No, federal workers are not "elites"
I regret to inform you that Compact Magazine is at it again
Leighton Woodhouse, on DOGE’s attacks on the federal workforce:
What we’re seeing is the latest battle in a long war between two factions of the American elite...Silicon Valley’s recent MAGA converts have convinced themselves that the civil service and the intelligentsia it represents are the real elite that runs America...
The federal employees who have been fired, Woodhouse explains, “weren’t ‘workers’ who sold their labor power for an hourly wage”; instead, they are part of a supposed “professional-managerial class.” This, he admits, is at odds with “an orthodox Marxist definition of class” — but that definition, he adds, “was becoming obsolete by the 1940s and, by the ‘70s, bore almost no resemblance to the post-industrial status order.”
Over the years I’ve learned to be suspicious of claims that “Marx is outdated.” Not because he anticipated everything, but because people often accept this truism even when it isn’t true. In this case, Woodhouse argues that
In the 19th century, when Marx wrote Capital, for the most part there were owners and there were workers…But as industrialization progressed…This required the creation of a whole new class of managerial employees to organize the increasingly complex logistics of production.
But not only does Marx account for this — he accounts for this in Capital!
In chapter 13, Marx begins by acknowledging those simple workplaces which Woodhouse thinks are his exclusive concern. In such workplaces all employees exclusively work “to produce the same sort of commodity under the mastership of one capitalist”.
But this is just the starting point of his analysis, because in order to produce “large quantitites of products” the capitalist starts to hire “a comparatively large number of labourers”. At first, with more employees, the workplace “is simply enlarged…the difference is purely quantitative”; but eventually, “the simultaneous employment of a large number of labourers effects a revolution in the material conditions of the labour-process.” One key change as the workforce expands:
All combined labour on a large scale requires, more or less, a directing authority, in order to secure the harmonious working of the individual activities, and to perform the general functions that have their origin in the action of the combined organism, as distinguished from the action of its separate organs.
This, of course, is the origin of management and bureaucracy. This is not some unforeseen development that poor ignorant Marx, writing all the way back in the 19th century, failed to anticipate; it was a direct and obvious consequence of his argument that capitalism was expanding and becoming increasingly complex.
But are these people workers? Marx seems to think so, insisting that they bear the exact same relationship to capital:
Just as at first the capitalist is relieved from actual labour so soon as his capital has reached that minimum amount with which capitalist production, as such, begins, so now, he hands over the work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workmen, and groups of workmen, to a special kind of wage-labourer.
Crucially, these wage-labourers “command in the name of the capitalist”; they have no power of their own. Like every other worker, they rely on wages to survive, and are thus at the mercy of the capitalist who employs them.
Insofar as the federal employees are managers and bureaucrats, then, they are indeed workers in the sense of orthodox Marxism. If Woodhouse wants to argue that we should not consider them workers for other reasons, fine; but what he cannot argue is that the so-called “professional-managerial class” is something Marx failed to anticipate.
Thanks for reading! My blog is supported entirely by readers like you. To receive new posts and support my work, why not subscribe?
Refer enough friends to this site and you can read paywalled content for free!
And if you liked this post, why not share it?