The birth of the knowledge class? (Image: Warner Brothers)

Frequent readers of this correspondent may know that I very occasionally speak of a thing called “the knowledge class”. Some of you may not have heard of it, and are saying to yourself “ooh, that sounds interesting, tell me more”, while others may be going “arrgh, not again, the pain, it hurts”.

Some people, it seems, feel that I talk about it a little too much. People have yelled this at me. Two friends of mine openly joked about it on Twitter, and then agreed to have a beer together in celebration. Haha, I see you. (I get Twitter printed out for me.)

The idea that a “knowledge class” is either some minor academic detail or a distraction from the “real” contest of economic class (which most people just call “class”) strikes me as so obviously wrong, so utterly missing the major divisions of our age, that I wonder how intelligent people can dismiss its crucial importance to social and political understanding.

Except, really, I don’t. Every ruling class tries to obscure its own class nature, and the knowledge class is exemplary in this. That’s a point to return to. But first a short recap of what it is, and why it matters — crucially matters — for contemporary politics, and for Australian politics in particular.

The crucial event that creates a distinct thing called the knowledge class (or knowledge-culture-policy class, as I called them for a while but then gave up on) is the shift of the West from local economies dominated by industrial production and relatively low levels of luxury and cultural consumption to one in which heavy industry and manufacturing are almost absent, much routine labour is service work (which is productive in a more removed fashion), and in which the creation and application of new scientific-technical knowledge comes to occupy a much larger role than before.

Parallel with this comes, after decades of higher wages and reduced prices, a world where cultural consumption — movies, TV, music, gadgets, furniture, clothes — becomes the rule of cultural life, not the exception. This in turn requires a larger group of people trained, in some form of the humanities, to produce it.

The third process is the gradual delegitimisation of traditional transmitters of moral authority — churches, patriarchal families, “brotherhoods” such as the Masons, unquestioned patriotism — as the social liberations of the 1960s occurred. After around two decades of society being dominated by a revolutionary and rebellious orientation, society began to reintegrate, as all societies must.

In place of the church and its ilk, the liberal-radical values of the 1960s began to be implemented by secular institutions, such as transformed schools, government departments, universities, HR/people and culture departments. An entire new society had to be built, and that generated the “policy” sector of this class.

Thus from the 1990s on, a group developed of sufficient size, similar culture and thinking, and sufficient social power to feel itself — without using an abstract language to say it — to have both a common view of how the world is (and how it should be), and to have common interests in an expanded sense of the term. At that stage, such a group was still small enough to be a “sub-class”. But it was significant enough for John Howard to assign it the status of “enemy” (as “the elites”), and ride to victory on transferred working-class votes.

But with another 20 years, and the further process of de-industrialisation that Howard and his Coalition successors encouraged, the balance shifted decisively. Huge amounts of Australia’s revenue now came from sources — agriculture and mining — whose direct employment levels were so low that, for industrial and political purposes, one could call the sectors wholly automated. If miners were not represented by a section of the powerful CFMEU, they would be a small quasi-professional association.

At the same time, the things that boomed were education exports, selling culture, luxuries and services to each other, and health and other services largely state-funded by cheap-money debt.

It’s in this context that something called a “knowledge class” begins to form. It has fuzzy borders (as does every class), but one could say it was about 20-25% of the working population, and their partners and families. That’s still a minority compared to everyone else, but the difference is that the knowledge class has acquired a degree of class-confidence and class-consciousness that every other social class lacks.

They know that the world now runs on the process of devising ever-better machines (software or hardware), and that they and people like them do this. They know that produced culture, not a church or even the process of work itself, is what shapes social culture, morals and personality. They know that they are the lawyers, the public servants, the HR managers, the trainers who will shape what people come to see as “correct practice” in everyday life.

Their precursors — bohemia, intellectuals, etc — were marginal groups in the main game of class struggle over industrial capitalism, its control and its spoils. The knowledge class is at the centre of how value is now created. The more central they become, the less value the actual working class — those doing routine, task-repetitive labour — generates. Though numerous, they become increasingly marginal to the process of core production.

But how can we say the knowledge class exists, when traditional class still exists? Tune in tomorrow for the next thrilling episode!