THE NEW CLASS: DOES IT EXIST? : SKEPTICAL THOUGHTS FROM ANOTHER DIRECTION

...Instead, Gouldner maintains that intellectuals are a class with specific interests, already in control of the means of production and violence through their scientific and technical knowledge...

...Despite the redistributive mechanisms of the welfare state, within this framework of the separation of state and society and the continued importance of the market, professionalism acquires the force of a legitimating ideology for intellectual privilege...

...Thus the myth-making of intellectuals regarding politics derived not from their excess power or their striving for power, but from their exclusion from the public realm...

...Yet the socialist civil society that Konrad and Szelenyi see would have to rest on universal principles of nonexclusion, democratic participation, formal law, individual rights, diversity and conflict of interests—if free public spaces and self-managing autonomous organizations are to be among its institutional forms...

...Arguing that universality cannot be carried by a class, Konrad and Szelenyi are led to reject all arguments rooted in anything other than interest...

...Barbara and John Ehrenreich use it to vindicate a quasi-Leninist strategy...

...Indeed, the defense of this ideology is also in the interest of those seeking to replace the party elite...

...The key argument against viewing these strata as a class is, ironically, a Marxist one: in the West there is no structure that could unify their interests and also unify the centrifugal tendencies of the stratification mechanisms at work...

...All privilege and power reside in a single structure...

...The alternatives to such reflection are dogmatism and cynicism...

...Here is a principle of stratification quite different from the distribution and con502 trol of the surplus product, however the two might be related...

...The political and theoretical conclusions reached by application of the Marxist theory of class to intellectuals are both ambiguous and contradictory...

...For the attack on any reference to universality implies that the intellectual can and should articulate only his own particular interests...

...The attack on the "culture of critical discourse" from the left has the unintended consequence of reinforcing the arguments of the "new right...

...Despite the variety of political positions informing these theories, the anti-intellectualism of all of them, together with the attack on "ideology" (intellectual transcendence) in the name of "realism" (analysis of class interests), reinforces the status quo against its critics...

...GOULDNER MAINTAINS that the particular interests of this new class are to increase its share of the GNP, to acquire positions of power that will enable it to ensure its privilege, and to control its work setting...

...It is, of course, granting too much to call the complaints about the rise of a new intellectual class raised by neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Aaron Wildaysky, Jeane Kirkpatrick and others a theory at all...

...499 Through a brief discussion of the main versions of this theory, I want to show that the unreflective and at times cynical use of Marxist concepts obfuscates rather than illuminates the social dynamics of contemporary society...

...Accordingly, the intellectuals' political strategy will be a combination of vanguardism and alliance with all oppressed groups to overthrow capitalism...

...Barbara and John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class," in Between Labor and Capital, Pat Walker, ed...

...Most of the neoconservatives use Tocqueville as their main referent...

...The thread connecting this diversity is the transference of the class analysis of Marxism from workers to intellectuals...

...Gouldner insists that intellectuals are not simply a particularistic class disguising its interests as universal...

...Despite power struggles among its various factions, Konrad and Szelenyi argue that the new intellectual class shares the legitimating ideology of "rational redistribution" and planning...

...Gouldner's simple little book is the most faithful to the classic Marxist theory of revolution and class...

...We have thus come full circle...

...The tensions in this best of all versions of the thesis of the new intellectual class derive from the incompatibility of Marxist theory with the development of an adequate account of civil society...

...Intellectuals have a class interest in creating a statist society in which both bureaucracy and capitalists will be "expropriated...

...The "new right" wields the class concept against all intellectuals who are critical of the status quo...

...Obviously, the thesis that intellectuals form a class in "state socialism" rests on the claim to have found a unifying structure...

...Only the economic function of the state is addressed, not its political dynamic...

...This "post-Marxist" impulse is expressed in two ways: the state is viewed as a stratification mechanism in its own right (it does more than just "reflect" class relations), and modern civil society is analytically distinguished from capitalism in the context of a political project calling for a socialist civil society...

...It turns out that the new intellectual class is "the most progressive force in history," that the "culture of critical discourse" is a harbinger of freedom, that the attack on the old order really represents the interests of (almost) everyone...

...A typically Marxist two-class model, which sets those men and women who control the economic surplus against the direct producers of that surplus, reappears at the heart of the analysis...

...Indeed, it is quite easy to be confused as to whether in this analysis the new intellectual class substitutes for the bourgeoisie or the proletariat...

...Indeed, Konrad and Szelenyi rejoin Gouldner in rejecting all appeals to universal norms and transcendence...

...It would be a mistake, however, to take this analysis as a warning against Machiavellian designs...

...Before we can accept the empirical insights of class analysis, it would be well to revise the theoretical framework that lends meaning to such insights...

...Accordingly, the authors' own critical intentions are severely impaired...

...This culture is thereby the core of an ideology with universalist claims for a potential ruling class—the technical and humanist intellectuals...

...Voluntary consent, context-free knowledge, and claims of scientific justification of truth— all inherent in the "culture of critical discourse" —are the basis for the rejection of any authority other than the rule of reason and the knowledge that it establishes...

...5) their very culture urges them to a stance of 500 permanent criticism, generating a moralizing commitment to represent the "social totality...

...3) their technical interests are stymied...

...Boston: South End Press, 1979...

...Even their advocacy of the reconstitution of civil society in a socialist form (a theoretical anticipation of Polish Solidarity) is disarmed by their insistent antiuniversalism...

...The flaw in this approach is the confusion of two rather different structures and principles of stratification...

...they are really a "flawed universal class...

...Instead of pursuing the theme of the "primacy of the political," however, our authors focus on the political-economic function of the planner/redistributor...

...The unique feature of this system—the penetration of society by the state—inspires Konrad and Szelenyi to offer what they call a "postMarxist" analysis of the new mechanisms of stratification and power to be found there...

...The obvious response to such confusion should be that the concept of class, whether in the form of a revised or a distorted Marxism, cannot come to grips with the phenomena addressed...

...The utter confusion of orthodox Marxism and anti-Marxism in the overall approach yields this surprise ending...

...The theory of the new intellectual class thus creates strange bedfellows...

...The New Class?, Bruce Briggs, ed...

...For it was Tocqueville's thesis that intellectuals in France prior to the Revolution engaged in abstract political reflection that was both dangerous and destructive because they were denied access to meaningful participation in public life—because they did not have political experience, i.e., the experience of freedom...

...According to Konrad and Szelenyi, the market and redistributive mechanisms of "state monopoly capitalism" lead to the proliferation of intellectual strata between capital and labor...

...Their book links an informative historical sociology to a structural analysis of the one social system to which they apply the thesis: Soviet-type "state socialism...

...to attack the redistributive mechanisms of the welfare state (except for those that aid corporations) and to stigmatize all (other) critics of the status quo as self-serving power seekers concerned with consolidating and expanding their own class dominance...

...Only if the scientific/ technical sector of the intellectual class displaced the old party elite and occupied the key power positions in the state, and so abolished irrational political criteria in enterprise management, would the class power of intellectuals and their ideology be fully reconciled...

...501 Moreover, the principles that legitimate the privileged status of some sectors of intellectuals —professionalism plus the culture of critical discourse—must compete with others, whose force is hardly spent: private property and the political representation of interests within a parliamentary state...

...But all these theorists go beyond descriptive analysis to assert that a particular class interest exists for a wide spectrum of intellectuals that, often unbeknown to them, unites them in a project of class rule...

...The work of Konrad and Szelenyi reduces the "culture of critical discourse" to a particular interest...

...Alvin Gouldner, George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi employ the class concept against, among others, the historical carriers of the theory—Marxist-Leninists—yet see the coming to power of the intellectual class as inevitable...

...The receptivity to their ideas among the populace derived from the same deficiency—the absence of democratic public spaces for participation and for the genesis of public will and virtue...

...The goals of efficient expanded production and reproduction, on the one hand, and the expansion and duplication of the state structure, on the other, are by no means identical...

...Defined as monopolistic proprietors of "transcontextual knowledge," intellectuals in the West are divided into scientific/technical, managerial, bureaucratic, elite cultural, and marginalized humanistic strata...

...Instead of guiltily embracing the selfdestructive thesis I have just described, intellectuals ought to reflect anew on the place of criticism within society and in relation to social movements...

...The structural position of "rational redistributor" obeys a political-economic logic (planning) that is not adequately distinguished from the "primacy of the political," or the domination of society by the state and of the state by the party...

...Although it is conceded that only one sector of the dominant class of intellectuals actually rules—the political bureaucracy of the party— the structure of central planning serves as the locus from which an objective class interest to rule is imputed by Konrad and Szelenyi to all intellectuals...

...It is the primacy of the political, and not planning per se, that requires the total abolition of an autonomous civil society...

...The claim that principles of consent, equality, and critique are simply or mainly the class ideology of intellectuals undermines Gouldner's own progressivist conclusions and, more seriously, undermines the possibility of critical discourse...

...There is certainly nothing new in conservative attacks on intellectuals.' What is new The long list extends from Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Bobbs503 about the recent neoconservative broadside is the clever use of Marxist formula to discredit social movements concerned with emancipation, egalitarian ideals, social justice, and political freedom...

...in Between Labor and Capital...

...But the attack on all intellectual claims to selfless transcendence is reminiscent of the old Stalinist trick of discrediting the discourse by referring to the class origins of its authors...

...Unlike their Marxist predecessors, however, they can claim neither the universality of the class, nor the certainty of history, nor morality itself as the basis of their choice...

...Were these authors really to get at the unique features of stratification in statist systems, they would have had to focus on the political logic of the centralization and appropriation of power and the suppression of any and all counterpowers (publics, unions, voluntary associations, and so on...

...Technical, managerial, bureaucratic, and humanistic intellectuals all are encompassed within a system that gives them advantages over the other main class of society —the direct producers...

...It is difficult to see just what, besides an indefensible evolutionism, the class theory of intellectuals adds to the common analyses of the privilege and power of intellectual strata...

...It would, of course, be informative and entirely unobjectionable if they simply set about to describe the large-scale shifts in the intellectuals' power, privilege, and status generated by changes in the structure of labor and the role of knowledge in modern society...

...For, as we know, Marxist class theory allows only one core structure per system...

...Indeed, the alarmist references to the dissolution of the work ethic, the new narcissism, the loss of respect for authority, the irresponsibility of intellectuals, and so on, if taken together with the theory of the new intellectual class, can be seen as an effort to resolve the ideological crisis of the welfare state in a regressive direction...

...It is, to be sure, important to show that neither intellectuals nor any other stratum can embody universality or be free from particular interests...

...The revolutionary ideology of this class will fuse themes of worker control, meritocracy, and a principle of distributive justice based on the old socialist ideal of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his work"—with intellectual work accorded the highest value...

...Clearly Gouldner's work dispenses with some Marxist dogma while retaining, rather blindly, the method and assumptions of the theory as a whole...

...But their analysis is prevented from articulating what is new about the structures of domination and stratification in these societies by their repeated use of categories that had been generated within an entirely different social system, namely, capitalism...

...The new class is "a flawed universal class" because it cultivates its own particular guild interests, but at the same time it embodies the universal interest...

...The principle of rational redistribution would be fully consistent with the class power of intellectuals only in a technocracy...

...From standpoints as diverse as leftHegelianism, East European dissidence, the American New Left, and contemporary neoconservatism, the old themes of the "treason of the clerks," the "managerial revolution," and the "new class" have reemerged in a new form...

...See Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury, 1979...

...elitism is only its "flaw...

...But it is certainly a powerful ideology with a very obvious political thrust...

...Clearly, Konrad and Szelenyi wanted to present their work as a sort of Capital of the state socialist systems...

...This bias distorts the sociological argument as well as the critique of intellectuals...

...selflessly represent the interests of other strata...

...The intellectual class is universal and progressive...

...George Konrid and Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979...

...For Konrad and Szelenyi, the ideology of "teleological rational redistribution" and the central planning mechanism of a state that has thoroughly penetrated society serve to fuse the privilege and power of intellectuals into a class position...

...The point at issue here is the following: whereas the "post-Marxist" impulse of Konrad and Szelenyi points to the state as the stratifying mechanism, their Marxism reduces this insight to the observation that the state as economic actor or planner creates a hierarchy of income and privilege...

...The self-hatred of critical intellectuals gives ammunition to those who hate the intellect...

...New Brunswick: Transaction, 1979), includes essays by Jeanc Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Aaron Wildaysky, and others...

...This is a misuse of a major thinker for political purposes contrary to the thrust of his thought...

...The "state socialist" system is not analyzed in terms of these two, often noncomplementary, stratification principles...

...Control over surplus remains the key to their class analysis...

...The theory that a new intellectual class, through relentless criticism of all authority, is destroying order and rationality, is at least in part a response to a feared breakdown of the stratification system and the Merrill, paper, 1955) to Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957...

...Only Gouldner's confusion of privilege with the locus and logic of power could enable him to claim a dominant and class status for intellectuals in the West...

...Critique, participation, equality, social justice and freedom— all of these, it is now said, are nothing more than an ideological cover behind which the intellectuals advance their own class power against both capital and labor.' Although many of the proponents of this thesis are decidedly anti-Marxist, the theoretical strategy they employ, or manipulate, is informed by Marxist theory...

...It deviates from the original only with regard to the class agent of political transformation...

...Hence the view that the present party/ state is transitional to the pure system of rational redistribution, with the odd implication that only the central planner, but not the party, is a structural feature of the system...

...Like its counterpart in the West, this approach leaves one with no means to address the needs and struggles of those challenging the system...

...Teleological rational redistribution" is the legitimating ideology of the party/state, whose leaders and ideologists claim that it plans according to scientific criteria (teleology, rationality) and distributes goods and rewards according to socialist principles (equality, justice...

...The attack on intellectual arrogance throws out the baby with the bath water...

...Produced in the universities and reproduced on an expanding scale owing to the educational and communications revolutions, the "knowledge class" has, according to Gouldner, elaborated an ideology and a culture...

...2) they suffer a status disparity between their functional importance to the system and their relatively low enjoyment of power and wealth...

...The ideology of professionalism serves to justify the intellectuals' guildlike privilege and power...

...Its sole new twist consists in the uninspiring exercise of applying the Marxist version of class theory to Marxists, among other intellectuals, who presume selflessly to articulate the needs of other oppressed groups...

...He rejects both the Gramscian position that intellectuals are capable only of representing the interests of other classes and the Mannheimian view that they are able to embody and represent universality...

...The drawback of this theory is, however, quite clear...

...knowledge is relativized and situated visavis a class...

...Their arguments for the presence of a new intellectual class in the East are, consequently, far less convincing than those they bring against the same thesis in the West...

...One is left with the arbitrary choice of defending the particular interests of a group out of power against the particular interests of those in power...

...The book's intentions are clear in one respect—Gouldner wants to dispense once and for all with any claims of intellectuals (specifically Marxists) that they For a critique of the Ehrenreichs' version of the theory, see Jean L. Cohen and Dick Howard, "Why Class...

...Their common "culture of critical discourse" distinguishes them linguistically from others, and devalues the claims to authority of the old ruling class (the capitalists or bureaucrats...

...Not surprisingly, Konrad and Szelenyi revert to a form of populism, choosing incomprehensibly to embrace the particular interests of the "direct producer...

...They cannot be content with their privileges in the given system because: (1) their upward mobility is artificially blocked by capitalists and bureaucrats...

...ideologies that have until now justified domination and inequality...

...The theory of an intellectual class thus prevents an adequate articulation of the stratification and structure of statist systems...

...4) they are underemployed and overproduced...

...To be sure, no group or class can fully embody universality...

...2 Even more important, I hope to demonstrate that the unintended (in some cases, however, intended) consequence of the social criticism of intellectual power is to disable all social criticism and to divert attention from the legitimate role intellectuals have to play in potentially progressive social movements...

...This leaves the critic of intellectual hubris and pretension with a dilemma...

...It is all the more distressing, then, to find these impulses continually frustrated by a reconstructed Marxism, with the "mode of production," a two-class model, and "appropriation and control of the surplus product" used as the key criteria for class boundaries...

...Here the concept of class is uses...

...social critique is stripped of its project (to articulate and discuss universal values...

...There is thus a persistent ambiguity as to whether it is the position of redistributor/ planner or the position of the party that makes for the unity of the dominant groups...

...All these writers, using a simplistic version of the Marxist critique of ideology, "unmask" the claims of intellectuals to represent, articulate, or even think in terms of universal principles as a subterfuge to conceal their interests "on the road to class power...

...Stratification is thus analyzed in traditional Marxist categories...

...The "new intellectual class" thesis has been formulated in a more sophisticated manner by Konrad and Szelenyi...