Purposive Drift

This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value, but in the (mystified) form of what has been called 'surplus wage': they are paid rather more than the proletarian 'minimum wage' (an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today's global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia), and it is this distinction from common proletarians which determines their status. The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific 'evaluation' is crucial: it legitimises disparities in earnings). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus they get takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for - some - intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc).