Peter Meiksins

Beyond the Boundary Question

Class politics, once the unquestioned centre of the socialist project, has
became the object of intense controversy. There have been many reasons
for this startling developmentthe appearance of the so-called new social
movements and the continued failure of traditional Left parties to effect
fundamental social change are just two. But at the heart of most critiques
has been the notion that the working class is no longer a viable basis for
socialism. Pointing to the contraction of the manual working class and the
proliferation of ostensibly different strata, a number of socialists have argued
that it is time to bid farewell to a social group that is anyway primarily turned
to material preoccupations. For the advance of socialism, it appears, an
alternative agency or agencies will have to be found.1 What is striking,
though perhaps not surprising, is that this abandonment of the first principle
of Marxist political practice has not been rooted in a solid theorization of
contemporary capitalist society. In fact, most recent contributions to the
debate on class structure have rejected the older orthodoxy (as expressed in
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the writings of Poulantzas, Carchedi and Wright) that there exists a

relatively large group of workers who cannot be regarded as either
capital or wage-labour. Instead, there is now a majority view that much
of the new middle class is virtually indistinguishable from manual
labour in its conditions of work and existence. The social structure
would thus include a small capitalist class, a privileged middle class that
is much narrower than previously thought, and a large and growing
working class of manual and non-manual labourers. These theorists
have, on balance, taken a step in the right direction. Their analyses seem
far more consistent with contemporary realitymass unemployment,
declining real wages, erosion of the economic position of the traditional
middle class, even the decline of the professionsthan do those of the
critics of class politics. They also recall Marxs own basic insight that
socialism is not a mere utopia, with no material basis in social reality,
but the self-emancipation of an actually existing and exploited working
class.2 As will be argued below, however, what is still missing is a
consistent Marxist definition of the nature of class and class conflict in
contemporary capitalist society.
Marxism and the Boundary Question

As Gavin MacKenzie has correctly remarked, discussions of class

structure in contemporary Marxist and sociological theory have focused
on the boundary questioni.e., on where to draw the line among
the various classes characteristic of capitalist social formations.3 Virtually
all the major contributors have agreed on a three-class model (Erik
Olin Wrights analysis of contradictory class locations is a possible
exception);4 but there has been a shift in the general perception of the
boundary between the working and middle class. Whereas many early
commentators, including Poulantzas,5 laid stress on the manualnonmanual divide, it is now widely agreed that many subordinate nonmanual workers experience conditions of work, levels of pay and degrees
of authority comparable to those of manual workers, and that they too
should be regarded as forming part of the working class. One of the
most influential attempts to locate the boundary between working class
and middle class within the non-manual category was an article by John
and Barabara Ehrenreich, The ProfessionalManagerial Class,6 which
posited the existence of an intermediate class of relatively privileged
1

See, for example, Andr Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, London and Boston 1982, and E. Laclau,
Ch. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Verso, London 1985.
2 For more extended rebuttals of the challenge to class politics, see Ben Fine et al., Class Politics: An
Answer to Its Critics, London 1984; P. Meiksins, E. Wood, Beyond Class: A Reply to Chantal Mouffe,
Studies in Political Economy (fourthcoming); and E. Wood, The Retreat from Class, Verso, London 1986.
3 G. MacKenzie, Class Boundaries and the Labour Process, in Social Class and The Division of Labour,
eds. A. Giddens and G. MacKenzie, Cambridge 1982.
4 E. O. Wright, Class, Crisis and the State, NLB, London 1978 retains a two-class model (plus a residual
petty bourgeoisie). However, he defines a substantial number of individuals as occupying contradictory
class locations between the two major classes or between then and the petty bourgeoisie. Wright
estimates that almost half of the population occupies these middle positions. Wright et al., The
American Class Structure, American Sociological Review 47:6, December 1982, pp. 70926.
5 Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, London 1974.
6 In Between Labour and Capital, ed. P. Walker, Montreal 1978. The Ehrenreichs argument is mirrored
by a number of non-Marxist analyses, including A. Gouldner, The Future of the Intellectuals and the Rise
of the New Class, New York 1979.

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professional, intellectual, technical and administrative workers. This

professionalmanagerial class (PMC) does not include many routinized,
subordinate non-manual occupations, and thus constitutes a small proportion of the total workforce. As their criteria for designating this
group a new class, distinct from the bourgeoisie above and the proletariat below, the Ehrenreichs point to (a) its non-ownership of the means
of production and (b) its role in the reproduction of capitalist social
relations. Whether in the labour process as such or in institutions such
as schools, welfare agencies or the media, members of the PMC exercise
social control over the working class and reproduce new generations
of docile wage-labourers.
Two more recent books, owing a great deal to Bravermans Labour and
Monopoly Capital, have taken up the PMC thesis in somewhat modified
form. Nicholas Abercrombie and John Urry, in Capital, Labour and the
Middle Classes, also contend that the line should be drawn within the
non-manual category7between a de-skilled white-collar group and a
service class8 of privileged professionals and administrators, most of
whom are in the middle layers of bureaucratic employment. The primary
distinction between these two groups is in their market and work
situations. De-skilled white-collar workers experience low pay, poor
mobility, extreme subordination and routinized jobs, making them
similar to the traditional manual working class. In contrast, the service
class enjoys far greater material rewards, relative freedom from control,
a degree of authority, and realistic prospects for career mobility. These
sociological differences override the common functions performed by all
non-manual labourers (control, reproduction and conceptualization),
although Abercrombie and Urry seem to suggest that the important
aspects of these functions may be increasingly concentrated in the
service class.9 The class map is thus similar to the Ehrenreichs: a large
heterogeneous working class, a small capitalist class, and a privileged
middle class which, though distinct, shades off into the other two.
Finally, Martin Oppenheimers White Collar Politics10 proposes a third
analytic variant, splicing together the service class thesis and Erik Olin
Wrights notion of contradictory class locations. White-collar work
comprises a variety of class locations. Probably the largest group consists
of low-level clerical and sales workers, many of them women, whose
levels of skill, material reward and authority clearly place them in the
working class. At least two white-collar groups, however, may not be
designated as working class: the capitalist owners and top managers of
large corporations; and a group in the middle (the professionals) whose
position is ambiguous and even contradictory. Oppenheimer remarks
of them: The various fractions of the professional stratum, insofar as
they can be identified, either belong to a vestigial class formation (the
petty bourgeoisie) or are marginal to one of the major classes, or even
both of them, depending on their function within the capitalist mode
of production at any given momenta moment that is constantly in
7

London 1983, especially chapter 7.

They borrow the term service class from John Goldthorpe, who in turn took it from Karl Renner.
9
Albercrombie and Urry, p. 125.
10
New York 1985.
8

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motion, so that the situation of a given fraction of the professions, or

of a profession, is normally contradictory, ambiguous, mystified.11
Oppenheimer locates the ambiguity of the professions in their market
and work situations. Some of the lesser professions, and perhaps even
some of the more prestigious, may be falling into the working class as
their conditions of work and their material position deteriorate. Yet
even the most deprofessionalized enjoy substantial technical control
over their work, and exclude working-class clients from the decisionmaking processas a result, they form at best a marginal, ambiguous
part of the working class. Top professionals, on the other hand, are
directly involved in policy-making and blend off into the bourgeoisie,
while middle professionals are the most ambiguous of all. Like subordinate workers, they are involved in a set of oppressive and exploitative
relations but are caught between capital and the labour force.12 In sum,
Oppenheimer too rejects the Ehrenreichs functionalism and hesitates
to identify a clear-cut middle class;13 but he does describe a middle
stratum that does not really belong to either of the major classes in
capitalist society.
Critique

These analyses represent significant advances in our understanding of

contemporary social structure. It remains doubtful, however, whether
any of them have solved the boundary question. In particular, if we
examine the criteria they use in locating the barriers between the various
classes (economic privilege, work conditions, function), many problems
with their definitions of class remain. Consider, for example, an argument which enjoys wide acceptance in Marxist circlesthat skill levels
may be equated with class distinctions. This view is implicit in the
willingness of many Marxists (including Oppenheimer and Urry) to
range de-skilled non-manual workers in the working class, while debarring more highly skilled professional and technical workers. One might
ask what is the basis for conflict between the skilled and de-skilled. Can
one say that the skilled exploit the less skilled, as the bourgeoisie exploits
the proletariat? Erik Olin Wright, in his most recent work, attempts
to argue that they do, but even he is obliged to admit that skill
exploitation is a rather dubious concept.14 Within capitalism, the skilled
exploit the unskilled only in the very limited sense that they can
temporarily mollify their own exploitation by maintaining their relative
privilege. This is hardly the same thing as the irreconcilable, long-term
conflict of interests implicit in the exploitation of the proletariat by
the bourgeoisie. Moreover, quite apart from the increasingly evident
problems in defining skill,15 most students of the de-skilling process
11

Ibid., p. 143.
Ibid., chapter 7.
13 Oppenheimer hedges his bets on this issue somewhat. Although he never clearly identifies a new
middle class, and although his discussion tends to lead him away from such a notion, he does include
it in his graphic representation of contemporary American class structure. Op. cit., p.18.
14 See E.O. Wright, Classes, Verso, London 1985, pp. 7071, for a discussion of the concept of skill
exploitation, which he draws from the work of John Roemer. Wright notes (p. 185) that the type
of exploitation, unlike others, does not correspond to a clear relation between exploiter and exploited.
15 See S. Wood, ed., The Degradation of Work?, London 1982, for a selection from recent debates on
the nature of skill.
12

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(including Braverman himself) have found the distinctions between skill

levels to be exceedingly vague and difficult to draw. Thus Crompton
and Jones, in their recent study of office de-skilling, found no clear
break between routine clerical work and administrative, professional
and managerial work and questioned whether skill was the basis for
class distinctions in bureaucratic structures.16 We are thus entitled to
ask just how de-skilled one has to be to qualify as working class. In
addition historical studies indicate that occupations which were once
highly skilled can and do experience a de-skilling process. This has
certainly been the case for many manual occupations, and the process
has been reproduced in some non-manual jobsMargery Daviess
Womans Place Is at the Typewriter provides a detailed description of this
for American clerical workers.17 If skilled occupations are exposed to
this process, why must we wait until it occurs before we accord them
working-class status? In fact, Marxists do not do so in the case of
highly skilled blue-collar occupations, even when they also have some
supervisory responsibilities.
In reading Marxist studies that use skill as a criterion for drawing class
distinctions, one sometimes detects a perverse kind of optimism, a
feeling that this will solve the problems posed by contemporary capitalist
social structure. The ostensible middle class of non-manual workers, so
often held up as a refutation of Marxist class theory, is here seen as a
shrinking group that de-skilling largely reduces to conditions like those
of manual workers. Dale Johnson, for instance, suggests that the
erstwhile middle classes of modern capitalism (an amorphous group
including, amongst others, semi-autonomous employees, service professionals and middle-level administrators) are being polarized by
developments in the capitalist mode of production.18 A small technocratic group, gaining in power and prestige, is increasingly engaged in the
performance of control functions delegated by capital, and is thus being
drawn closer and closer to the capitalist class. In contrast, a larger group
finds that, with its labour-power devalued, it is being driven towards
the working class. From this it is argued that the proletariat is a
homogeneous class, all of whose members live and work in marginal
economic circumstances.
Now, it is undeniable that de-skilling is a major force affecting the
labour process and a constant threat to virtually all types of workers,
both manual and non-manual. But it is not at all clear that the de-skilling
process, under capitalism, will produce a permanent homogenization of
labour. As Paul Thompson points out: Homogenization is a weak link
in the chain of argument on skills and the labour process. There is a
great difference between all work being subject tendentially to the same
trends with respect to skills, and saying that all work is the same.19 Not
only do workers respond differently to the experience of de-skilling
16

R. Crompton, G. Jones, White Collar Proletariat: De-skilling and Gender in Clerical Work, London
1984, p. 224.
17
See also Oppenheimers discussion of the case of pharmacists (p. 142).
18 D. Johnson, Class and Social Development: A New Theory of the Middle Class, Beverley Hills 1982,
esp. part three.
19 The Nature of Work: An Introduction to Debates on the Labour Process, London 1983, p. 119.

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some seek to preserve lost skills, or to re-define new ones, while others
capitulatebut the labour process continues to include a great diversity
of types of work. Even de-skilled jobs require different abilities
(compare a typist with an assembly-line worker) and command different
material rewards (this, after all, is what the movement for comparable
worth is trying to change). And while the situation of portions of the
highly skilled middle classes may have deteriorated in recent years, as
Johnson suggests, the historical record should teach us that such trends
are generally temporary, or overstated. The middle class has been
pronounced dead on many occasions. The reality is that skilled jobs
persist: some, such as engineers, successfully resist de-skilling while
other skilled jobs are created as the labour process evolves.20 All in all,
Marxists who hope that de-skilling will homogenize the labour force
leave themselves open to the kind of criticism mounted by Andr Gorz
when he denies that capitalism universalizes general abstract labour.21
Skill, then, is not the same as class. If anything, de-skilling is more
usefully understood as a symptom of class: that is, de-skillingor what
Marx referred to as the real subordination of labour to capitalcan
only occur once a worker has become a wage-labourer.
Similar criticisms can be made of the contention that material privilege
alone creates classes. As with skill, one must ask how much material
privilege one needs to have to be considered outside the working class;
clear breaks do not occur in the distribution of material rewards.
Besides, is it the case that the interests of privileged employees and
those below them are irreconcilably in conflict? At one level, the
engineer being paid $50,000 a year may be said to have an interest in
perpetuating the lower pay of an automobile worker, since it leaves
more for him and enhances his prestige. But one could also argue that
they have a shared interest in the abolition of capitalism. This would
allow both to enjoy material comfort, while removing the threat that
is always present under capitalism that the more privileged workers
position would be reduced as employers sought to reduce costs and
gain greater control over the labour process. Such privileged workers
are not capitalists, and their interests, unlike those of capitalists, can be
satisfied under socialism. At the same time, unlike the traditional
petty bourgeoisie, they share with less privileged workers a common
relationship to the dominant class. Their privileges are real and may
have important effects on their attitudes and behaviour, but there is no
theoretical reason to see these alone as placing them in a different class.
Functionalist Arguments

Finally, we should look at the argument that function can serve as the
basis for drawing class distinctionsone which has attracted a number
of Marxist adherents, including the Ehrenreichs, especially since the
20
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Robots and Capitalism, NLR 147 (SeptemberOctober 1984) notes that
although many new computer occupations are being de-skilled, trends seem to be leading towards a
hierarchy of knowledge-producing occupations, Thus some of the new skilled jobs will survive.
21
Gorz, op. cit., chapter one. For lengthier discussions of the de-skilling controversy, see S. Wood,
op. cit., and P. Thomson, op. cit., chapter four. P. Attewell, The De-skilling Controversy, SUNYStony Brook Sociology Working Paper No. 850302 provides a strong, perhaps too strong, statement
of objections to the de-skilling thesis.

106

appearance of Carchedis influential work on the collective labour

process.22 There are problems with this approach too. For it does not
seem possible to argue that the function of capital, or the function of
labour, corresponds clearly to specific positions in the labour process
or the social division of labour. Oppenheimer correctly notes that, as
production has been socialized, it is increasingly the case that virtually
everyone contributes to the generation/realization of surplus-value,
directly or indirectly.23 More importantly, it cannot be demonstrated
that, as Carchedi and others imply, there is a direct correspondence
between high position and capitalist function (or low position and
function of labour). If we use Marxs argumentbased on the analogy of
the orchestra conductorthat coordination forms part of the collective
labour process, then it is quite clear that upper management in large
corporations performs this function. At the same time, it could be
argued that first-line supervisors, who are often responsible for pacing
the work, and so on, are performing what Marx called the labour of
supervision.24 The outcome of functionalist-Marxist analysis, then,
may be a rather topsy-turvy map of contemporary class structure.
But what of the type of functional analysis employed by the Ehrenreichs? Their contention is not that one needs to perform the function
of capital to be a capitalist, but that within the category of non-capitalists
one can distinguish two classes: the direct producers, and those who
control and reproduce the direct producers for capital. Oppenheimers
point, it should be noted, still holds, since one could just as easily argue
that both classes labour to produce and to reproduce capitalist social
relations.25 Nevertheless, the real test of this argument, from a Marxist
standpoint, should be whether functional differentiation generates conflicts of interest. In other words, does the PMC, because of the functions
it performs, have interests antagonistic to those of the working class?
The Ehrenreichs, as well as Abercrombie and Urry, or Crompton and
Jones, answer in the affirmative: the PMC or service class does have
an interest in maintaining capitalist social relations, in fostering credentialism to exclude others, and in generating technocratic or meritocratic
structures to strengthen its control over the conditions of work. In
order to assess this reply, let us distinguish between two segments of
the PMCthose who perform the labour of control and reproduction
within the capitalist enterprise and those who do so outside. These two
types of workers have different kinds of contact with the direct producer.
The former (including supervisors, managers and perhaps some engineers) control and reproduce the labour force while it is actually producing; the latter (teachers, social workers, the criminal justice system) do
so primarily while it is not. The case for a conflict of interests is stronger
for the first group than it is for the second. Teachers and other such
workers undoubtedly enter into conflict at times with all or part of the
22

G. Carchedi, On the Economic Identification of Social Classes, London 1977.

Oppenheimer, p.15.
24 See Marx, Capital, vol 1, New York 1973, pp. 33031.
25 Thus Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent (Chicago 1979), argues that even blue-collar workers
informal forms of resistance actually help to guarantee capitalist social relations. Ian Gough, Productive
and Unproductive Labour in Marx, NLR 76 (NovemberDecember 1972) contends that many
unproductive workers such as teachers are indirectly productive because they reduce the cost of
socially necessary labour and/or enhance the productivity of productive labour.
23

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working class. But they are also exploited by their employers and have
formed unions and affiliated to the broader labour movement even in
the United States. It is precisely in this group that white-collar unionization has been concentrated. Although one can exaggerate the degree
to which this involves working-class solidarity, it seems clear that many
while-collar workers have begun to respond in rather familiar ways to
the experience of wage-labour that they share with the manual working
class.26
As to those who control and reproduce labour within the capitalist
enterprise, the situation is made more complex by their hierarchical
superiority over the direct producers, so that it is very easy for them
to consider themselves as separate or better than their subordinates.
But although the structure of the workplace itself often sets up a
conflictual relationship, the interests of this portion of the PMC are not
served by a full-scale drive to appropriate the skills and knowledge of
the traditional working class. That is in capitals interest: it is what
capital tells the PMC to do, but it in no way prevents the same thing
from happening to the PMC itself. Nor is this lost on PMC members.
Engineers, for example, long ago gave up the collective effort to pursue
technocratic strategies such as scientific management, which sought to
concentrate power in the hands of these professionals.27 Instead, engineers have focused their own self-defence either on chances of promotion
into top management or on the quest for higher salaries, job security,
autonomy, and so on.28 The former, if achieved, clearly does complicate
matters, as will be argued below. However, the latter course is similar
to what subordinate workers do and is caused by their situation as wagelabourers. One should not be so naive as to expect engineers or other
such privileged members of corporate hierarchies to ally themselves
easily with the labour movement. But there is no reason to see the many
obstacles as class barriers, and good reason to regard the middle layers
of corporate employment as the special kind of wage labour to which
Marx referred.29
An Alternative Approach to Class

In light of these problems, it may be that the boundary question, as

it is posed in much of the Marxist literature, is not really the right one
to be asking. Far too often, Marxists have adopted a static approach to
class analysis, simply drawing lines through social formations and calling
them class boundaries. This is inevitably an arbitrary procedure that
begs the question of why classes and class conflict should develop and
leaves Marxists open to the kinds of criticism that they themselves have
directed at Weberian methods. It should be said, however, that there
has been a movement away from this taxonomic approach in recent
discussionsOppenheimers work on deprofessionalization and the
26 See Bob Carter, Capitalism, Class Conflict and the New Middle Classes, London 1985 for a useful
discussion of the complexities of middle-class unionism.
27 I have argued this point at length in Scientific Management and Class Relations: A Dissenting
View, Theory and Society 13 (1984).
28
See P. Meiksins, Between Labor and Capital: The Decline of Engineering Radicalism in the 1920s
(forthcoming).
29 Capital, vol. 1, p. 332.

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widespread focus on de-skilling, in particular, imply a more dynamic

understanding of class. Perhaps it is time to push these insights further
and to develop a systematic Marxist analysis of class as a dynamic
process.
To do so requires that Marxists centre their attention on class conflict
and its origins. In Marxs own writings, the appropriation of surpluslabour from the direct producers by the exploiting class is clearly
the pivotal concept which enables him to answer the questions that
Weberians, and some recent Marxists, have been unable to address. For
Marx, conflict is built into the very structure of capitalist society.
Exploitative relations of production create a clear and ineradicable
conflict of interest between the producers and appropriators of surpluslabour which stimulates the formation of the groups we call classes, as
human beings react to and organize around their experience of exploitation. The difficulty with this approach, and undoubtedly the reason
why some contemporary Marxists have departed from it, is that it
appears to predict a two-class structure in capitalist society. Present
reality, especially the rise of new middle class occupations, therefore
faces Marxists with a choice: either they must modify or reject the
concept of exploitation, seeking some other explanation for class and
class conflict; or they must look again at the process of exploitation and
enquire whether there is some way in which polar relations of production
could produce the complex pattern of social relations characteristic of
contemporary capitalist formations.
In his important work Classes, Erik Olin Wright has attempted to
redefine the concept of exploitation in terms of control over various
types of assets. He identifies three distinct types of exploitation under
capitalism: (1) control over the means of production corresponds to the
exploitation of wage-labour by capital; (2) control over organization
assets corresponds to the type of exploitation found in bureaucratic
state socialism (but also present embryonically in capitalism); and (3)
control over skills or credentials corresponds to the exploitation of
the unskilled by the skilled. Treating these as distinct dimensions,
Wright suggests that certain positions in social structure may be
exploited on one while being exploiters on another. Such positions are
thus contradictory and form the ambiguous middle class that can be
observed in all modern capitalist societies.30
It will not be possible to provide a full critique of Wrights complex
argument, but several aspects are clearly relevant to the analysis outlined
here. First Wrights approach tends to lead us to focus on the exploitation of one individual by another.31 As we shall see, however, one of
the most important features of contemporary capitalist production is its
collective characterthe labour process involves a highly differentiated
collective labourer linking together a diverse group of workers. Unless
30

Classes, chapter three.

In fact, the whole approach developed by Roemer and Wright seems to measure exploitation in
terms of each individuals comparisons of relative advantage under existing and hypothetically different
social conditions. One gets little sense that the phenomenon of the collective labour process has been
considered at all.

31

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analyses of exploitation consider this group as a whole, they may be

forced into arguing that one part of the collective labourer exploits
another! Secondly, Wrights treatment of exploitation leads us perilously
close to the kinds of theoretical problem we have just been discussing.
Although he talks about conflicts of interest, he ultimately designates
certain assets as important largely because they have income consequences.
How else could he equate the effects of control of the means of
production with the effects of control over organizational or skill
assets? This becomes particularly evident in his discussion of skills and
credentials, where he admits that skill exploitation does not imply any
relationship between skilled and unskilled.32 Instead of focusing on
conflictual social relations, he leaves us with inequalities of income, skill
and position, thus forcing class analysis, once again, to draw arbitrary
lines in social structure when it attempts to identify class boundaries.
If such redefinitions of exploitation do not lead us very far, it may be that
we can link contemporary capitalist social structure to polar relations of
production by making two adjustments in the conventional Marxist
theory. First the relationship between production relations and specific,
historical patterns of class conflict needs to he reconsidered. The tendency, among many Marxists, has been to regard this relationship as one
of correspondence, in which classes mirror the positions people occupy
in the relations of production.33 Such a view is implicit in a wide range
of analyses, from Lukcss in-itself/for-itself problematic to neo-Marxist
assumptions that complex patterns of class conflict must correspond
to equally complex relations of production. It is also implicit in the
critiques of Marxism that point to the failure of polar class conflict to
emerge. Yet this is to miss the point of Marxs analysis of class.
Especially under capitalism, where exploitation is concealed in an
ostensibly equal exchange between labour and capital and where
exploiter and exploited are regarded in civil society as formally equal,
the relationship between the relations of production and patterns of
conflict is necessarily complex. As a result of selling his or her labourpower to the employer, the worker experiences exploitation and enters
into relations of conflict. But, for a sense of class to develop, more must
occur. Workers experience conflict on an individual basisas low wages,
close supervision, the threat of unemployment and so on. They must
respond to this if patterns of conflict are to take shape, and there is no
guarantee that all wage-labourers will react in the same ways or see
their common experience as relevant. Furthermore, there are always a
number of factors such as gender, race, locality and occupation that can
complicate the workers reaction to exploitation. Unlike the relations
of production, these factors do not automatically generate conflict; they
do so only when they are culturally defined as conflictual. However, in
a context where they are so defined, they can and do interact with the
relations of production to encourage a variety of reactions on the part
32

It is striking that Wrights empirical test of his theory treats income as the best available indicator
of exploitation. Classes, chapters 56, esp. p. 193.
33
A. Cottrell, Social Classes in Marxist Theory, London 1984, suggests that Marx makes use of this
concept of class in the Communist Manifesto, modifying it later in the Eighteenth Brumaire. While one
might wish that he had made allowance for the polemical character of the Manifesto, Cottrell is surely
right that there is a danger in crude Marxist analyses of class.

110

of wage-labourers. It should not surprise us, then, that the polar relations
of production characteristic of capitalism are translated by actual human
beings into far more complex and varying patterns of social conflict.
The evident disunity of the category of wage-labour, the fact that some
see themselves as different from others, is thus explicable without resort
to non-Marxist concepts. All wage-labourers, even the most privileged,
respond to their experience of the relations of production, almost
invariably through some form of individual or collective conflict with
their employers. But different types of wage-labour may quite easily
react in different ways, or the same types may exhibit varied responses
from one time, place or country to another.
The second adjustment that needs to be made is a recognition that the
production process in capitalist enterprises has become increasingly
collective. A single product or service depends upon a wide range
of employees, from specialized production workers, through clerical
workers who keep track of the paperwork involved in ordering
materials, coordinating production, marketing goods, etc., to technical
specialists who design products and the production process, and even
managers who coordinate the work. This is true not simply of material
production but of virtually all sectors of the economy. The crucial
question is what becomes of exploitation under these circumstances. If
we avoid Carchedis problematic focus on the function of labour,
then the alternative is to argue that all non-capitalistsi.e., the entire
collective labourer, irrespective of functionare exploited. All sell their
labour-power and participate in production, and all, even the most
privileged, experience the conflicts inherent in capitalist relations of
productionbeing treated as a cost, being exposed to de-skilling tendencies, unemployment and so on. Degrees of privilege and authority,
while muting the experience of conflict, do not eliminate it.34 However,
the question still remains: who is part of the collective labourer?
The Managerial Revolution

Marxist class analysis has traditionally answered by reference to the

means of production: those who own them are capitalists, while those
who do not, and are thus obliged to sell their labour-power, are
proletarian. This position has often been challenged in recent decades.
The so-called managerial revolution, with its ostensible separation of
ownership and control, has been gleefully hailed by critics as the final
nail in Marxs coffin. More recently, some Marxists have argued that
personal control of capital has been replaced by a kind of impersonal
capital wherein enterprises, not individuals, function as the exploiting
class.35 As much research has shown, however, corporate managers are
frequently major stockholders themselves and, in any case, do not differ
34

This point is missed in Wrights and Roemers discussion of exploitation. As Marx once put it:
The size of ones purse is a purely qualitative distinction whereby two individuals of the same class
may be incited against one another at will. Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality, Marx-Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 6 p. 330.
35 Cutler et al., Marxs Capital and Capitalism Today, London 1977; Cottrell, op. cit., chapter three.
Even Abercrombie and Urry (p. 124) come close to this argument when they suggest that the
managerial revolution has created a situation in which the service class increasingly works for
capital, not capitalists.

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significantly in their values, goals or behaviour.36 The capitalist class is

evolving into a cohesive, well-organized group at the top of large
corporations, while bank and institutional ownership of corporate stock
is further concentrating control over economic resources in a few hands.
It has also been demonstrated that there is an extensive network of
corporate interlocks, the purpose of which is often not simply for one
corporation to gain control or influence over another, but to create a
kind of class solidarity, to exchange information, and so on.37 Finally,
Michael Useem has argued that this growing interchange of personnel
has inadvertently resulted in the creation of an inner circle, a kind of
general staff of the capitalist class which, by dint of its wider experience
of the corporate world, tends to promote what it sees as the interests
of capital in general.38
Contrary to Galbraiths predictions, the proliferation of corporate managerial staff has not led to the emergence of technocratic control. It is
true that large corporations are generally characterized by a managerial
division of labour, and that lower and middle management have a
certain decision-making autonomy. But policy and budgetary decisions
are highly centralized in the hands of top management, which is able
to exercise an unobtrusive overall control. Routine operational decisions
do not add up to a meaningful degree of control over the means of
production.39 In sum, there is no real reason to jettison the idea of a
capitalist class defined by its ownership of the means of production. It
may be that individual ownership has given way to a more collective
form of control; Carchedis notion of a global capitalism, if stripped
of its functionalist connotations, may be a useful one in this respect.
But it is abundantly clear that a small group of individuals is firmly in
control of the large enterprises that dominate contemporary capitalist
societies, while the vast majority of the population sells its labourpower in exchange for a wage.
At this point we need to clarify the concept of ambiguity that many
analysts have used in discussing the social-structure position of the
middle layers of corporate employment. Occupants of the middle positions are no doubt privileged in material terms, generally also having
a greater degree of autonomy, skill and so on, but this is not what
makes them ambiguous in class terms. While such attributes may
reinforce the ambiguity derived from other sources, and may also
influence reactions to the relations of production, they do not affect
fundamental class interests. Privileged, skilled, autonomous workers are
still wage-labourers, whose privileges, skills and autonomy are under
constant threat of removal by capitalists. What makes some of these
36

See Th. Nichols, Ownership, Control and Ideology, London 1969, and J. Scott, Corporations, Classes and
Capitalism, New York 1979.
37 A statement of this and opposing views, together with an empirical test, is provided in M. Ornstein,
Interlocking Directorates in Canada, Administrative Science Quarterly 29:2, 1984, pp. 21031.
38
M. Useem, The Inner Circle, Oxford 1984.
39
Wrights early discussion of contradictory class locations does not distinguish very clearly between
these different types of control. As a result, he tends to exaggerate the degree of control possessed by
middle managers. Similarly, his more recent discussion of organizational asset exploitation ascribes
control over such assets to a surprisingly large, diverse group: perhaps as much as 14.2 per cent of
the US labour force have real control, while another 17.4 per cent are ambiguous. Classes, p. 195.

112

positions truly ambiguous is the possibility that their occupants may be

promoted into the capitalist class. For large corporations no longer rely
on family and friends for their leadership, drawing at least a portion of
upper managerial personnel from professional and lower-managerial
positions. Such mobility should not, of course, be confused with the
far more common phenomenon that occurs further down in the social
structure. Short jumps from blue-collar to white-collar or from technical
to lower-managerial positions may have a profound effect on how
people react to the experience of wage-labour (especially since corporate
reward structures emphasize this above all), but they do not affect their
long-term class interests. In contrast, a real possibility of promotion
into upper managementwith the virtual ending of exposure to deskilling, unemployment and the likeraises the question of whether
the individual has an interest in the maintenance of capitalism. Such
mobility is not common, given the limited number of top positions,
and is always contingent. There is no guarantee that ones abilities or
current position will eventually lead to the top, and in the meantime
the consequences of being a wage-labourer are always there. Nevertheless, those positions with a real chance of movement into the capitalist
class can legitimately be called ambiguous class positions.40
Finally there is a somewhat different theoretical problem that needs to
be resolved by analysis of exploitation in contemporary capitalismthe
problem of state employees. Since workers in the public sector are not
employed by capitalists, it is not immediately clear whether they are
exploited in the sense that private-sector workers are. Efforts to answer
this question have centred on the same set of issues raised in discussions
of private-sector non-manual labourproductive and unproductive
labour, function, and so forth.41 In both cases, however, the really
crucial questions for class analysis must be: Do the workers perform
surplus-labour? and What is their relationship to the capitalist class?
Ian Gough has already shown that, with the exception of high officials,
state workers do perform surplus-labour.42 (The precise nature of class
divisions within the state would have to be identified by an analysis of
the public-sector collective labour process.) Although such workers are
not directly exploited by capital, their experience of unemployment,
wage pressures, de-skilling, etc. is very much a result of their insertion
in a capitalist economy and the exigencies of capitalist accumulation. In
this sense, public and private-sector workers are in a similar relationship
to the capitalist class. At the same time, the indirectness of state workers
relationship to the capitalist class introduces a new complication.
Because they are not directly exploited by capital, and because their
wages are paid by the taxes of society as whole, their shared interests
with the traditional working class are easily obscured. Austerity measures within the state, for example, can be presented la Reagan or
40

American engineers constitute a good example, having traditionally had good chances of reaching
the top of corporate hierarchies, particularly in certain industries (petroleum, public utilities). The
leaders of the profession have often been precisely these engineer-executivesa fact which has coloured
the ideology of the professional associations, helping to make engineering what has been called the
business profession.
41 For example, see Gough, op. cit.; Carchedi, op. cit.
42 Gough (op. cit.) argues that such workers are indirectly productive in that their exploitation
reduces the cost of their necessary services to capital.

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Thatcher not as intensifications of exploitation but as an attack on a

parasitic growth on society as a whole. The public sector/private sector
divide, while not a class division, is one of the many sources of
heterogeneity and disunity within the contemporary working class.
The Centrality of Expoitation

The key point in our analysis of the contemporary collective labourer has
been that the exploitative character of capitalist relations of production is
the root of class structure. Although this is a conventional Marxist
proposition, many (including some Marxists) would argue that it artificially emphasizes exploitation and the polarizing tendency to which it
gives rise. Thus the objection is often raised that it fails to explain the
behaviour of real people, who do not group themselves into two classes;
and, in particular, that many people belonging to the collective labourer
do not see themselves as having a collective identity. Indeed, the
collective worker is deeply segmentedto cite just one example, engineers certainly do not see themselves as equal to blue-collar or subordinate
white-collar workers. The various parts of the collective worker seem
preoccupied with their internal differences, as this or that part claims
entitlement to more rewards, and so on. It appears, then, that status
rather than exploitation is the key to the actual pattern of stratification
in capitalist societies.
Now, this argument misunderstands the role of status preoccupations,
which can best be explained precisely as a result of exploitation. If
workers are concerned to protect and enhance their status, this is
because exploitative production relations constantly threaten them with
a loss of economic well-being and social respect. In struggling over
status, specific groups of workers are not trying, ultimately, to take
something away from those below them in a kind of zero-sum game.
They are trying to get more from their employers. The fact that they
sometimes enter into competition with other employees is a result of
the way in which employers structure the conflict, not of any necessary
conflict of interests among themselves. There is a real sense in which
status consciousness is a reaction to the experience of class exploitation.
In stressing the centrality of exploitation in contemporary social structure, we do not at all wish to devalue other factors to which Carchedi
and Wright have correctly pointed. Rather, the task is to understand
how the dynamics of exploitative production relations interact with these
other factors in shaping peoples responses to their situations and how
class solidarity may emerge from this. The labour force continues to be
deeply segmented by economic sector, skill level, and thus by market
position. As dual labour market theorists have noted, such inequalities
form an obvious basis for different forms of organization and consciousness (i.e., for different types of reaction to the experience of wage
labour).43 Different reactions are not inevitable, and solidarity among
various types of workers can and does occur. But the real possibility
remains that they will respond to their situation by seeking to preserve
43

This type of argument is summarized in D. Gordon, R. Edwards, M. Reich, Segmented Work, Divided
Workers, Cambridge 1982.

114

or increase the differences between themselves and other portions of

the labour force. (The case of the 19th-century labour aristocracy, or
of American engineers unionizing to protect themselves from encroachment from below, illustrates this well.44) Moreover, such reactions are
actively encouraged, both by employers and by the state. A number of
radical economists have argued that employers attempt to undermine
solidarity in the workplace by creating artificial job ladders and fostering horizontal divisions. Similarly, the state can encourage such divisions
by drawing legal distinctions between various types of workersfor
instance, the division between office and factory workers in West
Germany, or the NLRBs policy of excluding white-collar workers from
blue-collar bargaining units in the USA in the late thirties.
In its most extreme form, this type of segmented consciousness and
organization can evolve into the ideology of professionalism, which,
particularly in the United States, has exercised a powerful hold over
significant portions of the workforce and placed formidable barriers
between those occupations which define themselves as professions and
other types of wage-labour. As Larson notes, professionalism as an
ideology and a mode of occupational organization has allowed certain
occupations to parlay their skills and control of scarce resources into a
degree of autonomy and material privilege.45 Although it has proven
most successful where self-employment is a real possibility (medicine,
the law), a number of organizational professions (e.g., engineering)
have used it to some effect. Professionalism implies a powerful sense of
distinctiveness, of entitlement to special privilege and respectin other
words, a strong consciousness of status. It can also provide at least
temporary protection from the worst effects of wage-labour by legitimating the professions right to autonomy and high social reward,
although deprofessionalization remains a constant danger. Even in the
less successful instances, such as engineering or teaching, professionalism has sunk deep roots and plays a crucial role as a form of social
control.
Gender also intersects with the process by which patterns of class
conflict develop. In theory, the effects of gender should be less potent
than they were before the modern rise in female employment, but in
reality this remains an important factor in the workplace and the labour
market and in the way in which men and women react to the experience
of wage-labour. They may be involved in similar conflicts at work, but
the sex-typing of jobs and the fact that women are often supervised or
managed by men tend to limit their knowledge of each others situation
and to reinforce the barriers to working-class solidarity. Nor has the
labour movement always helped to overcome the problems; in many
countries, male-dominated trade unions have been unresponsive at best,
obstructive at worst, in organizing women workers.46 Gender can also
be manipulated to colour social relations in the workplace. It may be
that the availability of inexpensive, docile female labour temporarily
44

For the latter, see R. Walton, The Impact of the Professional Engineering Union, Boston 1961.
M.S. Larson, The Rise Of Professionalism, Berkeley 1977.
46
For comparative data on women and trade unions, see Alice Cook et al., Women and Trade Unions
in Eleven Industrialized Countries, Philadelphia 1984.
45

115

reduced the need for factory-style discipline and an elaborate division

of labour in the office, thereby serving to temper potential conflict in a
number of areas.47 Moreover, as Crompton and Jones have shown, the
division between male and female clerks has tended, at least in Britain,
to bring down the level of conflict between employers and male clerks,
since women have proved more willing to accept dead-end jobs and
to allow men to monopolize upward mobility.48
Cynthia Cockburns recent study Brothers49 describes how male compositors in the British printing industry have consistently fought efforts to
introduce women into the trade and have enveloped themselves in a
craft ethos that largely rests upon a masculine occupational culture.
This may be seen as an attempt to protect themselves from de-skilling,
complete subordination and the employers periodic moves to replace
them with cheaper (often female) labour. Nevertheless, Cockburn is
right to insist that their response is deeply coloured by patriarchy.
Rather than fighting for female equality, the male compositors choose
to exclude women altogether, thus perpetuating gender subordination
and a resulting segmentation of the working class. A full analysis would
also have to consider how and why actual patterns of conflict are
structured by such factors as racial divisions, the hierarchical organization of the labour process, the public sector/private sector division,
functions in the labour process, and forces operating outside the workplace. But enough has been said to indicate that these complicate
and intersect with class conflicts engendered by capitalist production
relations, rather than constituting class phenomena in their own right
or eliminating the effects of class.
Political Implications

Two points of great political importance emerge from this discussion

of class in contemporary capitalist society. First, despite the ongoing
process of subordination and de-skilling of labour, the category of
wage-labour seems likely to remain heterogeneous for the foreseeable
future. The traditional agent of socialism, then, does not exist immediately as a unified force in capitalist social formations. Second, the
manner in which workers respond to the conflicts inherent in capitalist
production relations is not given in advance. In face of these problems
for the socialist project, a common position has been to reject class
politics altogether. However, it seems rather perverse to speak of the
demise of a class at a time when wage-labour has become the norm for
the vast majority of the population (perhaps as much as 90 per cent in
the United States),50 and when many traditionally privileged workers
such as teachers or public-sector employees have been made forcefully
aware of the realities of their condition. Equally premature is the notion
47

Davies, op. cit., like Braverman, emphasizes efforts to apply scientific management in the office.
Nevertheless, the office division of labour is clearly less extensive than that characteristic of many
industries, especially of assembly-line systems. The low cost of female labour may help to explain why
the potentially expensive skilled private secretary has not been the target of workplace rationalization,
at least until recently. See Davies, ch. 7, and Kanter, op. cit., chapter 4.
48 Crompton and Jones, chapter three.
49 Cynthia Cockburn, Brothers, London 1983.
50 Oppenheimer, p. 89.

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that traditional Left politics has somehow failed. As Gran Therborn

argues, it is quite possible to interpret the present situation as a retreat
from an unprecedentedly strong position rather than as abject defeat.51
Of course, this is not to deny the need to re-evaluate and improve
socialist politics. Indeed, one can make a strong case that socialist
politics needs, at last, to be made class politicswhich it has not always
been in the past. Certainly none of the critics has explained what type
of society this is if it is not capitalism, or who is to be the agent of
socialism if it is not the self-emancipating working class.
A second, less imprudent response to contemporary reality is to advocate
some kind of alliance strategy, usually on the assumption that there are
fundamental differences between the new middle class and the industrial
working class. The politics of social democracy, in particular, attaches
central importance to an alliance with new layers, in the hope of creating
a mass electoral movement that will attain its goals exclusively through
majority votes in Parliament. In order to win over the new middle class,
social-democratic politicians therefore become advocates of cautious
policies whose principal virtue is that they are relatively inoffensive to
large numbers of voters. By avoiding as much as possible any mass
mobilization or organization, such a strategy does little to forge the
unity that the working class lacks and desperately needs. Instead, it
accepts the divisions as given and addresses itself to a diverse group of
people primarily on issues where they already agree. Thus, a general
appeal may be made to both elite engineers and subordinate lineworkers on such questions as inflation, but no attempt is made to
encourage these two very different groups of workers to redefine their
relationship as one of cooperation rather than superordination. A similar
critique may be applied to the big Eurocommunist parties of France
and Italy which, though paying somewhat more attention to mobilization and organization, are also hamstrung by their alliance strategy. The
goal of an anti-monopoly bloc does very little to overcome the
important conflicts and differences among the various components of
the blocnot to mention the fact that their long-term interests, for
example of factory workers and small employers, are probably
incompatible.
Erik Olin Wrights recent work also implies an alliance strategy. His
analysis of modes of exploitation suggests that those in contradictory
locations (i.e., who are wage-labourers but control organizational or
skill assets) have material interests different from those of the working
class, but he also argues the need to ally with such groups on the basis
of the non-material interests they have in common.52 The implication
would seem to be either that material interests are not primary and can
be neutralized, or that the working class may have to go through a
purgatorial period of skill and organizational asset-exploitation on the
road to a communist society. (Wrights discussion of post-feudal history
as the successive elimination of various forms of exploitation points in
this direction.) However, it is not at all clear that the so-called middle
51

G. Therborn, The Prospects of Labour and the Transformation of Advanced Capitalism, NLR
145, MayJune 1984.
52 Classes, pp. 28889.

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classes share only non-material interests with the working class. We

have already seen that privileged workers experience conflicts similar
to those in which the traditional working class is involved. And, as
Wright himself notes in his comments on Sweden, it is possible to unite
diverse types of workers on the basis of their common situation as
wage-labourers, thus producing a stronger anti-capitalist movement.
One should not idealize the Swedish casewhich still remains within
the framework of social democracy. But a strategy that emphasizes class
interpretations of social and political problems is likely to promote a
solidly polarized rather than a fragmented political culture.53
In rejecting alliance strategies, one has to be careful not to fall into the
opposite error of excluding the new middle class from the socialist
project, a strategy that we may call here workerism. In the name of
opposing the pollution of the labour movement, workerists would
restrict the term working class either to the industrial proletariat or
to wage-earners who are fully subordinate or de-skilled. Like the
alliance strategy, however, this merely postpones the task of creating
some kind of cooperative relationship between the two groups, the
working class being reduced to a minority by very definition. Quite
apart from making the task of socialist revolution more difficult, this
would have a negative effect on the prospects for a democratic socialist
society.
Finally, there is the idiosyncratic option outlined by Gavin Kitching in
his recent Rethinking Socialism.54 Kitchings contention is that changes
in the labour force have altered the nature of and prospects for the
socialist project, in his view for the better. The process of capitalist
development has gradually reduced the number of wage-labourers who
are mired in the realm of necessitythat is, whose material hardship
is the central preoccupation. In their place, capitalism has brought forth
a growing number of affluent, well-educated wage-labourers, freed from
material need, who are better able to get on with the real, non-material
business of socialism: For, to be a socialist is not to support the working
classs economic interests against those of the capitalist class. It is to
believe in a particular conception of the general interesta conception
which involves transcending class self-interest through abolishing classes
themselves. Thus, the less pressing the questions of sheer economic
survival and increasing material consumption of the working class, the
more that class can involve itself (on political and ethical grounds and
not simply out of economic self-interest) in a debate about the real
general interest. In this debate, of course, the socialist conception is one
contender. Parliamentary democracy provides an opportunity and a
forum for the debate to take place.55 Kitching, then, proposes a kind
of revamped social democracy focused more or less exclusively on nonmaterial issues. Kitchings first misconception concerns the development
of the division of labour and the attitudes of the middle-class wagelabourers on whom he focuses. For while he assumes that poorly
rewarded, menial positions are fast disappearingwhich may be true
53

Ibid., chapter seven.

London 1983.
55 Ibid., pp. 623.
54

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of certain kinds of industrial workthe contemporary labour force

remains highly segmented and continues to include large numbers of
low-paid positions in service, clerical and blue-collar employment.
Besides, many of the more affluent members of the labour force are
just as preoccupied with material questions as anyone else, as may be
seen from their persistent concern with maintaining pay differentials.
Kitchings dichotomymanual working class materialism, nonmanual working class post-materialismdoes not accord with reality.
His hope that working-class unity can be forged in parliament is
disturbingly reminiscent of Hegels idealization of the state, and of
Marxs criticism that this illusory community conceals the fundamental
class conflict structuring civil society. To abandon class politics, and
the effort to unify the working class, becomes a sure way of maintaining
the existence of the capitalist mode of production.
From a political point of view, it can be argued that only an approach
that bases itself on the essential unity of the working class is able to
take seriously its real segmentation and heterogeneity. Those who see
a process of gradual homogenization do not have to worry about the
diversity that remains: much of it will be eliminated, the rest signifies
a class barrier. Those who advocate an alliance strategy also do not
have to concern themselves with such differences: the traditional working class and the new middle class are discontinuous, but this does
not matter politically since they can be united into a single movement
without their mutual relationship being altered. It has been argued here,
however, that unless these differences are confronted and overcome,
political unity on the Left will inevitably be fragile and superficial. It
is this kind of false unity that lies beneath the Eurosocialism of
Mitterrand et al., which cannot be sustained in the face of even the
slightest political pressure.
In contrast, the view that all types of wage-labour share a common
interest takes us to the heart of the political problem for the socialist
movement. The working class can be unified, but it is not now. How
can we go about moulding this deeply segmented class into a unified
political force? If we can find the right answers, we can look forward
to a renewed socialist movement held together by the real solidarity of
class consciousness and organization. This is not as utopian a goal as
it may appear, for the basis of unity exists in the common experience
of the conflicts built into capitalist relations of production. Efforts to
break down the barriers will have to occur in all spheres of life. In the
production process itself, one of the thorniest problems is likely to be
the hierarchical structure of the labour process which encourages the
horizontal segmentation of the workforce. It will not be easy to focus
attention on the collective character of the labour process, but there are
already a number of encouraging signs. Some middle-class trade
unions, especially in the public sector, have in recent years aligned
themselves more closely with the broad labour movement and occupied
some of the more resolute positions within it. It may also be that the
proliferation of educational credentials and the enormous growth of
what used to be elite occupations (engineers, university teachers, etc.)
have somewhat reduced the social distance between these and other
types of wage-labour. Experiences like the Lucas Aerospace Plan,
119

particularly to the extent that it achieved staffshopfloor unity, may

provide further pointers for the future.
Outside the workplace the new social movements, whatever their
limitations, have undeniably touched a chord in large segments of the
population, including the manual working class where the question of
occupational safety is perceived as highly relevant. As several commentators have argued,56 it is necessary to find the link to the class issues
with which such questions are in fact connected. Ecology, for instance,
can be a class issue if it takes up the concern of all workers to protect
human health and to subordinate profit-making to this goal. But it can
also become a barrier to class unity if ecologists unthinkingly pursue
environmental purity without cooperating with workers and communities to develop ways of avoiding social and economic disruption. Even
at the best of times a unified working class does not emerge easily or
automatically in capitalist society, and we will not get very far if we
confuse the real basis for unity with its realization. As Raymond
Williams remarks: Nor is much to be gained by the rhetorical extension
to the formula of workers by hand and brain, since this either merely
assimilates the objective differences or, in its characteristic political uses,
actually masks the problems of working and social relations which have
to be clarified and assessed if they are ever in practice to be solved.57
56
57

Fine et al., op. cit., p. 3; R. Williams, Towards 2000, London 1983, pp. 1723.
William, p. 160.

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