(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

Welcome to part two of Guy Rundle’s mid-winter short course on the knowledge class. For part one, go here.

The principal objection to the notion of a knowledge class is that, well, capital still exists. Some people own the means of production, some people work for wages. There’s a categorical difference between Mike Cannon-Brookes and a jobbing coder or graphic designer, even if the latter are better paid than a shelf-stacker.

The argument from “economic classists” (they’re not all Marxists) is that the cultural divisions between non-knowledge and knowledge workers — the shelf-stacker and the waged software developer — are either confected distractions, or a degree of deflected economic class conflict.

In that latter scenario, the disturbance that many people feel at a certain sense that they are now marginal to social process is simply a diverted form of their frustration over a lack of economic power. Rather than identifying the correct enemy — capital and capitalists, who have managed to steadily raise the profit ratio for several decades — they are steered to a group of people whose representatives all seem to be doing pretty well for themselves, and who also spend a lot of time telling everyone how to live, what to believe and what to value.

The strategy derived from that is that if you just persevere with the economic class message, you will eventually persuade people to drop their superficial division — as eventually happened between Protestant and Catholic, white and black, and male and female workers.

The crucial argument from a knowledge class position is that that strategic conclusion is utterly and disastrously mistaken, and will lead to years of wasted energy and political misdirection (actually, it is). The counter-argument would be that the Marxist conclusion that “(economic) class struggle” lies at the root of other struggles fits some periods better than others, and does not fit our society very well at all.

The knowledge class seeks domination but, like all classes, it seeks domination in its own distinct way. Since its power at its root is through control of mathematics, language and cultural symbolisation, it inevitably sees the world composed in those terms.

The “life practice” of the knowledge class, which differentiates it from all other classes, is to think of the world as a series of problems, institutions, and “givens” to be, to a limited degree, questioned, challenged, analysed and remade. For all other classes in all of history, life has been the opposite: a series of given and unquestioned practices and habits, partly arising from life itself and partly supplied by small external groups, such as shamans, storytellers, priests, and artists.

Once you have a whole class of people whose life practice consists of questioning given ways of doing things on a regular basis, and once this process is plugged into economic production, you get a social division that generates not only different ways of seeing the world but different ways of seeing how you see the world. From that, it generates different social-ethical objects, which strike the knowledge class as real and central — the moral centrality of the stateless refugee or the trans person are the two recent examples — and which strike everyone else as possibly true but far from central to the main business of life.

The ethical imperatives generated by the knowledge class’s way of doing things are those oriented to a radical and universal equality, a joyous breaking of any inherited forms of particularity. Thus, in any situation where the economy has not seriously collapsed, the fond hope of the economic classists — that economic class calls the shots “in the last instance” — is likely to be disappointed. At the very least, it will encounter vastly more resistance than the economic classists (which includes many Labourists) anticipate.

But why does the knowledge class have such power and cultural unity, even across the capital/labour divide? We’ll find out in part three — the grand finale!