has called "intellectual mobilization," or "the growth of a reading public and of an educated secular elite dependent on learned occupations.' The expansion of learning and intellectual freedom was not a mere by-product of the expansion of trade and production, except in the obvious sense that the economy sets limits to the scope of activities not directly related to the satisfaction of basic material needs...
...Alvin Gouldner, The Future of the Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury Press, 1979...
...transmitters of knowledge and culture...
...The overthrow of the ancien regime freed the learned or mentally skilled occupations from dependence on the church, the monarchy, and aristocratic patrons, enabling them to sell their services in a wider and more anonymous market paralleling the new commercial and entrepreneurial freedoms won by the owners of productive resources...
...The major recent development in British politics has been the split in the Labour party that has produced the new Social Democratic party...
...A contempt for money-grubbing, a distaste for capitalists, or people in "trade," as persons of crass and limited vision, a commitment to what were seen as the higher things of life, a belief in service, whether to God, to learning, to the state, or to an exalted profession—all these values were characteristic of the noncapitalist segment of the bourgeoisie to which my forebears belonged...
...289-317...
...they modify it in seeing "intellectuals" not as marginal or deviant persons of bourgeois origin but as an occupationally rooted intelligentsia brought into being by the technical and organizational imperatives of industrial society...
...The expansion of these occupations and the link between most of them and higher education has been a recognized trend for a long time...
...they do not even look 494 comparatively at other capitalist countries...
...So it had been well back in the early 19th century, if not earlier...
...They also assumed left-wing political accents, although as recently as in the 1930s many of the same themes had been central to reactionary movements...
...I am myself a fourth- or fifth-generation member of the new class (though perhaps downwardly mobile within it...
...Come now...
...Yet one need look no further than Britain to wonder about the alleged political unity of the new class...
...Would their remvval in itself change "the system," bring about a fundamental "structural" transformation )f American society...
...Fernand Braudel and Ernest Gellner have both remarked that the most significant thing about capitalism is that nobody invented it...
...576-78...
...Somewhat earlier, such groups as engineers, technicians, and salaried managers were put forward in place of the proletariat as the new class destined to supplant the bourgeoisie and reorganize society...
...Berle and Means's famous study and Burnham's sweeping claims in The Managerial Revolution precipitated an interFor a short but incisive account of Labour and SDP sources of support, see Philip M. Williams, "The Rise —and Possibilities—of Britain's Social Democrats," Dissent, Winter 1982, pp...
...New class theorists have always moved in the ambience of Marxism...
...3) it may be both new and a class, but its appearance on the scene explains little about the political and cultural changes that modern societies are undergoing...
...B. Bruce-Briggs has done a valiant job of identifying three distinct groups in the upper reaches of American society that figure in these discussions: a "traditional bourgeoisie" of rentiers, business owners, and "free" professionals...
...The SDP is clearly not a party of the business community committed to unrestricted free enterprise, but its leaders quit the Labour party because they opposed the growing power of its Marxist-inclined left wing...
...101-22...
...It is worth noting, however, that Parkin writes of conflicts between elites rather than classes...
...Moreover, the earliest versions of a new class theory were put forward before the division into two worlds, that is, before the October Revolution in Russia...
...For surveys on "life-styles," see also Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules (New York: Random House, 1981), pp...
...Such a claim involves empirical and theoretical issues that transcend the question of whether or not there is a new class...
...The SDP favors a mixed economy giving far greater scope to private capital and market forces than does the Labour left...
...Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), p. 417...
...salaried managers and engineers in the profit sector...
...Hacker begins by sharply distinguishing between the old and new versions of a new class: the managers, on the one hand, and the professional/ scientific intelligentsia on the other, two groups "with almost no overlap in membership...
...16-18...
...it must be found in cultural attitudes...
...To be sure, we might be dealing with a mere figment of the imagination of some social analysts or an expression of their total "false consciousness," but even unicorns and mermaids were presumably distorted impressions of some real experience...
...My maternal grandfather was also a professor (of classics) and he too descended from a long line of people in the same occupations, though with a much greater preponderance of Anglican country clergymen —literally members of "the Establishment...
...Nor does it seem likely that even a renascent political liberalism capitalizing on the failures of the Reagan administration would revive such measures as busing and affirmative action quotas or far-reaching environmental regulations...
...I might have said that my grandfather remarked "sadly" on his family's lack of business acumen—his own father went bankrupt twice, once as farmer and once as small-town storekeeper, and my grandfather lost a lot of money in the 1929 crash...
...15-18...
...For those who need the authority of Karl Marx to legitimate it, Hacker notes its consistency with the discussion of the joint-stock company in the third volume of Capital, the discussion that Bell once called Marx's "schema two" for capitalist development as distinct from his betterknown forecast of increasing polarization of owning and nonowning classes...
...Recent Marxists have greatly exaggerated the degree to which the supposed "ideological hegemony" of the bourgeoisie perpetuates capitalism...
...2) the old bourgeois culture of asceticism, the work ethic, deferred gratification, and repressive familial and sexual morality has dissolved...
...Although they acquire stock in the companies they work for, they do not build up their portfolios until they are near the top and their holdings are relatively modest, far from placing them in the super-rich category...
...the left's strongest union support comes from public-sector and white-collar unions.' The followers of both Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn therefore represent the new class, though perhaps different segments of it...
...We do live, however, in a postbourgeois society in two senses: (1) There is no longer a ruling class of private owners of the means of production...
...1 am grateful to the late Erving Goffman for having invited me to participate in the session...
...Apart from personal impressions, these survey data provide the main basis for the claim that a new class has emerged with a distinctive, antitraditional outlook of its own...
...1" Daniel Bell, "The New Class: A Muddled Concept," in Bruce-Briggs, ed., The New Class?, pp...
...creators and critics of culture...
...The state is currently a very fashionable subject among academic social theorists, some of whom write as if its very existence had only recently been revealed...
...second, I already returned it whole to you weeks ago...
...This old "new class" spawned its own opposition...
...Both Hacker and Bell accentuate in different ways the primacy of organizations over classes...
...The interests and allegiances of members of the new class are therefore fragmented by occupation or profession and by the situs where they are employed, not to speak of the particular organizations they work for, which was true also, of course, of the old bourgeoisie...
...Classes as such are never united in struggle against others...
...But what of the United States, that most purely capitalist country of all, notoriously lacking any prebourgeois past...
...Yet surveys in the 1970s revealed an unmistakable departure from the old post-New Deal correlations between class and what are regarded as "liberal" or "conservative" views on various issues.' The change was greatest when measured by educational level, and educational differences held within broad occupational categories—professional, managerial, white-collar, blue-collar...
...Indeed, the neoconservatives oversimplify the relation between politics and imputed class interests as greatly as doctrinaire Marxists...
...sues," the more educated holding more favorable attitudes on divorce, abortion, formerly tabooed forms of sexual behavior, and equality between the sexes...
...102-105, 138, 180-85...
...182-83...
...PERHAPS CLASSES, whether old or new, are no longer the chief collective actors of contemporary history, though they may have been in the past...
...Still, the increase in the numbers of the educated and the occupations requiring educational credentials has undoubtedly weakened the past identification of many in these groups with the business community and the Republican party...
...I was brought up, in fact, to think of most Americans as rich and vulgar...
...Does It Matter...
...Gerth and C. Wright Mills wrote 30 years ago: "The bureaucratization of modern government, of corporate business life, the spread of totalitarian, one-party states may be more dynamic than all the riots, mobs, and crowds of the last fifty years put together from all over Western civilization...
...Future social analysts could do worse than to inscribe on their banners: "The history of presently existing society is the history of organizational struggles...
...But the Labour left too is hardly proletarian in composition and support...
...Thus there is little basis for a common interest leading to the emergence of a shared "class consciousness" expressed politically...
...Recent versions of new class theory have resuscitated this idea...
...My paternal grandfather, who was an academic historian, became interested in his old age in his genealogical roots...
...Since I am on record as admiring Gouldner's lengthy final book, I trust that I may be forgiven for saying that his penultimate short one on the new class was not one of his happier efforts...
...For Christopher Lasch, the resultant "culture of narcissism" reflects a decadent capitalism whose main agents are the therapeutic professions...
...Not surprisingly, they were most marked with respect to "social isThis paragraph is chiefly based on Everett CarII Ladd, Jr., "Pursuing the New Class: Social Theory and Survey Data," in B. Bruce-Briggs, editor, The New Class...
...Critics of the original managerial revolution thesis were clearly right to insist that corporations remain capitalist profit-seeking enterprises whether they are controlled by owners or by managers, quite apart from the very consider" Hacker does this, most fully, in "What Rules America...
...Suppose that all members of the 25,000 families in the United States owning (in 1974) over $1 million worth of paper assets, mostly in the form of stock," were suddenly to expire, stricken with a mysterious fatal disease or perhaps liquidated in an unbelievably efficient Red Brigades action...
...But educational differences were also present on more directly political and economic issues, with the well-educated favoring less economic growth, more government spending on urban problems, environmental protection, and education itself...
...913...
...He cites Frank Parkin, who has argued that conflict between the professional/ scientific intelligentsia and the political elite in Communist countries is much more acute than that between their equivalents in the "late-capitalist" West.' One groans at the thought of all the ink expended on tedious and eternal disputation over definitional distinctions between "class," "stratum," and "elite...
...But, lacking any inherent tie to an anticapitalist political mass movement, the values of this culture are also open to commercial exploitation in vulgarized form 493 and are readily assimilable as personal culture, or even life-style, by the educated...
...It is a condition rather than a theory, a condition whose survival does not depend on the ideological indoctrination of the population living under it...
...Anarchist opponents of Marxism in the late 19th century argued that Marxism itself was the creation of bourgeois intellectuals masking their own aspirations to collective power by claiming to represent the proletariat...
...The problem remains as to whether there are real class boundaries separating these groups...
...However, he made the observation with an unmistakable note of satisfaction...
...their origins are modestly middle-class, and their education usually was not acquired at private schools or the more distinguished universities...
...As for the second "new class," Hacker dismisses it as no more than a collection of new service occupations entered by means of educational credentials whose practical value he questions in sardonic remarks and anecdotes...
...Mills was a post-Marxist...
...The so-called new class has been with us for a long time, and it has sustained complex relations of interdependence with capitalists, or with private owners of the means of production in the strict sense...
...Certainly, there are heirs of the original founding owners of the major corporations who continue to draw large incomes from them, although their money, like invested trade-union pension funds, is usually managed by professional trustees...
...I shall try to answer this question indirectly in the course of criticizing the three claims made for the phenomenon...
...My immediate ancestors were Anglo-Canadians, only recently removed from England...
...Mills, in short, did not separate out those occupations 491 requiring higher education or earning a relatively high income as a new class, but continued along the Marxist lines of regarding them as a segment of the larger intermediate stratum between the dominant propertied classes and wage-earning manual workers...
...What all of these discoveries of new classes possessing or bidding for state power seem to have in common is recognition that collective power can be won and held by means other than ownership or control of private productive resources: it can be won by special knowledge or skill acquired through education, by office in public and private bureaucracies, and by leadership of popular political movements, parties, and even currents of opinion...
...C. Wright Mills reopened the question with reference to the United States in the early 1950s...
...p. 161...
...This Quoted by David T. Bazelon, "How Now 'The New Class...
...9 Andrew Hacker, "Two 'New Classes' or None...
...5 Burnham turned conservative well before the emergence of the "neo" variety, and he certainly no longer regards managers as a rising anticapitalist class already in power in the Soviet Union, with people like Harold Geneen representing its vanguard in the United States...
...The most detailed and cogent argument to this effect that I know is Bryan S. Turner, For Weber (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp...
...But the precise relationship between the new "new class" of professional and scientific intelligentsia and the old "new class" of managers remains somewhat obscure...
...Certainly, the highbrow culture of modernism and the pop counterculture of the '60s are antithetical to the traditional bourgeois values of both businessmen and the old "new class" of the learned professions...
...Yet even Gouldner describes Maurice Zeitlin, "Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class," in Giddens and Held, eds., Classes, Power, and Conflict, pp...
...497 able problems of definition and empirical measurement in determining which is which...
...Alvin Gouldner differentiates the "intellectuals as a New Class" from the old "monied" or "propertied" classes, which they are destined to supplant in the West, and also from the Communist party ruling elite in the East.' Gouldner agrees that there is a major trend under capitalism toward the replacement of owners by managers, and he includes the latter as part of the new class...
...More important, all six groups are distributed unevenly among five of what Bell calls situses, defined as "vertically organized locations of interest-bound activities": economic and business enterprises, government, universities and research organizations, "social complexes" (hospitals, schools, community organizations), and the military...
...Let us apply to them what I like to call the Saint-Simon "drop dead" test...
...In 1819, Henri de Saint-Simon suggested that the instantaneous loss of all of France's courtiers, state officials, and church dignitaries would do little permanent damage to French society...
...There were, moreover, close ties between the Anglo-Canadian intelligentsia and that of the Northeastern United States...
...He repeats an argument he has developed before to the effect that the aggregate of What's-Their-Names at the top of IBM, General Motors, Exxon, et al...
...For Daniel Bell, the popularized antibourgeois culture of modernism threatens the rationality and discipline required by the economy...
...He adds: "The very conception of a 'ruling class' militates against understanding capitalism today...
...This is a shorter, somewhat recast version of a paper presented at a plenary session of the American Sociological Association's annual meeting in San Francisco, September 8, 1982...
...Human beings are capable of prodigious feats of compartmentalization, and economic change has increasingly separated the spheres of work and leisure...
...Power, Hacker contends, resides not in a class of owners and managers, nor in one of partially owning managers, but in the corporate organizations themselves...
...Labour loyalists have argued, and the evidence seems to bear them out, that the SDP is primarily a middle-class party appealing to the very occupational and professional groups that American neoconservatives have called new class...
...498 there classes as "cache areas in which political organizations mobilize, recruit and conscript support and in whose name they legitimate their struggle...
...third, I never actually borrowed it from you...
...in Bruce-Briggs, ed., The New Class?, p. 161...
...Most of the surveys were taken in the middle and late 1970s, before recent sharp declines in employment and economic growth and at a time when the "Vietnam syndrome," obviously more prevalent among the educated, still governed attitudes toward foreign policy...
...Rejection of its narrow, repressive and quintessentially "bourgeois individualist" aspects was central to the avant-garde culture of modernism, and it often found diverse forms of political expression...
...Its activists have variously been described as "polytechnic Marxists" and even as a "bourgeois lumpen-intelligentsia...
...Their tenure at the top is too brief and comes too late in life, not before their late fifties or sixties and after what Mills once called "the long bureaucratic crawl" upward...
Vol. 30 • September 1983 • No. 4
