Ask Lemmygrad

I am not sure of what you mean of a dialectic relation, whether it exists or not between them. As long as you can categorize them, you can realize conflict of interests, and friction between groups, there is a dialectic relation. Whether it is explained fully by traditional Marxist class analysis or not is debatable. In other words, it is not the dialectic's fault the theory is incomplete or wrong, or Marx can't be held accountable for future fragmentation of the "working class" into internally struggling sub-classes.

In the old days, in industrial settings where capitalist model of production was based on, people more or less entered production as equals. There wasn't much schooling needed or available to the working class, and many entered industrial work as teens. With seniority and good record of obedient hard working people who gained experience and displayed high aptitude on the specific work, would get elevated as supervisors and trainers of younger workers. Imagine people being engaged in industrial manufacturing from 12 or 15 till the age they just dropped dead in the assembly line. Very few ever reached the current age of retirement, and there was no retirement benefits, private or government provided.

After ww2 especially, the working class had attained the right to have access to education, laws in many industrial countries to prevent children from working, and vocational/trading schools becoming more of a norm than someone dropping off school at 15 and getting a factory job. Also universities and colleges became more and more accessible to the masses, and sometimes affordable by the working poor's children. This provided industry with a way to distinguish entry level ranks, and a managerial class was born. People who had never worked before, due to a certificate or degree would be placed higher up in hierarchy than people who had worked for years. This provided them a false class consciousness, they weren't workers, they were managers or administrators because of their education. They behaved very differently than an aged experienced supervisor who started from 0 and knew what it was like, and saw himself as a worker, not something different. The owners saw a benefit of this fragmentation, this "managerial class" would develop owner like consciousness and would become very conscious of the very fact that it was manual work exploitation that produced profit, and out of that profit was their position necessary. The higher the exploitation and oppression they would exercise the higher the profitability, therefore their job security.

I believe generally the left and traditional syndicalism, because of the theoretical constrains of traditional class analysis never knew how to deal with this. They were eager to get more people registered to the union but had no theoretical tools to learn how to discriminate against management. In many cases those same internal class enemies would make it up to the top ranks of union hierarchy and help in diluting struggle to maintain "peace" with the owners, seek negotiation instead of clash, and further serve the interests of owners to prevent strikes. In some horrible moments of union history they were the same responsible for splitting unions up in terms of race, gender, or just varying interests of different ranks of workers. See hospitals for example, especially in countries where private health care was more the norm than exception, physician unions, nurse unions, non-medical hospital workers, one boycotting each others' actions, and rarely acting as a unit. The owners learned all too well to play this game against them, set one group against the other.

I remember this long term massive strike within UPS (US private parcel shipping company) that brough the largest transportation company of the country to its knees. Management, who did not strike, some had commercial licenses as to improve their chances of getting a job there, had 0 experience, and offered to drive when drivers and warehouse workers were on strike. Within days there were trucks overturned, wrecked, lost, destroyed. From this strike FedEx and DHL were born or became giants overtaking what UPS lost. UPS caved into financial world demands to sell itself in the "markets" and stop being a "family owned business". The market lost has yet to be recovered. It also became less competitive due to backling to union pressure and allowing some of the demands to become policy. This an Eastern airline strikes were pretty much the end of a long history of union struggle in the US. Ever since the movement became so fragmented and owners became armed with systems specifically designed to defeat mass movement and strikes.

There have been Marxist scholars, some of m-l tradition, who argued that high/higher education role in the US specifically was to provide fragmentation criteria among workers for bosses to exploit. At work, very little of what is learned in school transfers. One thing that does is subservience and obedience to those above, and an elitist attitude towards those below. Ask anyone who went through grad school if there were 22-25 year old grad.students mistreating 40+ yo clerical stuff who had to do work "for them".

Why was Pol Pot shooting managers, experts, highly educated people in the head? Why were they perceived as an enemy to farm workers? Cruel and nasty, but he may have been right about some things.