[From a TWC discussion]
Re “they’re workers and anti-worker”: you might like three-class analysis: a professional-managerial class between workers & capitalists. In the Soviet Union, they were the ruling class
I’m prob one of them & aspire to be a class traitor. Michael Albert calls them coordinator class & says:
The coordinator class looks down on workers as instruments with which to get jobs done. It engages workers paternally, seeing them as needing guidance and oversight and as lacking the finer human qualities that justify both autonomous input and also the higher incomes needed to support more expensive tastes. Workers in reply look up at coordinators as well-educated and knowledgeable— which in fact they generally are—but also as arrogant, elitist snobs lacking human sentiment and solidarity. Workers may wrongly accept that the empowerment and capacity differentials between themselves and coordinators are due to innate differences, and may thus bemoan their own sad—though seemingly inevitable—lot, while hating, but succumbing to, the coordinators’ arrogance.
I once tested a programmer. (He came from a professional/managerial background.) Told him I’ll disclose my salary/benefits to lower-rung women coworkers. He spent the entire car trip trying to convince me not to: they didn’t deserve our privileges
(Ironically I’d got him hired & told him my salary/benefits to give him a negotiating edge.)
Anyway I pretended to agree & disclosed his salary/benefits too