Professional Dominance or Proletarianization?: Neither

Abstract

The medical profession has lost much of its power to control the production of knowledge, practice, and organization of medicine, but it was never the dominant force in shaping medicine. Instead, medicine has evolved in response to many different, and often conflicting, social, political, and economic forces, including professional forces. The profession's loss of autonomy over the material means of producing, and the systems for funding and organizing, medical services--the "corporatization" of medicine--should not, however, be identified as "proletarianization." The considerable influence that physicians retain and their level of skill keep them from fitting a strict Marxist definition of the proletariat.