Classless Utopia Versus Class Compromise
15th August 2018
In modern industrial societies, Marx’s claim that the major division would be among capitalists who control the means of production and proletarians without productive assets other than their own labor has proven to be influential and useful. In these pages (Summer 2017), I have argued that the Marxist conception was usefully modified by James Burnham and others, for whom a bureaucratic, managerial group in both the private and public sectors displaced an older, owner-operator-investor bourgeoisie. In this view, modern advanced industrial societies are divided chiefly among two classes. One is a substantial managerial-professional minority, as large as 30 percent or so if all recipients of college degrees are included in it, but arguably no more than the top 10 or 15 percent. The other is the working class, increasingly working in the nontraded domestic service sector as manufacturing jobs are eliminated by a combination of offshoring and automation.
But a vocation, or a constellation of related vocations, is not in itself a class, any more than an income category is. In ordinary discourse, one is born into a class. What turns a mere vocation or income or wealth category into a class is a high degree of persistence of its membership across generations. The source of hereditary class advantage need not be formal legal privileges, or even inherited wealth; it can also take the form of attitudes, skills, and connections bequeathed by parents to their children.
Thus the best definition of a class, I would suggest, is this: a class is a group of families within a society whose members are disproportionately likely to work in certain vocations and also disproportionately likely to marry and have children with one another. This definition unites the functional and nepotistic aspects of class.