The Classes of the New

The Philosophers – Adam Smith (1776)

‘Many improvements [in machinery] have been made by the ingenuity of … those who are called philosophers or men of speculation, whose trade it is not to do any thing, but to observe every thing; and who, upon that account, are often capable of combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects. In the progress of society, philosophy or speculation becomes, like every other employment, the principal or sole trade and occupation of a particular class of citizens. Like every other employment too, it is subdivided into a great number of different branches, each of which affords occupation to a peculiar tribe or class of philosophers; and this subdivision of employment in philosophy, as well as in every other business, improves dexterity, and saves time. Each individual becomes more expert in his own peculiar branch, more work is done upon the whole, and the quantity of science is considerably increased by it.’

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, page 14.

The Industrials – Henri Saint-Simon (1819)

‘The national [industrial] party consists of:

Those whose work is of direct use to society.

Those who direct this work or whose capital is invested in industrial enterprises.

Those who contribute to production through work which is useful to

the producers.’

Henri Saint-Simon, ‘Comparison Between the National (Industrial) Party and the Anti-National Party’, page 187.

‘Let us suppose that all of a sudden France loses fifty each of its best physicists, chemists, physiologists, mathematicians, poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, authors, mechanics, civil and military engineers, artillerymen, architects, doctors, surgeons, pharmacists, sailors, clockmakers, bankers; its two hundred best merchants and six hundred best farmers; fifty each of its best iron-masters, arms manufacturers, tanners, dyers, miners, manufacturers of cloth, cotton, silk, linen, ironmongery, earthenware and porcelain, crystal-[ware] and glassware; shipowners, carriers, printers, engravers, goldsmiths, and other metalworkers; masons, carpenters, joiners, blacksmiths, locksmiths, cutlers, foundrymen, and one hundred other persons in other unspecified posts, eminent in the sciences, fine arts, and arts and crafts, making in all the best scientists, artists, and artisans in France.*

As these Frenchmen are the most essential producers, those who provide the most important products, who direct the work which is most useful to the nation, and who are responsible for its productivity in the sciences, fine arts, and arts and crafts, they are really the flower of French society. Of all Frenchmen they are the most useful to their country, bringing it the most glory and doing most to promote civilisation and prosperity. The nation would become a lifeless corpse as soon as it lost them.

*Usually the term ‘artisan’is only used to refer to ordinary workmen. In order to avoid circumlocution, we shall take this expression to mean everyone involved in material production, i.e. farmers, manufacturers, merchants, bankers, and all the clerks and workmen employed by them.’

Henri Saint-Simon, ‘A Political Parable’, page 194.

The Civil Servants – Georg Hegel (1821)

‘The universal class [of civil servants] has for its task the universal interests of the community.’

Georg Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, page 132.

‘The maintenance of the state’s universal interest, and of legality, in … [the economic] sphere of particular rights, and the work of bringing these [self-interested] rights back to the universal, require to be superintended by … (a) the executive civil servants, and (b) the higher advisory officials (who are organised in committees). These converge in their supreme heads who are in direct contact with the monarch.’

Georg Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, page 189.

‘Between an individual [civil servant] and his office there is no immediate natural link. Hence individuals are not appointed to office on account of their birth or native personal gifts. The objective factor in their appointment is knowledge and proof of ability. Such proof guarantees that the state will get what it requires; and since it is the sole condition of appointment, it also guarantees to every citizen the chance of joining the class of civil servants.’

Georg Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, page 190.

‘Civil servants and the members of the executive constitute the greater part of the middle class, the class in which the consciousness of right and the developed intelligence of the mass of the people is found.’

Georg Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, page 193.

The Bohemians – Adolphe d’Ennery and Grangé (1843)

‘By “bohemians”, I mean that class of individuals for whom existence is a problem, circumstances a myth, and fortune an enigma; who have no sort of fixed abode, no place of refuge; who belong nowhere and are met with everywhere; who have no particular calling in life but follow fifty professions; who, for the most part, arise in the morning without knowing where they are to dine in the evening; who are rich today, impoverished tomorrow; who are ready to live honestly if they can, and otherwise if they cannot.’

Adolphe d’Ennery and Grangé, ‘Les Bohémiens de Paris’.

The Bourgeoisie – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)

‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. … Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. … All that is solid melts into air …’

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, page 17.

‘The bourgeoisie … has created more massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?’

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, page 20.

The General Intellect – Karl Marx (1857)

‘To the degree that … direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production – of the creation of use values – and is reduced both quantitatively … and qualitatively … compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising from social combination in total production on the other side … Capital thus works towards its own dissolution dominating production.’

Karl Marx, Grundrisse, page 700.

‘Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. … They are organs of the human brain, created by human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and have been transformed in accordance with it.’

Karl Marx, Grundrisse, page 706.

The Self-Made Man – Samuel Smiles (1859)

‘It is the diligent head and hand alone that maketh rich – in self-culture, growth in wisdom, and in business. Even when men are born to wealth and high social position, any solid reputation which they may individually achieve can only be attained by energetic application; for though an inheritance of acres may be bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. … Indeed, so far from poverty being a misfortune, it may, by vigorous self-help, be converted even into a blessing; rousing a man to that struggle with the world in which … the right-minded and true-hearted find strength, confidence, and triumph.’

Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, pages 11-12.

The Labour Movement – Karl Marx (1867)

‘… in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as … a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class.’

Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, page 344.

‘[The] … highly detailed specifications [of the Factory Acts], which regulate, with military uniformity, the times, the limits and the pauses of work by the stroke of the clock, were by no means a product of the fantasy of Members of Parliament. … Their formulation, official recognition and proclamation by the state were the result of a long class struggle.’

Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, pages 394-395.

‘Factory legislation, that first conscious and methodical reaction of society against the spontaneously developed form of its production process, is … just as much the necessary product of large-scale industry as cotton yarn, self-actors and the electric telegraph.’

Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, page 610.

‘If the general extension of factory legislation to all trades for the purpose of protecting the working class both in mind and body has become inevitable, … that extension [also] hastens on the general conversion of numerous isolated small industries into a few combined industries carried on upon a large scale; it therefore accelerates the concentration of capital and the exclusive predominance of the factory system. … While in each individual workshop it enforces uniformity, regularity, order and economy, the result of this immense impetus given to the technical improvement by the limitation and regulation of the working day is to increase the anarchy and the proneness to catastrophe of capitalist production as a whole, the intensity of labour, and the competition of machinery with the worker. … By maturing the material conditions and the social combinations of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process, and thereby ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one.’

Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, page 635.

The Educated Working Man – Thomas Wright (1868)

‘The educated working man is the stock intelligent artisan improved and tempered by education. … [He] … is a well-read, well-informed member of society who has kept pace and is keeping pace with the progress of the age; a man who, having class interests, is yet capable of taking a broad and tolerant view of questions affecting those interests, and of clearly expressing and giving reasons for his own sentiments upon such questions; a man who can find his greatest gratification in intellectual pursuits and pleasures, and in his daily life displays in some greater or lesser degree that refinement which education gives.’

Thomas Wright, The Great Unwashed, pages 7-8.

The Superman – Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)

‘You solitaries of today, you who have seceded from society, you shall one day be a people: from you, who have chosen out yourselves, shall a chosen people spring – and from this chosen people, the Superman.’

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, page 103.

‘Artists, if they are any good, are (physically as well) strong, full of surplus energy, powerful animals, sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system a Raphael is unthinkable.’

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, page 421.

‘… as the consumption of … mankind becomes more and more economical and the “machinery” of interests and services is integrated ever more intricately, a counter-movement is inevitable. … [This will be] the production of a synthetic, summarising, justifying man for whose existence this transformation of mankind into a machine is a precondition, as a base on which he can invent his higher form of being.

He needs the opposition of the masses, of the “levelled”, a feeling of distance from them! he stands on them, he lives off them. This higher form of aristocracy is that of the future.’

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, pages 463-464.

The Aristocracy of the Working Class – Friedrich Engels (1885)

‘… the great Trades’Unions … are the organisations of those trades in which the labour of grown-up men predominates, or is alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women and children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised strength. The engineers, the carpenters and joiners, the bricklayers, are each of them a power, to that extent that, as in the case of the bricklayers and bricklayers’ labourers, they can even successfully resist the introduction of machinery. That their condition has remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact that for more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They form an aristocracy among the working class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the model working-men of Messrs. Leone Levi & Giffen, and they are very nice people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.’

Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, page 368.

The New Middle Class – William Morris (1885)

‘I should like our friend to understand whither the whole system of palliation [through the Factory Acts] tends – namely, toward the creation of a new middle class to act as a buffer between the proletariat and their direct and obvious masters; the only hope of the bourgeoisie for retarding the advance of Socialism lies in this device. Let our friend think of a society thus held together. Let him consider how sheepishly the well-to-do workers today offer themselves to the shearer; and are we to help our masters to keep on creating fresh and fresh flocks of such sheep? What a society that would be, the main support of which would be capitalists masquerading as working men!’

William Morris, ‘Socialism and Politics (An Answer to ‘Another View’)’, pages 99-100.

The Intellectual Proletariat – William Morris (1888)

‘The lower ranks of art and literature are crowded with persons drawn to these professions by the pleasantness of these pursuits in themselves, who soon find out the very low market value of the ordinary educated intellect. These, together with the commercial clerks, in whose occupation no special talent is required, form an intellectual proletariat whose labour is “rewarded” on about the same scale as the lower portion of manual labour, as long as they are employed, but whose position is more precarious, and far less satisfactory.’

William Morris, ‘Socialism From the Root Up’, page 603.

The Vanguard Party – V.I. Lenin (1902)

‘The active and widespread participation of the masses [in anti-monarchical politics] will … benefit by the fact that a “dozen” experienced revolutionaries, trained professionally no less than the police, will centralise all the secret aspects of the work – drawing up leaflets, working out approximate plans and appointing bodies of leaders for each urban district, each factory and for each educational institution, etc. ...’

V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, pages 154-155.

‘It is … our duty to assist every capable worker to become a professional agitator, organiser, propagandist, literature distributor, etc. etc. … A worker agitator who is at all talented and “promising” must not be left to work eleven hours a day in a factory. We must arrange that he be maintained by the Party, that he may go underground at any time, that he change the place of his activity … When we have detachments of specially trained worker-revolutionaries who have gone through extensive preparation … no political police in the world will then be able to contend against them, for these detachments of men absolutely devoted to the revolution will themselves enjoy the absolute confidence of the masses of the workers.’

V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, pages 162-164.

The Samurai – H.G. Wells (1905)

‘Typically, the samurai are engaged in administrative work. Practically the whole of the responsible rule of the world is in their hands; all our head teachers and disciplinary heads of colleges, our judges, barristers, employers of labour beyond a certain limit, practising medical men, legislators, must be samurai, and all the executive committees … that play so large a part in our affairs are drawn by lot exclusively from them. The order is not hereditary … The samurai are, in fact, volunteers … our Founders … made a noble and privileged order … open to the whole world.’

H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, pages 222-223.

The Bureaucrats – Max Weber (1910)

‘Office holding is a ‘vocation’. This is shown … in the requirement of a firmly prescribed course of training … and in the … special examinations which are prerequisites of employment. Furthermore, the position of an official is in the nature of a duty. … Entrance into an office [job], including one in the private economy, is considered an acceptance of a specific obligation of faithful management in return for a secure existence. … Modern loyalty is devoted to impersonal and functional purposes. …

Whether he is in a private office or a public bureau, the modern official always strives and usually enjoys a distinct social esteem as compared with the governed. His social position is guaranteed by the prescriptive rules of rank order …’

Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, pages 198-199.

The Scientific Managers – Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911)

‘[No] … one workmen [has] the authority to make other men cooperate with him to do faster work. It is only through enforced standardisation of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and of enforcing this cooperation rests with the management alone. The management must supply continually one or more teachers to show each new man the new and simpler motions, and the slower men must be constantly watched and helped until they have risen to their proper speed. All of those who, after proper teaching, either will not or cannot work in accordance with the new methods and at the higher speed must be discharged ... The management must also recognise the broad fact that workmen will not submit to this more rigid standardisation and will not work extra hard, unless they receive extra pay for doing it.’

Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, page 83.

The Labour Aristocracy – V.I. Lenin (1916)

‘The upper layers [of the British working class] furnish the main body of co-operators, of trade unionists, of members of sporting bodies, and of numerous religious sects. … Imperialism has … a tendency to create privileged sections amongst the workers … and to detach them from the main proletarian masses … to encourage opportunism amongst them, and to give rise to a temporary organic decay in the working class movement …’

V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, pages 124-125.

The Labour Bureaucracy – Gregory Zinoviev (1916)

‘The great, overwhelming majority of the [labour movement’s] functionaries are workers. … But the concept “worker”, in and of itself, must be applied with the greatest of care in this case. It would be better perhaps not to say “worker”, but “worker in his origin.” … In reality, … these people are no longer workers and have not been for decades. They have incomes bigger than the average bourgeois and have long ago given up their trades. … They are workers in name only. In reality they are bureaucrats with a standard of living quite distinct from the average worker.

The worker-functionaries very often hail from the circles of the labour aristocracy. The labour bureaucracy and the labour aristocracy are blood brothers. The group interests of the one and the other very often coincide. Nevertheless, labour bureaucracy and labour aristocracy are two different categories.’

Gregory Zinoviev, ‘The Social Roots of Opportunism’, page 108

The Blackshirts – Mario Piazzesi (1921)

‘For some time … a new Italy has been forming, an Italy born of professionals, petty bourgeois artisans, peasants, common people, of all those who fought in the … [First World War] … It feels that the spirit of Victory is an idea which can nourish even simple souls.

New classes are forming who are leap-frogging the political and economic generations of before the war, most of them belonging to the small and middling bourgeoisie and artisan class. These have held military rank and have no intention of being absorbed back into the anonymous masses, but want to create new types of business, new companies, new trades in which to project the sense of leadership and organisation they learnt and applied in the war.’

Mario Piazzesi, ‘The Squadristi as the Revolutionaries of the New Italy’, page 39.

The Engineers – Thorstein Veblen (1921)

‘In the beginning … of the Industrial Revolution, there was no marked division between the industrial experts and the business managers. … But from an early point in the development [of capitalism] there set in a progressive differentiation, such as to divide those who designed and administered the industrial processes from those others who designed and managed the commercial transactions and took care of the financial end. …

This division between business management and industrial management has continued to go forward, at a continually accelerating rate, because the special training and experience required for any passably efficient organisation and direction of these industrial processes has continually grown more exacting, calling for specialised knowledge and abilities on the part of those who have this work to do and requiring their undivided interest and their undivided attention to the work at hand. But these specialists in technological knowledge, abilities, interest, and experience … - inventors, designers, chemists, mineralogists, soil experts, crop specialists, production managers and engineers of many kinds and denominations – have continued to be employees of … the captains of finance, whose work it has been to commercialise the knowledge and abilities of the industrial experts and turn them to account for their own gain.’

Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System, pages 76-77.

‘These expert men, technologists, engineers … make up the indispensable General Staff of the industrial system; and without their immediate and unremitting guidance and correction the industrial system would not work. It is a mechanically organised structure of technical processes designed, installed, and conducted by these production engineers. Without them and their constant attention the industrial equipment, the mechanical appliances of industry, will foot up to just so much junk.’

Thorstein Veblen,The Engineers and the Price System, pages 82-83.

The Fordist Worker – Henry Ford (1922)

‘I am now most interested in fully demonstrating that the ideas we have put into practice [at the Ford Motor Company] are capable of the largest application – that they have nothing peculiarly to do with motor cars … but form something in the nature of a universal code.’

Henry Ford, My Life and Work, page 3.

‘The net result of the application of … [the] principles [of the assembly-line] is the reduction of the necessity for thought on the part of the worker and the reduction of his movements to a minimum. He does as nearly as possible only one thing with only one movement.’

Henry Ford, My Life and Work, page 80.

‘… to the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors. In fact, to some types of mind … the ideal job is one where the creative instinct need not be expressed. … The average worker … wants a job in which he does not have to put forth much physical exertion – above all, he wants a job in which he does not have to think.’

Henry Ford, My Life and Work, page 103.

‘[Our policy of raising wages] … was a sort of prosperity-sharing plan. But on conditions. The man and his home had to come up to certain standards of cleanliness and citizenship. … the idea was that there should be a very definite incentive to [morally] better living and that the very best incentive as a money premium on proper living. A man who is living alright will do his work alright.’

Henry Ford, My Life and Work, page 128.

The Open Conspiracy – H.G. Wells (1928)

‘… when we come to the general functioning classes, landowners, industrial organisers, bankers and so forth, who control the present system … it is very largely from the ranks of these classes and from their stores of experience and traditions of method, that the directive forces of the new order must emerge. … There are no doubt many … [who act] for personal or group advantage to the general detriment. … But there remains a residuum of original and intelligent people … who are curious about their own intricate function and disposed towards a scientific investigation of its origins, conditions and future possibilities. Such types move naturally towards the Open Conspiracy. …

Now the theme of the preceding paragraph might be repeated with … appropriate modifications … [for] the industrial organiser, the merchant and organiser of transport, the advertiser, the retail distributor, the agriculturalist, the engineer, the builder, the economic chemist, and a number of other types functional to the contemporary community. In all we should distinguish … an active, progressive section to whom we should turn naturally for developments leading towards the progressive world commonweal of our desires.’

H.G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy, pages 57-58.

The Intellectuals – Antonio Gramsci (1934)

‘School is the instrument through which intellectuals of various levels are elaborated. The complexity of the intellectual function in different states can be measured objectively by the number and gradation of specialised schools: the more extensive the “area” covered by education and the more numerous the “vertical” “levels” of schooling, the more complex is the cultural world, the civilisation, of a particular state.’

Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, pages 10-11.

‘The intellectuals are the dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government.’

Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, page 12.

‘Intellectuals of the urban type have grown up along with industry and are linked to its fortunes. … Their job is to articulate the relationship between the entrepreneur and the [proletarian] instrumental mass and to carry out the immediate execution of the production plan decided by the industrial general staff, controlling the elementary stages of work. On the whole, the average urban intellectuals are very standardised, while the top intellectuals are more and more identified with the industrial general staff itself.’

Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, page 14.

The Managerial Class – James Burnham (1941)

‘We may often recognise them as ‘production managers’, operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians; or, in government (for they are to be found in governmental enterprise just as in private enterprise) as administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on. … [The] managers … [are] those who already … are actually managing, on its technical side, the actual process of production, no matter what the legal and financial form – individual, corporate, governmental – of the process.’

James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, page 81.

‘The managers … naturally tend to identify … the salvation of mankind with their assuming control of society. Society can be run, they think, in more or less the same way that they know they … can run, efficiently and productively, a mass-production factory.’

James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, page 177.

The Entrepreneurs – Joseph Schumpeter (1942)

‘[The] … function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionise the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganising an industry and so on. … To undertake such new things is difficult and constitutes a distinct economic function, first, because they lie outside of the routine tasks which everybody understands and, secondly, because the environment resists in many ways that vary, according to the social conditions, from simple refusal to finance or to buy a new thing, to physical attack on the man who tries to produce it. To act with confidence beyond the range of familiar beacons and to overcome that resistance requires aptitudes that are present in only a small fraction of the population and that define the entrepreneurial type as well as the entrepreneurial function. This function does not essentially consist in either inventing anything or otherwise creating the conditions which the enterprise exploits. It consists in getting things done.’

Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, page 132.

The Inner Party – George Orwell (1948)

‘The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government. …

Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything … because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit.’

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, page 166.

The New Middle Class – C. Wright Mills (1951)

‘… the white-collar workers … are expert at dealing with people transiently and impersonally; they are masters of the commercial, professional and technical relationship. The one thing they do not do is live by making things; rather, they live off the social machineries that organise and coordinate the people who do make things. … They are the people who keep track; they man the paper routines involved in distributing what is produced. They provide technical and personal services, and they teach others the skills which they themselves practice, as well as all other skills transmitted by teaching.’

C. Wright Mills, White Collar, pages 65-66

. ‘The historic bases of the white-collar employees’ prestige ... have included the similarity of their place and type of work to those of the old middle-classes … Furthermore, the time taken to learn … [their] skills and the way in which they have been acquired by formal education and by close contact with the higher-ups in charge has been important. … White-collar employees are the assistants of authority; the power they exercise is a derived power, but they do exercise it.’

C. Wright Mills, White Collar, pages 73-74.

The Power Elite – C. Wright Mills (1956)

‘There is no longer, on one hand, an economy, and, on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and money-making. There is [instead] a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with military institutions and decisions. … As each of these domains has coincided with the others, … the leading men in each of the three domains of power

1– the warlords, the corporation chieftains, the political directorate

2– tend to come together, to form the power elite of America.’

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, pages 7-9.

‘All those who succeed in America … are likely to become involved in the world of celebrity. This world … has been created from above. Based upon nation-wide hierarchies of power and wealth, it is expressed by nation-wide means of communications. …

With the incorporation of the economy, the ascendancy of the military establishment, and the centralisation of the enlarged state, there have arisen the national elite, who, in occupying the command posts of the big hierarchies, have taken the spotlight of publicity and become the subjects of the intensive build-up. At the same time, with the elaboration of the national means of mass communications, the professional celebrities of the entertainment world have come fully and continuously into the national view.’

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, page 71.

The Organisation Man – William Whyte (1956)

‘These people only work for The Organisation. They are the … mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions. …

The corporation man is the most conspicuous example … [of how] the collectivisation so visible in the corporation has affected almost every field of work. Blood brother to the business trainee off to join Du Pont is the seminary student who will end up in the church hierarchy, the doctor headed for the corporate clinic, the physics PhD in a government laboratory, the intellectual on the foundation-sponsored team project, the engineering graduate in the huge drafting room at Lockheed, the young apprentice in a Wall Street law factory.

… Listen to them talk to each other over the front lawns of their suburbia and you cannot help but be struck by how well they grasp the common denominators which bind them.’

William Whyte, The Organisation Man, page 8.

‘Look at a cross section of [managers’] profiles and you will see three denominators shining through: extroversion, disinterest in the arts, and a cheerful acceptance of the status quo.’

William Whyte, The Organisation Man, page 183.

The New Class – Milovan Djilas (1957)

‘The ownership principles of the new class and membership in that class are the privileges of administration. This privilege extends from state administration and the administration of economic enterprises to that of sports and humanitarian organisations. Political, party, or so-called “general leadership” is executed by the core [of the new class].’

Milovan Djilas, The New Class, page 54.

‘Membership in the Communist [Vanguard] Party before the Revolution meant sacrifice. Being a professional revolutionary was one of its highest honours. Now that the party has consolidated its power, party membership means that one belongs to a privileged class. And at the core of the party are the all-powerful exploiters and masters.’

Milovan Djilas, The New Class, page 55.

The Specialists – Ralf Dahrendorf (1957)

‘In the enterprises of post-capitalist society, … [a] complex system of delegation of responsibility obliterates … the dividing line between positions of domination and subjection. … there are … groups that stubbornly resist allocation to one or the other quasi-group. One of these consists of the “staff” of the enterprise, the engineers, the chemists, physicists, lawyers, psychologists, and other specialists whose services have become an indispensable part of production in modern firms. … the class situation of specialists in the enterprise remains as uncertain as the class situation of intellectuals in society. They are neither superordinates nor subordinates; their positions seem to stand beyond the authority structure. Only insofar as they can be identified as (often indirect) helpers of management, can they be called a marginal part of the ruling class of the enterprise.’

Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society, page 255.

The New Class – J.K. Galbraith (1958)

‘The New Class is not exclusive. … Any individual whose adolescent situation is such that sufficient time and money are invested in his preparation, and who has at least the talents to carry him through the formal academic routine, can be a member. …

Some of the attractiveness of membership in the New Class … derives from a vicarious feeling of superiority … However, membership in the class unquestionably has other and more important rewards. Exemption from manual toil; escape from boredom and confining and severe routine; the chance to spend one’s life in clean and physically comfortable surroundings; and some opportunity for applying one’s thoughts to the day’s work …

This being so, there is every reason to conclude that the further and rapid expansion of this class should be … the major social goal of the [affluent] society.’

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, pages 275-276.

The Industrial Managers – Clark Kerr (1960)

‘Industrial managers, private or public, and their technical and professional associates … are the “vanguard [party]” of the future. It is they who largely create and apply the new technology, who determine the transformations in skills and responsibilities, who influence the impact of such changes upon the work force and who exercise leadership in a technological society.’

Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Frederick Harbison and Charles Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man, page 30.

‘Management … includes entrepreneurs, managers, administrators, engineers and professional specialists who hold the top positions in an enterprise. In this hierarchy, the organisation builder plays a critical role. He may be the owner of the business, a professional private manager or a government official. He is the keystone in the arch of management …’

Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Frederick Harbison and Charles Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man, page 134.

‘There is … no precise dividing line between the managerial group and the industrial labour force. … In some cases foremen are members of the management; in others they are the highest ranking members of the labouring class. … With this qualification, the working force may said to include the following: manual labour of all skill levels, [and] clerical workers … whereas administrators, professional employees, engineers, and scientists are clearly in the managerial category.’

Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Frederick Harbison and Charles Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man, page 165.

The Order-Givers – Cornelius Castoriadis (1961)

‘At the objective level, the transformation of capitalism is expressed in increasing bureaucratisation. The roots of this tendency are in production, but they extend and finally invade all sectors of social life. Concentration of capital and statification are but different aspects of the same phenomenon. …

The inherent objective … of bureaucratic capitalism is the construction of a totally hierarchical society in constant expansion, a sort of monstrous pyramid where the increasing alienation of men in labour will be “compensated” by a steady rise in the standard of living, all initiative remaining in the hands of the organisers. … The increasing bureaucratisation of all social activities only succeeds in extending into all social domains the conflict inherent in the division of society into order-givers and order-takers. … The inherent irrationality of capitalism remains but now finds expression in new and different ways.’

Paul Cardan [Cornelius Castoriadis], Modern Capitalism and Revolution, page 3.

The New Working Class – Serge Mallet (1963)

‘Workers employed in automated industries (or industries in the process of automation) have been called the “new working class”. In fact, this term covers two different types of wage earners, both born of new technical developments and both involved in this process of “integration in the firms”.

The new factory uses two types of workers who are still classified as manual workers. These are the foremen, loaders, operators, and preparers who are assigned to automated production units; and the maintenance workers, who are in charge of repairing and keeping watch over the machinery. ….

The other group, numerically greater, is not exclusively born of automation, but is partly due to the trend in modern industry to devote much time and effort to operations anterior to the classic production process (studies and research) and beyond it (commercialisation, market research, etc.). … The enormous development of research units has … created real intellectual production units, in which working conditions grow increasingly similar to those of a modern workshop, but devoid of physical strain, dirt and stink – though with the same planned timing and mechanisation of office work.’

Serge Mallet, The New Working Class, pages 66-68.

The Knowledge Workers – Peter Drucker (1966)

‘Modern society is a society of large organised institutions. In every one of them, including the armed services, the centre of gravity has shifted to the knowledge worker, the man who puts to work what he has between his ears rather than the brawn of his muscles or the skill of his hands.’

Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive, page 3.

‘The imposing system of measurements and tests which we have developed for manual work – from industrial engineering to quality control – is not applicable to knowledge work. … Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective. This is not capable of being measured by any of the yardsticks for manual work.

The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself towards performance and contribution, that is effectiveness.’

Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive, pages 3-4.

‘Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results. And for these, the size of the [administrative] group and the magnitude of the managerial job are not even symptoms.’

Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive, page 7.

The Educational and Scientific Estate – J.K. Galbraith (1967)

‘As the trade unions [of the industrial working class] retreat … into the shadows, a rapidly growing body of educators and research scientists emerges. This group connects at the edges with scientists and engineers within the [corporate] technostructure and with civil servants, journalists, writers and artists outside. Most directly nurtured by the industrial system are the educators and scientists in the schools, colleges, universities and research institutions. They stand in relation to the industrial system much as did the banking and financial community to the earlier stages of industrial development. … Education … has now the greatest solemnity of social purpose.’

The educational and scientific estate, like the financial community before it, acquires prestige from the productive agent that it supplies. Potentially, at least, this is also a source of power.’

John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, pages 286-287.

The Technocrats – Alain Touraine (1969)

‘Technocrats are not technicians but managers, whether they belong to the administration of the State or to big businesses which are closely bound, by reason of their very importance, to the agencies of political decision-making.’

Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society, pages 49-50.

‘If property was the criterion of membership of the former dominant classes, the new dominant class [of technocrats] is defined by knowledge and a certain level of education.’

Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society, page 51.

‘The principal opposition between … [the] two great classes … does not result from the fact one possesses wealth and property and the other does not. It comes about because the dominant classes dispose of knowledge and control information.’

Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society, page 61.

‘… today’s programmed society … [is] dominated by the new conflict between technocrats and consumers …’

Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society, page 192.

The Hippies – Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin (1969)

‘It was a phenomenal burst of human energy and spirit that came and went like a tidal wave up there in … Woodstock, Aquarian Exposition, Music Festival, Happening, Monster, or whatever you called the fuckin thing. I took a trip to our future. That’s how I saw it. Functional anarchy, primitive tribalism, gathering of the tribes. Right on!’

Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation, page 13.

‘Like almost everyone in the left, I have a genuine suspicion about the mass media, especially television. [However] … some day real soon most families in [the American] PIG NATION will be able through their TV sets to have a computer at their disposal … the most revolutionary means of communications since language itself was invented.’

Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation, page 105.

‘Our youth ghettos must have a communal economy so we can live with one another, trading and bartering what we need. A free community without money.

We will organise our own record companies, publishing houses and tourist companies so profit will come back into the community for free food, free rent, free medical care, free space, free dope, free living, community bail funds.

Thousands of us have moved from the cities into the country to create communes. Dig it! The communes will bring food into the city in exchange for services which the urban communes will bring to the country.’

Jerry Rubin, Do It!, page 236.

‘The world will become one big commune with free food and housing, everything shared. All watches and clocks will be destroyed. … There will be no such crime as “stealing” because everything will be free. The [US military’s] Pentagon [headquarters] will be replaced by an LSD experimental farm. There will be no more schools or churches because the entire world will become one church and school. People will farm in the morning, make music in the afternoon and fuck wherever and whenever they want to.’

Jerry Rubin, Do It!, page 256.

The Produsumers – Décio Piganatari (1969)

‘The collage is the provisional syntax of creative synthesis, a mass syntax. The collage is the assembly of simultaneity, a general totem. … Technology is achieving such sophistication that it starts to require the year zero of a NEW BARBARISM to unblock its pores. Society is ever more rich, life is ever more poor. … Today’s models of consumption are the models of production of 40 years ago … This is the time of PRODUSUMERISM. The student is for the university what the worker is for the factory. The student is the information worker. Students in the [political and ideological] superstructure are still copying the old models of struggle of workers in the [economic] base. [This is the time of] PRODUSUMERISM. The world of consumption is superseded by the world of information, where the decisive battle will take place. NEW BARBARISM: an open field for the new models of the information war. The elites, especially the academic ones, are rotten with stupidity: every new [produsumer] barbarian knows more than them. It is not necessary to wait until everyone owns a motor car for the new culture to be born. Ownership is for the world of things, culture is for the world of signs. The artist is a language designer, even if – and especially if – they’re marginalised. This is the [time of the] artistic guerilla. … Collective joy is the final vindication: intimacy in deep harmony. Beyond the ciphers. And against the [tyranny of the] $$.’

Décio Pignatari, Contracomunicacao, page 27.

The Scientific Intellectual Labourers – Ernest Mandel (1972)

‘Economically, the … main characteristics of the third technological revolution [of nuclear energy, cybernetics and automation] can be discerned: A qualitative acceleration in … the displacement of living by dead labour. …

A shift of living labour power still engaged in the process of production from the actual treatment of raw materials to preparatory or supervisory functions. … The scientists, laboratory workers, projectors and draughtsmen who work in the forecourt of the actual production process also perform … surplus value-creating labour. …’

Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, pages 194-195.

‘The age of the third technological revolution is necessarily an epoch of [the] unprecedented fusion of science, technology and production. … In increasingly automated production there is no further place for unskilled factory or office workers. A massive and generalised transformation of manual into intellectual work is not only made possible, but also economically and socially essential by automation.’

Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, page 215.

‘The social position of all those social groups that occupationally participate in supervising the extraction of surplus-value from the commodity labour-power or the preservation of constant capital by labour-power, typically induces a general identification with the class interests of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. It might even be said that such identification is a precondition of the performance of their specific function … [within the] factory or society. … By contrast, intellectually qualified workers engaged in the immediate process of production or reproduction, or those whose social function does not necessarily come into collision with the class interest of wage-earners – for example, health-insurance doctors or social workers employed by a local authority – are … more likely to align themselves with the … proletariat.’

Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, page 265.

The Knowledge Class – Daniel Bell (1973)

‘If the dominant figures of the past hundred years have been the entrepreneur, the businessman and the industrial executive, the “new men” are the scientists, the mathematicians, the economists and the engineers of the new intellectual technology. …

In the post-industrial society, … the crucial decisions regarding the growth of the economy and its balance will come from government, but they will be based on the government’s sponsorship of research and development, of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis; the making of decisions … will have an increasingly technical character. The husbanding of talent and the spread of educational and intellectual institutions will become a prime concern of society; not only the best talents but eventually the entire complex of prestige and status will be rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities.’

Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, pages 344-345.

‘If one turns … to the societal structure of the post-industrial society … two conclusions are evident. First, the major class of the new society is primarily a professional class, based on knowledge rather than property. But second, the control system of the society is lodged not in a successor-occupational class but in the political order, and the question who manages the political order is an open one. …

In terms of status (esteem and recognition, and possibly income), the knowledge class may be the highest class in the new society but in the nature of that structure there is no intrinsic reason for this class, on the basis of some coherent or corporate identity, to become a new economic interest class, or a new political class which would bid for power.’

Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, page 374-375.

The Intermediate Layers – Harry Braverman (1974)

‘Among … [the] intermediate groupings are parcelled out the specialised bits of knowledge and delegated authority without which the machinery of production, distribution and administration would cease to operate. … Their conditions of employment are affected by the need of top management to have within its orbit buffer layers, responsive and “loyal” subordinates, transmission agents for the exercise of control and the collection of information, so that management does not confront unaided a hostile or indifferent [working class] mass. … All in all, … those in this area of capitalist employment enjoy, in greater or lesser degree depending upon their specific place in the hierarchy, the privileges of exemption from the worst features of the proletarian situation, including, as a rule, significantly higher scales of pay. …

This “new middle class” … occupies its intermediate position not because it is outside the process of increasing capital [as with the old middle class], but because, as part of this process, it takes its characteristics from both sides. Not only does it receive its petty share in the prerogatives and rewards of capital, but it also bears the mark of the proletarian condition.’

Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital, pages 406-407.

The New Petty-Bourgeoisie – Nicos Poulantzas (1974)

‘[The] … engineers and technicians … [of the new petty-bourgeoisie] are often themselves responsible for the work of management and supervision; they directly control the ‘efficiency’ of the workers and the achievement of output norms. …

Their mental labour, separated from manual labour, represents the exercise of political relations in the despotism of the factory, legitimised by, and articulated to, the monopolisation and secrecy of knowledge, i.e. the reproduction of the ideological relations of domination and subordination.’

Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, pages 239-240.

‘The various [new] petty-bourgeois agents each possess, in relation to those subordinate to them, a fragment of the fantastic secret of knowledge that legitimises the delegated authority that they exercise. This is the very meaning of [bureaucratic] ‘hierarchy’.’

Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, page 275.

‘[The] … petty-bourgeois ideological sub-ensemble is a terrain of struggle and a particular battlefield between bourgeois ideology and working-class ideology, though with the specific intervention of peculiarly petty-bourgeois elements.’

Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, page 289.

The Professional-Managerial Class – Barbara & John Ehrenreich (1975)

‘We define the Professional-Managerial Class [PMC] as consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labour may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.

Their role in the process of reproduction may be more or less explicit, as with workers who are directly connected with social control or with the production and propagation of ideology (e.g. teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, writers of advertising copy and TV scripts, etc.). Or it may be hidden within the process of production, as is the case with the middle-level administrators and managers, engineers, and other technical workers whose functions … are essentially determined by the need to preserve the capitalist relations of production. Thus we assert that these occupational groups – cultural workers, managers, engineers and scientists, etc. – share a common function in the broad social division of labour and a common relation to the economic foundations of society.

The PMC … includes people with a wide range of occupations, skills, income levels, power and prestige. The boundaries separating it from the ruling class above and the working class below are fuzzy. … occupation is not the sole determinant of class (nor even the sole determinant of the relation to the means of production).’

Barbara & John Ehrenreich, ‘The Professional-Managerial Class’, pages 12-13.

The Proletarianised Professionals – Stanley Aronowitz (1975)

‘As the logic of capital requires a more minute division of labour, more sophisticated integrative mechanisms, enlarged state intervention into the economy, and a larger army of administrative workers, the size of the middle strata of professionals grows. At the same time, those lacking power and authority within the administrative and state sectors also grow. The army of clerical workers, operators of duplicating, accounting, bookkeeping, and other machines accompanies the employment of computer professionals, accountants, designers, and other professionals.

Although clerical workers such as typists, secretaries and office machine operators are certainly part of the working class, their position is by no means unambiguous in the social structure. … Head offices of large corporations and state bureaucracies are apparatuses of bourgeois ideological hegemony as well as social domination. The institutions of schools, health care, and administration … function to reproduce capitalist social relations and culture, as well as facilitate the accumulation and reproduction of capital. …

What is more, often the clerical functions overlap with those of technicians and professionals. The number of “managers” of clerical workers is extremely high in proportion to those who are designated as “clerical” employees. … This tendency is particularly pronounced in the telephone and other branches of the communications industry where the proportion of supervisors to workers is about one to three. In addition, many of those designated in the job categories as technicians and professionals find that, as mechanisation replaces a large number of tasks that were previously skilled aspects of their professions, these college educated, professionally trained employees are reduced to clerical workers.’

Stanley Aronowitz, ‘The Professional-Managerial Class or Middle Strata’, page 236.

The Post-Modernists – Jean-François Lyotard (1979)

‘It is widely accepted that knowledge has become the principle force of production over the last few decades; this has already had a noticeable effect on the composition of the work force of the most highly developed countries ... In the post-industrial and post-modern age, science will maintain and no doubt strengthen its pre-eminence in the arsenal of productive capacities of the nation-states.’

Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition, page 5.

‘[The post-modern] … orientation corresponds to the course that the evolution of social interaction is currently taking; the temporary contract is in practice supplanting permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family, and international domains, as well as in political affairs. This evolution is of course ambiguous: the temporary contract is favoured by the system due to its greater flexibility, lower cost, and the creative turmoil of its accompanying motivations … We should be happy that the tendency toward the temporary contract is ambiguous …This bears witness to the existence of another goal with the system: knowledge of [multiple] language games as such and the decision to assume responsibility for their rules and effects. …

We are … in a position to understand how the computerisation of society affects this problematic. It could become the “dream” instrument for controlling and regulating the market system, extended to include knowledge itself and governed exclusively by the performativity principle. … But it could also aid groups discussing metaprescriptives by supplying them with the information which they usually lack for making knowledgeable decisions. The line to follow for the second of these two paths is, in principle, quite simple: give the public free access to the [computer] memory and data banks.’

Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition, pages 66-67.

The Socialised Workers – Antonio Negri (1980)

‘This [new] proletariat is fully social … and it has extended the contradiction/antagonism against capitalist accumulation of profit from the factory area to the whole of society. It has been responsible for upsetting and destabilising the whole circuit from production to reproduction. And it has developed the contradiction of the social conditions of the reproduction of labour-power as an obstacle against capital accumulation. … It has above all represented a new quality of labour. This … represents a mobile sort of labour force, both horizontally and vertically, a labour-power which is abstract, and which projects new needs. … For this … proletariat, wage gains went hand in hand with advances in the social wage and the conquest of free time.’

Antonio Negri, ‘The Crisis of the Crisis-State’, page 183.

‘… when the whole of life becomes production, capitalist time measures only that which it directly commands. And socialised labour-power tends to unloose itself from command, insofar as it proposes a life-alternative

– and thus projects a different time for its own existence, both in the present and in the future. When all life-time becomes production-time, who measures whom? The two conceptions of time and life come into direct conflict in a separation which becomes increasingly deep and rigidly structured.’

Antonio Negri, ‘Archaeology and Project’, page 220.

‘The … [historical] process, concomitant with those of individual marginalisation and collective socialisation, has brought about a conjunction between (a) the refusal of labour-power to make itself available as a commodity (… the effect of individual marginalisation and the collapse of any relationship between “job” and “skill”) and (b) the socialisation of this mode of class behaviour.’

Antonio Negri, ‘Archaeology and Project’, page 223.

The White-Collar Proletarians – Michael Kelly (1980)

‘Market Situation. Income proletarianisation … the incomes of white-collar workers have fallen relatively or absolutely [compared] to those of manual workers … Different sources of income … the incomes of non-manual workers are derived increasingly from their own productive labour and less from the productive labour of others … Feminisation … the white-collar workforce is becoming increasingly feminine in character … Social origin … the white-collar labour force is becoming increasingly “proletarian” in origin as children of manual workers move into non-manual occupations …

Work Situation Bureaucratisation … as large-scale organisations become increasingly big, they become increasingly bureaucratic and the employee loses his identity as a specialist or professional … Mechanisation and automation … with changes in the division of labour brought about by technological advances, the functions and nature of clerical work have changed, producing routinisation and repetitiveness …

Michael Kelly, White-Collar Proletarians, page 23.

The Nomads – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980)

‘The more the worldwide [capitalist] axiomatic installs high industry and highly industrialised agriculture at the periphery [of the world economy], provisionally reserving for the centre so-called post-industrial activities (automation, electronics, information technologies, the conquest of space, overarmament, etc.), the more it installs peripheral zones of underdevelopment inside the centre, internal Third Worlds, internal Souths. “Masses” of the population are abandoned to erratic work (subcontracting, temporary work, or work in the underground economy), and their official subsistence is assured only by State allocations and wages subject to interruption. … In enslavement and the central dominance of constant capital … labour seems to have splintered into two directions: intensive surplus labour that no longer even takes the route of labour, and extensive labour that has become erratic and floating. … The opposition between the [capitalist] axiomatic and the [nomadic] flows it does not succeed in mastering becomes all the more accentuated.’

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, page 469.

‘We can say of the nomads … they do not move. They are nomads by dint of not moving, not migrating, of holding a smooth space that they refuse to leave … To think is to voyage … It is not a question of returning to … the ancient nomads. The confrontation between the smooth [nomad space] and the striated [space of the State apparatus is] … under way today, running in the most varied directions.’

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, page 482.

The Prosumers – Alvin & Heidi Toffler (1980)

‘Above all, … Third Wave [post-industrial] civilisation begins to heal the historic breach between producer and consumer, giving rise to the “prosumer” economics of tomorrow. For this reason, among many, it could – with some intelligent help from us – turn out to be the first truly human civilisation in recorded history.’

Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, pages 24-25.

‘Many of the same electronic devices we will use in the home to do work for pay will also make it possible to produce goods or services for our own use. In this system, the prosumer, who dominated in First Wave [agricultural] societies, is brought back into the centre of economic action – but on a Third Wave [post-industrial], high-technology basis.’

Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, page 286.

‘Given home computers, given seeds genetically designed for urban or even apartment agriculture, given cheap home tools for working plastic, given new materials, adhesives, and membranes, and given free technical advice available over the telephone lines with instructions perhaps flickering on the TV or computer screen, it becomes possible to create lifestyles that are more rounded and varied, less monotonous, more creatively satisfying, and less market-intensive than those that typified Second Wave [industrial] civilisation.’

Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, pages 289-290.

The Post-Industrial Proletarians – André Gorz (1980)

‘This … [social group] encompasses all those who have been expelled from production by the abolition of work, or whose capacities are underemployed as a result of the industrialisation (in this case, the automation and computerisation) of intellectual work.’

André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, page 68.

‘[The] … traditional working class is now no more than a privileged minority. The majority of the population now belongs to the post-industrial neo-proletariat which, with no job security or definite class identity, fills the area of probationary, contracted, casual, temporary and part-time employment. In the not too distant future, jobs such as these will be largely eliminated by automation. Even now, their … requirements bear little relation to the knowledge and skills offered by schools and universities. The neo-proletariat is generally over-qualified for the jobs it finds.’

André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, page 69.

‘Whether they work in a bank, the civil service, a cleaning agency or a factory, neo-proletarians are basically non-workers temporarily doing something that means nothing to them. They do “any old thing” which “anyone” can do, provisionally engaged in temporary and meaningless work.’

André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, pages 70-71.

The Entrepreneurs – George Gilder (1981)

‘Entrepreneurial learning is of a deeper kind than is taught in schools, or acquired in the controlled experiments of social or physical science, or gained in the experience of socialist economies. For entrepreneurial experiments are also adventures, with the future livelihood of the investor at stake. He participates with a heightened consciousness and passion and an alertness and diligence that greatly enhance his experience of learning. The experiment may reach its highest possibilities, and its crises and surprises may be exploited to the utmost.’

George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty, page 35.

‘Material progress is ineluctably elitist: it makes the rich richer and increases their number, exalting the few extraordinary men who can produce wealth over the democratic masses who consume it. Material progress depends upon the expansion of opportunity: geniuses identify themselves chiefly through their works rather by their inheritance or test scores. Material progress is difficult: it requires from its protagonists long years of diligence and sacrifice, devotion and risk that can be elicited only with high rewards, not the “average return on capital.” … Material progress is inimical to scientific economics: it cannot be explained or foreseen in mechanistic or mathematical terms.’

George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty, page 273.

‘Some are scientists, some are artists, some are craftsmen; most are in business. … They are not always kind or temperate, rarely elegant or tall, only occasionally glib or manifestly leaders of men. … As immigrants, many deliberately seek an orphan’s fate, and toil to launch a dynasty. … Mostly outcasts, exiles, mother’s boys, rejects, warriors, they learn early the lessons of life, the knowledge of pain, the ecstasy of struggle. …

The so-called means of production are impotent to generate wealth and progress without the creative men of production, the entrepreneurs.’

George Gilder, The Spirit of Enterprise, pages 17-19.

‘In business as in art, the individual vision prevails over the corporate leviathan; the small company … confounds the industrial policy; the entrepreneur dominates the hierarch. The hubristic determinisms of the academy and the state – the secular monoliths of science and planning, the imperial sovereigns of force and finance – give way to one man working in the corner of a lab or a library.’

George Gilder, The Spirit of Enterprise, page 243.

The Venture Capitalists – John Naisbitt (1982)

‘American entrepreneurship has gotten a big boost in recent years with the abrupt increase in venture-capital money. … What was behind the impressive upsurge in venture capital? For one thing, small business can thank [US] government policy – in 1978, the capital-gains tax was reduced from 49 to 28 percent. That certainly helped. …

But there are other reasons behind the new abundance in venture capital: More and more people are learning that entrepreneurship pays off. Sophisticated venture capitalists are willing to take a calculated risk in return for a possible 20 to 25 percent return. When stock market returns average below 10 percent and even money-market funds can barely keep pace with inflation, backing new businesses starts to look more attractive. …

Furthermore, venture capitalists can now choose from a great number of more sophisticated, more experienced entrepreneurs who are better managers and whose ideas are well thought-out.

All totalled, entrepreneurial self-help is an idea whose time has come again, and the 1970s were its debut decade.’

John Naisbitt, Megatrends, pages 147-148.

The Hackers – Steven Levy (1984)

‘[The] … hackers – those computer programmers and designers who regard computing as the most important thing in the world – … were adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, artists … and the ones who most clearly saw why the computer was truly a revolutionary tool. … As I talked to these digital explorers … I found a common element … It was a philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralisation, and getting your hands on machines at all costs – to improve the machine, to improve the world. This Hacker Ethic is their gift to us: something with value even to those of us with no interest at all in computers.’

Steven Levy, Hackers, page 7.

‘The people in [the] Homebrew [Computer Club] were a mélange of professionals too passionate to leave computing at their jobs, amateurs transfixed by the possibilities of technology, and techno-cultural guerrillas devoted to overthrowing an oppressive society in which government, business, and especially IBM had relegated computers to a despised Priesthood [of authorised users].’

Steven Levy, Hackers, page 205.

The Cyborgs – Donna Haraway (1985)

‘The “New Industrial Revolution” is producing a new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities. The extreme mobility of capital and the emerging international division of labour are intertwined with the emergence of new collectivities, and the weakening of familiar groupings. … In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women’s lives have been structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age. The ethnic and racial diversity of women in Silicon Valley structures a microcosm of conflicting differences in culture, family, religion, education, and language.’

Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, page 166.

‘”Networking” is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy – weaving is for oppositional cyborgs.’

Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, page 170.

‘Cyborg imagery … is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the super-savers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.’

Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, page 181.

The Symbolic Analysts – Robert Reich (1991)

‘Included in this category are the problem-solving, [problem]-identifying, and [strategic-]brokering of many people who call themselves research scientists, design engineers, software engineers, civil engineers, biotechnology engineers, sound engineers, public relations executives, investment bankers, lawyers, real estate developers, and even a few creative accountants. Also included is much of the work done by management consultants, financial consultants, tax consultants, energy consultants, agricultural consultants, armaments consultants, architectural consultants, management information specialists, organisation development specialists, strategic planners, corporate headhunters, and systems analysts. Also: advertising executives and marketing strategists, art directors, architects, cinematographers, film editors, production designers, publishers, writers and editors, journalists, musicians, television and film producers, and even university professors.

Symbolic analysts solve, identify, and broker problems by manipulating symbols. They simplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and then, eventually, transformed back into reality. The manipulations are done with analytical tools, sharpened by experience. The tools may be mathematical algorithms, legal arguments, financial gimmicks, scientific principles, psychological insights about how to persuade or to amuse, systems of induction or deduction, or any other set of techniques for doing conceptual puzzles.’

Robert Reich, The Work of Nations, pages 177-178.

The Virtual Class – Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein (1994)

‘The economic base of the virtual class is the entire communications industry – everywhere it reaches. … The most complete representative of the virtual class is the visionary capitalist who is constituted by all of its contradictions and who, therefore, secretes its ideological hype. The rest of the class tends to split the contradictions: the visionless-cynical-business capitalists and the perhaps visionary, perhaps skill-orientated, perhaps indifferent techno-intelligentsia of cognitive scientists, engineers, computer scientists, videogame developers, and all the other communication specialists, ranged in hierarchies, but all dependent for their economic support on the drive to virtualisation. Whatever contradictions there are within the virtual class – that is, the contradictions stemming from the confrontation of bourgeois and proletarian – the class as a whole supports the drive into cyberspace through the wired world.’

Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein, Data Trash, page 15.

‘The virtual class wants to appropriate emergent technologies for purposes of authoritarian political control over cyberspace. It wants to drag technotopia back to the age of the primitive politics of predatory capitalism.’

Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein, Data Trash, page 16.

The Netizens – Michael & Ronda Hauben (1995)

‘My research demonstrated that there were people active as members of the network, which the words net citizen did not precisely represent. The word citizen suggests a geographic or national definition of social membership. The word Netizen reflects the new non-geographically based social membership. …

This definition is used to describe people who care about Usenet and the bigger Net and work towards building the [system’s] cooperative and collective nature which benefits the larger world. … As more and more people join the online community and contribute towards the nurturing of the Net and toward the development of a great shared social wealth, the ideas and values of Netizenship spread.’

Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, Netizens, pages x-xi.

The Digerati – John Brockman (1996)

‘The “digerati” … are a cyber elite … they constitute a critical mass of doers, thinkers, and writers, connected in ways they may not even appreciate, who have a tremendous influence on the emerging communication revolution surrounding the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Although they all happen to be American, their activities have a worldwide impact.’

John Brockman, Digerati, page xxxi.

‘Many of the brightest people in recent years have gone into computing (hardware, networking, software, Internet, convergence media). The cutting edge is exploring new communications, such as the World Wide Web, through the use of computers … the digerati … (as well as others) … are driving this revolution. … This … group of people … are reinventing culture and civilisation.’

John Brockman, Digerati, page xxxii.

The Multipreneurs – Tom Gorman (1996)

‘To become a multipreneur you must realise that your economic value depends upon your ability to make or save money for others and your ability to add value to processes. Your economic value will not depend upon your position, seniority or connections. You must therefore train yourself to see opportunities where others see problems, dislocations, and barriers. You must choose your assignments on the basis of the skills you can learn as well as those you can apply. You must develop your interpersonal and technological skills to a high level so that you can make things happen rather than hope they will happen.’

Tom Gorman, Multipreneuring, pages 11-12.

‘In multipreneuring you develop a portfolio of jobs, projects, businesses, and income streams as well as a portfolio of knowledge, skills, contacts, and credentials. Like an investor, you must actively manage your portfolio. This entails balancing risks and returns, desires and obligations, the future and the present. So your employment portfolio should include … movement toward your deepest dreams as an artist, athlete or public servant or world traveller, as well as the work that pays the bills (may the two someday be one for you). It should include skill-[building], contact-[building], and knowledge-building activities for your next career move and the move after that, as well as activities that add high value to your current situation.’

Tom Gorman, Multipreneuring, page 258.

The Immaterial Labourers – Maurizio Lazzarato (1996)

‘All the characteristics of the post-industrial economy … are heightened within the form of “immaterial” production properly defined: audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities, etc.

The activities … of immaterial labour … are the result of a synthesis of various types of savoir-faire (those of intellectual activities, as regards the cultural-informational content; those of manual activities for the ability to put together creativity, imagination and technical and manual labour; and that of entrepreneurial activities for that capacity of management of their social relations and of structuration of the social cooperation of which they are a part).’

Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘General Intellect’, page 2.

‘It is immaterial labour which continually innovates the form and the conditions of communication (and thus of work and consumption). It gives form and materialises needs, images, the tastes of consumers and these products become in their turn powerful producers of needs, of images and of tastes.’

Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘General Intellect’, page 3.

‘Waged labour and direct subjugation (to organisation) are no longer the principle form of the contractual relationship between capitalist and worker; polymorphous autonomous work emerges as the dominant form, a kind of “intellectual worker” who is himself an entrepreneur, inserted within a market that is mobile and within networks that are changeable in time and space.’

Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘General Intellect’, page 4.

The Digital Artisans – Richard Barbrook and Pit Schultz (1997)

‘For those of us who want to be truly creative in hypermedia and computing, the only practical solution is to become digital artisans. The rapid spread of personal computing and now the Net are the technological expressions of this desire for autonomous work. Escaping from the petty controls of the shopfloor and the office, we can rediscover the individual independence enjoyed by craftspeople during protoindustrialism. … We create virtual artifacts for money and for fun. We work both in the money-commodity economy and in the gift economy of the Net. When we take a contract, we are happy to earn enough to pay for our necessities and luxuries through our labours as digital artisans. At the same time, we also enjoy exercising our abilities for our own amusement and for the wider community. Whether working for money or for fun, we always take pride in our craft skills. We take pleasure in pushing the cultural and technical limits as far forward as possible. We are the pioneers of the modern.’

Richard Barbrook and Pit Schultz, ‘The Digital Artisans Manifesto’, page 53.

The Digital Citizen – Jon Katz (1997)

‘… there is indeed a distinct group of Digital Citizens. … they’re knowledgeable, tolerant, civic-minded, and radically committed to change. Profoundly optimistic about the future, they’re convinced that technology is a force for good and that our free-market economy functions as a powerful engine of progress. … they … view our existing political system positively, even patriotically. … The Internet … encompasses many of the most informed and participatory citizens we have ever had or are likely to have. … [The] profile of this rising group … [is] based on … [the people who] use email and … have access to a laptop, a cell phone, a beeper and a home computer.’

Jon Katz, ‘The Digital Citizen’, page 71.

The Swarm Capitalists – Kevin Kelly (1998)

‘The internet model has many lessons for the new economy but perhaps the most important is its embrace of dumb swarm power. The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment. When things happen fast and furious, they tend to route around central control. By interlinking many simple parts into a loose confederation, control devolves from the centre to the lowest or outermost points which collectively keep things on course.’

Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, page 16.

‘Numerous small things connected together into a network generate tremendous power. But this swarm power will need some kind of minimal governance from the top to maximise its usefulness. Appropriate oversight depends upon the network. In a firm, leadership is supervision; in social networks, government; in technical networks; standards and codes.’

Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, page 18.

‘The future of technology is networks. Networks large, wide, deep, and fast. Electrified networks of all types will cover our planet and their complex nodes will shape our economy and colour our lives. … Those who obey the logic of the net, and who understand that we are entering into a realm with new rules, will have a keen advantage in the new economy.’

Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, page 160.

The New Independents – Charlie Leadbeater and Kate Oakley (1999)

‘The [New] Independents … are a driving force of … [economic] growth. A large and growing share of employment in … [the creative] industries is accounted for by the self-employed, free-lancers and micro-businesses. These new Independents are often producers, designers, retailers and promoters all at the same time. They do not fit into neat categories. The Independents thrive on informal networks through which they organize work, often employing friends and former classmates. Although some are ambitious entrepreneurs, many want their businesses to stay small because they want to retain their independence and their focus on their creativity. Yet that does not mean they see themselves as artists who deserve public subsidy. They want to make their own way in the market. They have few tangible assets other than a couple of computers. They usually work from home or from nondescript and often run-down workshops. Their main assets are their creativity, skill, ingenuity and imagination.’

Charlie Leadbeater and Kate Oakley, The Independents, page 11.

‘They blur the demarcation line between work and non-work. As consumption and leisure are inputs into the creation of cultural products, the corollary is that periods not at work – leisure, relaxation, entertainment – can be as important as periods at work hunched over a computer terminal. Both contribute to delivering a creative product. Many of these independents say their best ideas come to them when they are not at work.’

Charlie Leadbeater and Kate Oakley, The Independents, page 24.

The Elancers – Helen Wilkinson (1999)

‘More and more organisations are out-sourcing work, and are reliant on a new breed of flexible, independent workers, otherwise known as the elancer. Elancers lack the support structures of a typical head office environment and are reliant on the Internet to organize their work and communicate with colleagues. They tend to be self-employed, mobile consultants, freelancers, contractors, even remote workers for large organisations. … Elancers are change agents, challenging traditional ways of working with their unique energy and spirit – something we call elancentricity. … Join this exciting new community and help map the new terrain that is the elancescape.’

Elancentric, ‘Project Description’.

The Multitude – Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (2000)

‘With the computerisation of production today … the heterogeneity of concrete labour has tended to be reduced, and the worker is increasingly further removed from the object of his or her labour. The labour of computerised tailoring and the labour of computerised weaving may involve exactly the same concrete practices – that is, manipulation of symbols and information. … The computer proposes itself … as the universal tool … through which all activities might pass. Through the computerisation of production, then, labour tends towards the position of abstract labour.’

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, page 292.

‘Immaterial labour immediately involves social interaction and cooperation. In other words, the cooperative aspect of immaterial labour is not imposed or organised from the outside, as it was in previous forms of labour, but rather, cooperation is completely immanent to the labouring activity itself. … Today productivity, wealth, and the creation of social surpluses take the form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks.’

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, page 294.

‘The mode of production of the multitude reappropriates wealth from capital and also constructs new wealth, articulated with the powers of science and social knowledge through cooperation. …. Private property of the means of production today, in the era of the hegemony of cooperative and immaterial labour, is only a putrid and tyrannical obsolescence. The tools of production tend to be recomposed in collective subjectivity and in the collective intelligence and affect of the workers; entrepreneurship tends to be organised by the cooperation of subjects in [the] general intellect. … The multitude is biopolitical self-organisation.’

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, pages 410-411.

The New Barbarians – Ian Angell (2000)

‘Make way for the barbarians (old and new), the opportunists awaiting their chance to hijack the future, and form a new order. … They are the press and media barons, the market manipulators, international businesspeople, international terrorists, ‘downsized’ states, criminal conspiracies, drugs barons, neo-colonialist non-governmental organisations, economic mercenaries, financial plutocrats, religious and political fundamentalists, amoral individualists: the new you and the new me? They are the power brokers, now cut free from the constraints of national boundaries by the new communication technologies. … The barbarians know that their time is coming, for natural selection is on their side; history is on their side.’

Ian Angell, The New Barbarian Manifesto, page 26.

The Bobos (Bourgeois Bohemians) – David Brooks (2000)

‘In this era, ideas and knowledge are at least as vital to economic success as natural resources and finance capital. … So the people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products. These are highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians. Or, to take the first two letters of each word, they are Bobos.’

David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, pages 10-11.

‘Work … becomes a vocation, a calling, a metier. And the weird thing is that when employees start thinking like artists and activists, they actually work harder for the company. … if work is a form of self-expression or a social mission, then you never want to stop. You are driven by a relentless urge to grow, to learn, to feel more alive.’

David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, page 135.

‘Bobo businesspeople have created a corporate style attuned to the information age, with its emphasis on creativity, flat hierarchies, flexibility and open expression. It’s simply impossible to argue with the unparalleled success of America’s information age industries over the past decade.’

David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, page 269.

The Cognitariat – Franco Bifo Berardi (2001)

MF: In your new book, ‘The Factory of Unhappiness’ you describe a class formation, the ‘cognitariat’– a conflation of cognitive worker and proletarian ... You’ve also previously used the idea of the ‘Virtual Class’. What are the qualities of the cognitariat and how might they be distinguished from this slightly higher strata depicted by Kroker and Weinstein in Data Trash?

Bifo: I like to refer to the concept of virtual class, which is a class that does not actually exist. It is only the abstraction of the fractal ocean of productive micro-actions of the cognitive workers. It is a useful concept, but it does not comprehend the existence (social and bodily) of those people who perform virtual tasks. But the social existence of virtual workers is not virtual, the sensual body of the virtual worker is not virtual. So I prefer to speak about cognitive proletariat (cognitariat) in order to emphasise the material (I mean physical, psychological, neurological) disease of the workers involved in the net-economy.

Matthew Fuller, ‘Bifo/Berardi, interview on ‘The Factory of Unhappiness’’.

The Free Agents – Daniel Pink (2001)

‘Legions of Americans, and increasingly citizens of other countries as well, are abandoning one of the Industrial Revolution’s most enduring legacies – the “job” – and forging new ways to work. They’re becoming self-employed knowledge workers, proprietors of home-based businesses, temps and permatemps, freelancers and e-lancers, independent contractors and independent professionals, micropreneurs and infopreneurs, part-time consultants, interim executives, on-call troubleshooters, and full-time soloists. And many others who hold what are still nominally “jobs” are doing so under terms closer in spirit to free agency than traditional employment. They’re telecommuting. They’re hopping from company to company. They’re forming ventures which are legally their employers, but whose prospects depend largely on their own individual efforts. And they’re swapping, or being forced to swap, steady salaries for pay-for-performance agreements that compensate them in commissions, stock options and bonuses. … to truly understand where the economy is heading, you need to get to know free agents – who they are, what they do, how they work, and why they’ve made this choice.’

Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation, page 11.

‘Diversification – that is, an independent worker spreading her risk across a portfolio of projects, clients, skills, and customers – is the best hedging strategy. … Today anyone who holds a job and isn’t looking for a side gig – or crafting a business plan, writing a screen play, or setting up shop on eBay – is out of touch. Moonlighting is a way to diversify your human capital investments – and hedge against the risk of your company collapsing or your job disappearing. … In some sense, we’re all moonlighters, because in every sense, we’re all risk managers.’

Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation, page 93.

The Cybertariat – Ursula Huws (2001)

‘… across the … workforce an extraordinary and unprecedented convergence has been taking place. From tele-sales staff to typesetters, from indexers to insurance underwriters, from librarians to ledger clerks, from planning inspectors to pattern-cutters, a large and increasing proportion of daily work time is spent identically: sitting with one hand poised over a keyboard and the other dancing back and forth from keys to mouse. Facing these workers on the screen, framed in pseudo bas relief, are ugly grey squares labelled, in whatever the local language, “File”, “Edit”, “View”, “Tools”, “Format”, “Window”, or “Help”, the ghastly spoor of some aesthetically challenged employee of Microsoft of the late 1980s.’

Ursula Huws, The Making of a Cybertariat, page 165.

‘The fact that skills are now generic has made it easier to skip laterally from job to job, company to company, industry to industry. But by the same token each worker has also become more easily dispensable, more easily replaceable; thus the new opportunities also constitute new threats. The combination of this new occupational mobility with the huge expansion of the potential labour pool has also made it much more difficult to build stable group identities based on shared skills. … Any investment of time and effort in learning a new software package may be wiped out in a matter of months by the launch of a replacement. … At the head office, e-mail brings senior and junior members of staff into direct communication with one another, cutting out middle layers of management, and a strange new camaraderie develops between colleagues of different grades as one shows the other how to eliminate a virus, or unzip an obstinate attachment. But simultaneously an unbridgeable gulf may have opened up between these same head office staff and their fellow employees at a remote call centre, or data-processing site.’

Ursula Huws, The Making of a Cybertariat, pages 166-167.

The Netocracy – Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist (2002)

‘In … [the informational society] a merciless power structure of networks is constructed, in which the most exclusive network, to which only the uppermost netocratic elite has access, is at the top. Family names mean nothing here, unlike under feudalism. Wealth means nothing here, unlike under capitalism. The decisive factor governing where in the hierarchy an individual ends up is instead his or her attentionality: their access to and capacity to absorb, sort, overview, generate the necessary attention for and share valuable information. …

It is, paradoxically, the netocrats’ ability to think beyond their own ego, to build their identity on membership of a group instead of individualism, on electronic tribalism instead of mass-mediated self-assertion, that leads to their understanding and being in control of the new world that is developing. … Networking itself, the feedback loop and social intelligence are at the very heart of the netocracy.’

Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, Netocracy, pages 117-118.

The Precariat – Frassanito Network (2002)

‘Precarious work refers to all possible forms of insecure, non-guaranteed flexible exploitation: from illegalised, seasonal and temporary employment to homework, flex-[work] and temp-work, to subcontractors, freelancers, or so-called self-employed persons.

Frassanito Network, ‘Precarious, Precarisation, Precariat?’, pag 60.

‘Precariat … is used as a combative self-description in order to emphasise the subjective and utopian aspects of precarisation. Through the mass refusal of gender roles, of factory work, and of the command of labour over life … it is possible to speak indeed of flexibilisation from below. Precarisation is not simply an invention of the command centres of capitalism: it is also a reaction to the insurgency and new mobility of living labour, and in this sense it can be understood as the attempt to recapture manifold struggles and refusals in order to establish new conditions of [the] exploitation of labour and valorisation of capital.’

Frassanito Network, ‘Precarious, Precarisation, Precariat?’, page 61.

The Creative Class – Richard Florida (2002)

‘This young man [with spiked multi-coloured hair, full-body tattoos, and multiple piercings in his ears] and his lifestyle proclivities represent a profound new force in the economy and life of America. He is a member of what I call the creative class: a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend. Members of the creative class do a wide variety of work in a wide variety of industries – from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts. They do not consciously think of themselves as a class. Yet they share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference, and merit.

More and more businesses understand that ethos and are making the adaptations necessary to attract and retain creative class employees – everything from relaxed dress codes, flexible schedules, and new work rules in the office to hiring recruiters who throw Frisbees. Most civic leaders, however, have failed to understand that what is true for corporations is also true for cities and regions: Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don’t.’

Richard Florida, ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’, pages 3-4.

‘The distinguishing characteristic of the Creative Class is that its members engage in work whose function is to “create meaningful new forms.” I define the Creative Class as consisting of two components. The Super-Creative Core of this new class includes scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers, and architects, as well as the thought leadership of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion-makers. ... I define the highest order of creative work as producing new forms or designs that are readily transferable and widely useful – such as designing a product that can be widely made, sold and used; coming up with a theorem or strategy that can be applied in many cases; or composing music that can be performed again and again. …

Beyond this core group, the Creative Class also includes “creative professionals” who work in a wide range of knowledge-intensive industries such as high-tech sectors, financial services, the legal and health-care professions, and business management. These people engage in creative problem-solving, drawing on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. Doing so typically requires a high degree of formal education and thus a high level of human capital. People who do this kind of work … are required to … think on their own. They apply or combine standard approaches in unique ways to fit the situation, exercise a great deal of judgment, perhaps try something radically new from time to time. …

Much the same is true of the growing number of technicians and others who apply complex bodies of knowledge to working with physical materials. … In fields such as medicine and scientific research, technicians are taking on increased responsibility to interpret their work and make decisions, blurring the old distinction between white-collar work (done by decision-makers) and blue-collar work (done by those who follow orders). …

Everywhere we look, creativity is increasingly valued. Firms and organisations value it for the results that it can produce and individuals value it as a route to self-expression and job satisfaction. Bottom line: As creativity becomes more valued, the Creative Class grows.’

Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, pages 68-71.

The Pro-Ams – Charlie Leadbeater and Paul Miller (2004)

‘… in the last two decades a new breed of amateur has emerged: the Pro-Am, amateurs who work to professional standards. … The Pro-Ams are knowledgeable, educated, committed and networked, by new technology. The twentieth century was shaped by large hierarchical organisations with professionals at the top. Pro-Ams are creating new, distributed organisational models that will be innovative, adaptive and low-cost.’

Charlie Leadbeater and Paul Miller, The Pro-Am Revolution, page 12.

‘Pro-Ams are not professionals. They do not see themselves that way. They do not earn more than 50 percent of their income from their ProAm activities. … Yet to call Pro-Ams amateurs is also misleading. … Many of the defining features of professionalism also apply to Pro-Ams: they have a strong sense of vocation; they use recognised public standards to assess performance and formally validate skills; they form self-regulating communities, which provide people with a sense of community and belonging; they produce non-commodity products and services; they are well versed in a body of knowledge and skill, which carries with it a sense of tradition and identity.’

Charlie Leadbeater and Paul Miller, The Pro-Am Revolution, page 22.

‘The relationship between amateurs and professional is becoming more fluid and dynamic. It is not a zero-sum game. Professionals and Pro-Ams can grow together.

Pro-Ams work at their leisure, regard consumption as a productive activity and set professional standards to judge their amateur efforts.’

Charlie Leadbeater and Paul Miller, The Pro-Am Revolution, page 23.