The Marxist view of modern society starts with a critique of how mainstream sources frame class. Organizations such as Pew or Brookings view class as a hierarchy of income, education, and occupational status, with lower, middle, and upper tiers. But this perspective is only about results, not about relations. Marxism is about relationships. The fundamental issue is your relationship to the means of production and who benefits from others' labor. Income brackets are only superficial. The real challenge is to see these patterns as signs of deeper exploitation, and then to ask a tougher question: how is this relationship now structured, and why is a clearly exploited class less able than ever to act?
Now wealth is so concentrated, class divisions are obvious. The richest 1 percent hold almost a third of all wealth in the U.S., and the bottom 50 percent have very little. But these numbers are just about how wealth is distributed. What counts is that the big boys control the means of production. Some professionals and small business owners are wealthy but don't have large numbers of workers. The real capitalist class is much smaller, maybe nine hundred billionaires and the big investors who own most of the corporate stock. Today ownership looks social because investment groups, not families, own big firms, but in reality it is still private. Hence, the term “patrimonial” is only partly right and also incomplete. There are still some powerful people, but they work within a large, impersonal management network. The key point is to understand the distance between the political personal and the unemotional character of the economy. This group is often referred to as the professional-managerial class, or the new petty bourgeoisie. These managers form a group that exists between the owners and the workers. They don’t own the means of production, but they control how work is done and how value is distributed. This group includes senior managers, technical experts, and coordinators. Wright says they have power over others and that capital exploits them because they get paid more and sometimes get equity. The number of productive workers has fallen, and this group has become more important. Its politics reflect its special situation. And this is why it is so important in today’s culture wars. You cannot understand its politics solely through its role in production. Attacking the PMC or grouping it with the working class misses what is really going on. Most people in the workforce, some sixty percent, belong to the working class, meaning they have to sell their labor, whether it is considered productive or not. The basic relationship is still there, but the organization has changed. Three facts show this change. First, union membership has declined. In 2025, only ten percent of workers are in unions and only 5.9 percent in the private sector, compared to 20.1 percent overall in 1983. The class is still there, but it has lost much of the structure that allowed it to function as a class. Second, there is a significant gap between unions in the public and private sectors: 32.9 percent of public workers are in unions, compared with 5.9 percent of private workers. That means organized labor now mostly works in government jobs, especially in education and protective services. This has brought the working class into close association with the state, and many of the workers are now also public employees, a fact that detractors are wont to use against them. Third, the top 10 percent now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, the largest share since 1989. The system is increasingly reliant on rich people spending money, which means most workers have lost power as consumers even as they continue to create value. The facts are clear and troubling. The working class is real, and the exploitation is worse than it has been in a hundred years. The big question is now: how can a divided class act together? Two important differences matter: productive versus nonproductive labor, and structural versus associational power. The productive/unproductive distinction is not just about job types but also about how value is produced, and it helps explain the divide between structural and associational power. Understanding the value form is key to understanding what has happened to unions. The mistake is the same for the workerists and for the critics of the PMC, just in different ways. They see the division between productive and unproductive work as if it divides the population into separate classes. The workerists insist that only productive workers constitute the real working class, while the rest are on the sidelines, particularly in manufacturing and logistics. PMC theorists claim that those in unproductive, coordinating roles are a separate class with their interests, so that professionals are foes or unreliable allies. Both are wrong in dividing social classes out of a distinction Marx made about how value is counted. Better, argues Neue Marx Lektüre, is to see productive versus unproductive labor as a matter of the relation of work to capital’s growth, not of who works or their relation to production. A worker can switch from productive work to unproductive work without moving from one class to another because class is a matter of having to sell your labor, not the specific work you do. This difference indicates that the proletariat includes more than just productive workers, and it must be acknowledged. It doesn’t set class membership. It sets class capacity. Structural power is a function of position in the circuit of capital, not class position. This difference should not be used to restrict the working class to productive workers alone, but it is nonetheless important. It doesn't say who in the class, but it does affect what the class can do. Structural power is not simply a matter of class position but of location in the flow of capital. The worker in a key position, productive or not, has real power. They’re still workers, just someone on the edge. A care worker, gig worker, etc. has very little power. Structural power is about position in the system. Class membership is about selling your labor. This is a major error in the left's strategy today: confusing structural power and class membership. Structural power is greatest at the choke points of capital circulation. The lowest densities are in finance, professional services, and food service—the dispersed periphery and the unproductive but high-status coordinating layer. Associational power has been most enduring where structural power is strongest. It has collapsed where structural power was weakest or where the loyalty rents of the coordinating stratum rendered organization unnecessary for workers and impossible for capital. The two power forms correlate in their distribution, but they decay for different reasons and at different rates. The value form explains the pattern. In short, the decline of union power was not incidental. It was a deliberate effort to cut the link between the foundations of workers’ power and their capacity to act together. The PATCO bust, offshoring, strike limits, and subcontracting—each was aimed at places where workers could use their position to gain leverage. Capital didn't bother with the weak spots. It went to the strong points and mostly succeeded except in the public sector where unions are still strong. This is where the argument will likely face the most rigorous testing and where a careful reader will probably question it first. Public sector workers are wage workers and part of the working class, but their work is largely outside the direct production of surplus value. They are paid from state revenue, which is raised by taxes—that is to say, by surplus value collected elsewhere. This boundary remains contested; even Marx did not resolve it, and the debate about what counts as productive labor has continued since the 1970s. It is used here to explain leverage, not because it is the only possible view, but because of the distinction between labor traded for capital and labor paid from revenue. It is better to be upfront about this choice than to hide it. Let’s not be taken in by the facile notion that all public-sector work is unproductive, because that’s not universally true. In fact, many state-related jobs touch the market: city utilities that sell services, transit agencies that collect fares, public hospitals that bill insurance, and, particularly, numerous public services run by private companies under government contracts. This type of work produces surplus value or furnishes services for sale, even when the worker wears a public uniform. In practice, there is a spectrum. Some jobs are core state jobs, funded only by taxes, e.g., teachers and social workers. Some are public enterprises that compete in the market. Some are completely privatized contractors. This spectrum helps us understand the different kinds of strike power in the public sector, according to where jobs sit in terms of value creation. Public workers, who are paid solely from tax revenue and do not produce surplus value, have power that is primarily political rather than economic. The power of a teachers' strike, for example, is not that it stops profiting but that it disrupts social life and questions the legitimacy of the government. A transit worker takes the fares and faces the market. They have political and economic power. They can upset daily life and the flow of money. A private contractor working for the state, like a corrections officer, has economic power because their strike hurts the company's profits, but there is still a political side to it. The position of a public worker along this value spectrum doesn’t determine whether they have power, but it does influence the nature of that power and where it is relevant. Another challenge to this argument is the idea that the flow of capital, especially in logistics, creates structural power. Critics say that warehouse and transport workers move things that have already been made, that their work is about circulation rather than production, and that it is therefore unproductive. If structural power were only about the production of surplus value, then logistics workers wouldn’t have the leverage the argument claims they do. This seems inconsistent, since these workers are very powerful, yet their jobs are designated as unproductive by value-form standards. The answer is to stop seeing structural power only in terms of the production of surplus value but to see it as part of the total circulation of capital. Capital does not grow by creating surplus value alone; it must be realized through selling. If goods are produced but never sold, the value is not realized and is a loss. Production and selling are both integral parts of the process, and capital may be tied up at either step. This is a very important point from vol. II of Marx, often overlooked, and it addresses this issue. Marx even says that moving goods to consumers is production because it adds value to the product by getting it to where it’s needed. On the other hand, jobs that consist of buying and selling are unproductive. So even by Marx’s standards, logistics work is not merely unproductive. If we call logistics work unproductive, it still has real structural power. Halting the sale of goods is as damaging to capital as halting their production. A warehouse worker does not have to generate surplus value to harm capital; they only have to stop the process of turning goods into money. If capital can't sell, it can't grow. So the criticism is invalid. Structural power is not only about production but also about the entire flow of capital. That's why fights at Amazon and in logistics matter; they're about rebuilding the collective. All these points lead to one thought. The wage relation determines the class membership. Structural power is about where you sit in the whole flow of capital, which includes both production and sales. The productive/unproductive split is another matter, just concerning the stage of production. These three things are to be separated. For example, the power of a logistics worker is a function of their position in the system; the power of a public school teacher is a function of being outside the flow of capital and affecting social life instead; their power is therefore political, not economic. Whether the work creates surplus value does not answer the other questions. The bulk of the criticisms stem from conflating these three distinct concepts. Reducing two of the three axes to one The bottom line is clear. Now the organized part of the working class has collective power directed against the state, not capital. Their strikes are not for profit, but for society and the legitimacy of government. This gives them political power but also makes them vulnerable to assaults from capital and local politics, as well as attacks on public workers. Private sector workers in logistics and utilities still have real power, but they are not well organized. Building class power means more unions but also connecting collective action with real leverage where that still exists. It is much more complicated than just reviving unions, and public-sector unions are not the best place to start such a campaign. I understand the point. The left often argues over whether the coordinating group is a friend or a foe or whether the only real working class is the productive core. But those are the wrong questions. The wage relation defines class membership. What matters is where the class can still use its power within the system. This is not the focus of the workerists or the PMC theorists. The U.S. has a clear class structure but very little working-class action because the mechanisms for turning position into power have been dismantled where they count most. It is not a question of class consciousness. It is a question of a clear class structure and a weak class force. Fixing this is about rebuilding the right forms, not just changing the way we analyze things. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42070): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42070 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119843448/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
