*A SHORT NOTE ON THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE WHITE COLLAR WORKERS

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia' entry for Richard Sennett's book,"The Culture Of New Capitalism".

COMMENTARY

One of the tenets of classical Marxism is that the industrial working class- those who produced the mass goods of society- are the central agency for leading the revolution against capitalism and creating the conditions for a socialist society. In their enthusiasm for this social change Marxists, including this Marxist, never expected that capitalism would be holding on as tight as it has. This development has had many causes that I have gone into elsewhere and is not germane to the point of this commentary. What is germane is that with the long term extension of the capitalist mode of production some significant changes have occurred in the infrastructure of the system, particularly in the advanced capitalism countries. The prime example is, as almost always the case when talking about modern capitalism, the United States. There has been a long term gradual but steady conversion of the old model industrial plant to the new technologically driven service industry. Here, think Wal-Mart.

One would think that the conversion from the old top down hierarchical system that industrial capitalism demanded to that of a service economy with a more and better educated workforce and with increased technological skills that this system would have become obsolete. Not so according to in an article in the New York Review of Books, August 16, 2007, entitled "They’re Micromanaging Your Every Move" (reviewing "The Social Life of Information" by John Seely Brown; "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream" by Barbara Ehrenreich; and, "The Culture of the New Capitalism" by Richard Sennett). The gist of the article is that the new technologies are spinning off software that permit a small elite of managers and ‘super star’ technocrats to control white collar work in the manner of the old industrial system. I have not personally read the books discussed there yet but it is apparent, and has been for a while, that we need to account for these dramatic changes in the workplace. And first things first- we desperately need to organize the Wal-Mart workers-that is for sure. Read this article or one of these books