ABSTRACT
The chapter considers teachers class location under contemporary corporate capitalism. Teachers basically are workers: they are salaried labourers contracted to perform specific activities; and in common with the working class they have little occupational independence, little control over the labour process, and no access to the means of production. Teachers are in the business of constituting individual ideological subjects as willing bearers of labour power for capital. Proletarianisation comes about mainly from the needs of capital to reduce production costs, which it can do most effectively by the introduction of technology to replace human labour power and by devaluing the labour power still required from skilled to average levels. Schooling is primarily in the business of socialisation, or the reproduction of bearers of labour power. Class struggle is complex and dynamic, and for fundamentally non-aligned groups, like teachers, class position is a shifting and varying thing.
