I think benji is right that these two claims:
- that it's necessary to pursue the PMC's support as a class (and not just the skillset of its individual members) and
- that the PMC's primary motivation is its own aspirations of self-preservation and, yes, control
are fundamentally at odds with one another and so it's worth asking if solidarity is even possible.
Yeah, curly, the "scientifictechnological elite" is only a part of the class in question but isolating it specifically points out some of the contradictions in the concept/strategy. For one thing, the ideal society for this class is the technocratic/meritocratic ideal, one where they are no longer subservient to finance capital for survival but are still the Masters of Everything and justly compensated. I think Seattle is the perfect microcosm of technocracy - you could replace Jeff Bezos with a
democratically bureaucratically controlled Gosbank and it would still be the same hell... but everyone is technically "proletariat" now so revolution achieved
The appeal to a "slowly disappearing" professional class is a fruitless effort because it's not slowly disappearing - some jobs are falling into ruin but new and different careers are coming into view all the time. The amount of highly paid professionals is exploding, just look at the change in income distribution over time (and for everyone else, the main issue is not income but cost of living caused by housing shortages). This has inherent limitations like the wealth-inequality stagnation rot the global economy is suffering from right now but the professional class views the bourgeois law of distribution as a just order and it will never not view it that way. What Barbara sees as class allies are really only the ones that are in frequent contact with the despoiled masses (the nurses, the journalists, teachers, social workers, gamers and so on) and it's this direct interaction that makes them allies, not their tenuous membership of a withering middle class. The bankers, tech workers, engineers, and professional managers have everything to lose and nothing to gain from socialism (specifically: there would be more people employed in these professions but their incomes would take a huge hit). That is what makes them the new reactionary middle class, just like the petty artisan was.
to undermine myself a little, and since we're all contributing historical visions of societal development through new-class analysis (dialectics really is immortal science
), Schumpeter also noticed something like this and predicted that capitalism produces an army of intellectuals* that is increasingly hostile to the capitalist order and is also self-proletarianizing because there are too fucking many of them, so it would be this vanguard of resentfuls that would inevitably overthrow capitalism. He's pretty condescending about this in chapter 8 of his book though, this is what I meant when I told jake that there were people who were committed to a historical materialist argument for socialism but not the moral argument for communism per se.
* he meant this in the very broad sense that people in the 20th century are very educated, they have enough leisure time to reflect on society, and they can express and publicize their resentments. he didn't mean academic intellectuals of staggering intelligence like jordan peterson.
as for this:
even when Dilas wrote a book literally named it cribbing Trotsky he adhered to the rule. (Although to be fair he was largely describing the Soviet and Yugoslav experiences. And he totally was not Party Line.)
it's kind of funny that you can give Dilas a pass on making a class analysis specific to stalinist bureaucratic socialism but you won't give the same leeway to barbs doing it for post-war western capitalism.
as kara once warned you, this might be a stumbling block for your career in contrarian shitposting...
