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Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 weeks agoI’m not conflating anything, drag quite clearly has stated that “Marx was an Anarchist.” This is wrong.
As for the “Professional Managerial Class,” it isn’t a distinct class, but a subsection of the proletariat. You also see the term “Labor Aristocracy” used by Engels and Lenin, but crucially, you don’t see the conflation of this substratum of a class with a class in and of itself. The insistence that managers make up a distinct class is more of an Anarchist thing than a Marxist one, as adopting such analysis would be similar to calling plumbers and elictricians their own classes in and of themselves, rather than substratums.
barsoap@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Absolutely.
Plumbers are not in a power hierarchy relationship to electricians so that’s a strawman.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Class isn’t “power hierarchy” in Marxist analysis, though. That’s an Anarchist interpretation, one I won’t say you can’t hold personally as valid, but that’s not the Marxist critique. Engels and Lenin specifically called managers Labor aristocracy as they are necessary aspects of large industry, and not a class in themselves. Class instead is a social relation to ownership of the Means of Production.
In the “Administration of Things,” as Engels puts it, there are to be administrators, and production along a common plan. It’s through this that large industry under Capitalism paves the way for the transition to Socialism, and then Communism, socialized production requires an informed plan.
barsoap@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
And the managerial class doesn’t have that? Is it easier or harder for an MBA to get a loan to become a millionaire than it is for a worker coop? To furnish golden parachutes for themselves while leaving workers with not even the dole (heard of some nasty practices in the US, there, making people ‘quit without cause’ by bullying etc which would disqualify them from welfare).
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Is an Engineer a class? They make better money than assembly workers. The answer is no, Engineers are a substratum of the Proletariat, worthy of their own analysis, but not as distinct from the rest of the Proletariat. That’s why Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc all viewed managers as proletarian, doing a separate kind of labor, and even distinct living conditions on average, but retaining the same labor relations to the Means of Production.