Abstract

Three widely discussed contemporary theories about the place and prospects of workers in the U.S. political economy are criticized. The Regulation school erroneously extends the Fordist era of corporate industry past the 1920s. The work of Bowles, Gordon, Weisskopf obscures the development since then of a class structure of accumulation one-sidedly weighted against a corporate working class still only in process of formation. Bell's "post-industrial society" obscures the central role of service sector growth in the present-day emergence of a majority corporate working class. These developments, paralleled in the other advanced capitalist countries, have created a working class which will soon, for the first time in its history, have the capacity to intervene decisively in the course of capitalist development.