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).
The evaluative procedure that qualifies some workers to receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a 'middle class' for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success...."
Of course, taking it easy hardly fits in with conventional notions of virtue, but then again, our civilization's valuation of the nature of virtuous work may well be rotten to its core. As Terence McKenna puts it: "Now you see, the current theory of problem solving is that we must solve all our problems with solutions that make a buck. Well, it just may not be possible to solve the problems of the 20th century and make a buck at the same time. But if you're willing to put aside that notion, then the human future appears endlessly bright." Or, to paraphrase the words of the Christos, Mammon sits fundamentally at odds with the irresistible march of evolution. That, in a nutshell, is the stark truth underpinning a collaborative return to the Garden, perhaps the truest attunement to the Great Work we are capable of. "Work, motion, life," says William Bryant Logan, "All rise from the dirt.""