Was Marx right?

[Olentzero]

Fussell’s definition of class is entirely subjective, and by that I mean it is based on individual attitudes and perceptions rather than objective economic and social function (outside of acknowledging that some people have to work for a living and others don’t). That might be all well and good for people who don’t regard sociology as a science, but anyone who wishes sociology to be as scientifically rigorous as possible should reject this out of hand. High, low, or middle, working people are part of the working class, and the hostility you mention comes more from the lack of consciousness about the nature and role of the working class rather than actual class division. For instance, let’s take concert musicians. According to Fussell, these people would be high proletarian with all sorts of disdain and whatnot for the lower two ‘classes’. Yet not three months ago the Detroit Symphony Orchestra went on strike over wages and working conditions. Subjectively they may feel like high proletarians or even middle class, but objectively they are subject to the same crisis-prone forces pushing their wages downward as are the rest of the working class and they took the same kind of action other workers do (and ought to do a lot more) when confronted with that situation.

But not characterized by any expectation of making vast fortunes in manufacturing or foreign commerce. That lay in the future.

Please identify the source of the following quote:

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation… For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

[Olentzero]

@The_Other_Waldo_Pepper

Heh. All kidding aside, what set of events could, hypothetically, falsify the stuff?

Proving the existence of a modern class with an economic function independent of either the capitalist class or the working class.

I had a post that got eaten by the server upgrade earlier this week that analyzed the class structure of Athenian society before the dawn of democracy. Basically, there were four: rich merchants, craftsmen and artisans, poor farmers, and slaves. The merchants produced olive oil and wine for sale and export, the craftsmen and artisans supplied goods that couldn’t be imported or were too expensive to, the poor farmers grew foodstuffs (mostly wheat, which was often subject to poor agricultural management and undercutting by cheap imports), and the slaves came from the farming class as collateral on loans from the merchants when they went into default - either the farmers themselves or members of their families. Each performed an independent economic function and had a specific role in relation to production.

Under capitalism, we have a class that organizes production for its own profit and invests those profits into expanding production when it chooses to, and we have a class that actually performs the productive work in return for wages; its members are more or less economically compelled to do so or face destitution. Is there another class with an independent economic function and a specific role in relation to production besides these two in today’s society?

[RickJay]

@Olentzero

Subjectively they may feel like high proletarians or even middle class, but objectively they are subject to the same crisis-prone forces pushing their wages downward as are the rest of the working class and they took the same kind of action other workers do (and ought to do a lot more) when confronted with that situation.Please identify the source of the following quote:

Major league baseball players have gone on strike on a number of occasions. I admit I have a great deal of difficulty seeing them as being “proletarians.”

@Olentzero

Proving the existence of a modern class with an economic function independent of either the capitalist class or the working class.

O0, I really don’t believe you would ever accept any argument of evidence that attempting to prove this. You’re willing, to my frank amazement, to claim that pre-democratic Athens had four classes - three of which sure sound like a working class - while insisting today’s vastly more complex society and economy has just two. No matter what, you’re insist everyone’s a capitalist or a worker; distinctions between them will be rejected out of hand because they don’t fit your worldview.

Not that I’m saying BG’s muse of Paul Fussell is right - but his distinctions aren’t any less logical than anyone else’s. Lumping major league baseball players, high level managers, unionized tradesmen, and the severly underemployed together and saying there’s no difference, and then saying there’s a capitalist “class” distinct from them even though, in fact, the majority of shareholders and small business woners are themselves workers, seems far less thought out than Fussell’s theory.

[Lumpy]

I wonder if anyone has ever, as a parody of Marxism, come up with a completly arbitrary system of classification that is patently absurd, but which is internally self-consistant and whose adherents insist that if you don’t believe it you lack “conciousness” of it’s truth?

[Olentzero]

@RickJay

You’re willing, to my frank amazement, to claim that pre-democratic Athens had four classes - three of which sure sound like a working class - while insisting today’s vastly more complex society and economy has just two. No matter what, you’re insist everyone’s a capitalist or a worker; distinctions between them will be rejected out of hand because they don’t fit your worldview.

You do realize you’re contradicting yourself here? If I identify four separate and distinct classes in Athenian society, how am I insisting everyone’s a capitalist or a worker? Workers have to sell their ability to work to someone else in order to survive because that’s all they’ve really got. The impoverished crop farmers in Athens didn’t sell their ability to work to anyone; they were able to sell their crops on their own initiative, and therefore controlled the product of their labor. Ditto for the artisans and craftsmen. Neither of those classes were working class. The olive oil and wine merchants, it’s clear you agree, were not working class by any stretch of the imagination. Slaves, finally, did not sell their ability to work - they certainly didn’t get paid regular wages (or any wages at all, for that matter) for their troubles. They bargained it away (or had it bargained away for them) through promises of indenture against loans.

Those classes also had political power; the olive oil and wine merchants obviously had a lot of it because they were able to call the shots on things like loan terms up until Solon’s reforms. The farmers and slaves also had political power because they convinced Solon to abolish slavery and ban loans with slavery as collateral. Doubtless the artisans and craftsmen had political influence as well.

The situation has changed. Today there are very few people who directly control the product of their own labor, and their political clout is negligible in comparison to the two great modern classes. The majority of people in the world are compelled to sell the only real thing they possess - their ability to work - (and that includes baseball players; your personal incredulity is not a refutation) to a minority who control not only the product of other people’s labor but national and international economies in order to maintain an acceptable level of profit, which they alone decide what to do with.

I’m certainly not arguing that the world is not a more complex place now than it was 2500 years ago in Athens. But that doesn’t mean the foundations of modern society can’t be simple. After all, the Internet, when you get down to it, is built entirely out of two units: 1 and 0.

[RickJay]

@Olentzero

You do realize you’re contradicting yourself here? If I identify four separate and distinct classes in Athenian society, how am I insisting everyone’s a capitalist or a worker?

Sorry, I forgot to add the modifier “…today.”

Workers have to sell their ability to work to someone else in order to survive because that’s all they’ve really got. The impoverished crop farmers in Athens didn’t sell their ability to work to anyone; they were able to sell their crops on their own initiative…

This is a distinction without a difference. We have farmers today, too. Surely they constitute a third class? Wouldn’t all self-employed people constitute another class?

No matter how you slice it, they’re selling their ability to work. In fact, almost everyone who has ever lived has sold their ability to work; very, very few people have been nobility, after all.

The majority of people in the world are compelled to sell the only real thing they possess - their ability to work - (and that includes baseball players; your personal incredulity is not a refutation)

You missed my point, likely because, again, you won’t accept anything Marx didn’t say.

My point is not that baseball players don’t make money by selling their work. Of course they do. Alex Rodriguez is paid $25,000,000 a year to engage in playing baseball; if he did not play baseball, he wouldn’t be paid. It is, however, absolutely proposterous to pretend that Alex Rodriguez is in the same social “class,” in any sense that matters, as I am, or as a worker at McDonald’s. Rodriguez’s relationship with his employers is not at all the same, his economic freedom is not at all the same - after all, he doesn’t actually have to work anymore if he doesn’t want to - he’s as much capitalist as he is worker now, and his level of influence is orders of magnitude higher than mine. Paul Fussell’s distinctions, which place Alex Rodriguez in a different class from me, seem to be just as logical as Karl Marx’s.

Give me a reason, based on some sort of evidence, why I should believe Marx and not Fussell.

[BrainGlutton]

@Olentzero

Fussell’s definition of class is entirely subjective, and by that I mean it is based on individual attitudes and perceptions rather than objective economic and social function (outside of acknowledging that some people have to work for a living and others don’t). That might be all well and good for people who don’t regard sociology as a science, but anyone who wishes sociology to be as scientifically rigorous as possible should reject this out of hand.

Why? All characteristics of social life are at least partly subjective, and there is no “mystification” in that, for these purposes the subjective is as real as anything else. There is no qualitative difference between A looking down on B because B works for a living, and A looking down on B because B has what A perceives as “low-class” habits and manners; both are equally class feelings and both will shape the social relations of the two – and of their respective classes. No complete system of sociology could omit or ignore the role of the subjective feelings and perceptions of people in society. The subjective factors might be much harder to rigorously classify and quantify than socioeconomic statistics, but they are no less real and no less important. Fussell does not pretend to be a sociologist, but any really scientific sociological analysis of class would have to start with such woolly perceptions as his, not with economics.

And Fussell’s perception that class status depends less on income than on freedom is not only a striking and truthful insight, it is one in which any Marxist should take deep interest. You want a classless society? Be warned that income equality is not enough – it has to be a society where the factory worker has as much real, personal, daily freedom and independence and dignity in the workplace as his foreman and the foreman’s supervisor and the supervisor’s CEO. I cannot think how that could be achieved, but it is a challenge you must at some point meet – because the foreman and the supervisor and the CEO cannot be taken out of the equation. (The Board of Directors might be taken out. Or replaced with something fundamentally different, like a workers’ soviet or a state planning agency.) Both institutional elites, as such, and management hierarchy, as such, are indispensable to any industrial economy; the problem is to break the linkage between institutional status and social status as here defined.

[BrainGlutton]

@Olentzero

High, low, or middle, working people are part of the working class, and the hostility you mention comes more from the lack of consciousness about the nature and role of the working class rather than actual class division. For instance, let’s take concert musicians. According to Fussell, these people would be high proletarian with all sorts of disdain and whatnot for the lower two ‘classes’. Yet not three months ago the Detroit Symphony Orchestra went on strike over wages and working conditions. Subjectively they may feel like high proletarians or even middle class, but objectively they are subject to the same crisis-prone forces pushing their wages downward as are the rest of the working class and they took the same kind of action other workers do (and ought to do a lot more) when confronted with that situation.

How does that prove Fussell wrong? Just because classical musicians are willing to use the tools of organized labor does not mean they see sanitation workers as their class brethren, nor does the fact that strikes can work in favor of both groups make sanitation workers their class brethren. The most telling factor there is that they are unlikely to marry each other. A social class has characteristics independent of its economic function.

I’ve already posted this in this thread, but it bears repeating at this point:

Understanding the white overclass requires revising the most common misconceptions about class. The discussion of social class has been confused for generations by Marxist thinkers, who made the mistake of completely identifying class with economic function. Like the Marxists, old-fashioned American liberal pluralists tend to misunderstand class. What they refer to as class is typically not a social class at all, but a mere occupational or income category, such as service-sector workers or millionaires. Meanwhile, the New Left which came to prominence in the sixties has tended to drop the idea of class altogether, in favor of race and gender. . . . In recent years, conservative ideologues have added further confusion by defining political factions and lifestyle subcultures as classes. . . .

In order to think about class in twenty-first century America, we must first clear our minds of these Marxist, liberal, New Left, and conservative definitions of class, and return to the older notion of class found in classical and European political thought from Aristotle to Montesquieu.

A class is a group of families, united by intermarriage and a common subculture, whose members tend to predominate in certain professions and political offices, generation after generation. Note that the class – the group of similar families – has an existence independent of the offices which its members tend to hold. Indeed, we cannot talk intelligently about class unless we make a distinction between a social class and a mere institutional elite. Those who talk about “the political class” or, with C. Wright Mills, about “the power elite,” are confusing two very different things. Every modern society, even the most perfectly egalitarian, will have an institutional elite – top civilian politicians, military officers, judges, diplomats, financial and industrial executives, publishers, editors and leading intellectuals, clerical leaders, and so on. The subject of class is raised only when you examine the social origins of the particular individuals who hold office in the institutional elite or elites. Learning the organization of judicial offices in a country tells you nothing about class. However, if you find out that most of the judges tend to come from old-money families in a particular region of that country, and that most attended one of half a dozen schools, then you have learned something important about that country’s class system.

An analysis obviously tailored to understanding the nature of an upper class, but if we substitute “occupations” for “professions and political offices,” it applies to all classes. The important thing is that you can be, and almost certainly are, a member of the class you were born in whether you work in an occupation associated with that class or not. Climbing to a higher class might be possible, but it requires a lot more than getting a higher-class job or income; falling to a lower class might be possible, but there will always be some social difference and distance between a prole and an impoverished “gentleman” who works beside him.

[BrainGlutton]

@Olentzero

Proving the existence of a modern class with an economic function independent of either the capitalist class or the working class.

Professionals. They are well-paid, but they are not of the capitalist, possessing class; they work for a living, but they are not of the capitalist-dependent working class. However, professionals are not actually a class, they are an occupational category most strongly associated with the upper-middle class.

[Olentzero]

Both of you are making an assumption about my definition of class that is unwarranted. Nowhere have I said that class is defined by income level, and RickJay’s elaboration on baseball players illustrates the problem with that definition quite nicely.

A-Rod’s personal worth alone does not make him a capitalist. What would make him a capitalist is if he used that personal worth to start up a company, hired people to work in it, made a profit off it, and either used those profits to reinvest in expanding the company or pocketed them for his own personal use. Or if he just invested his personal worth in other companies to reap profits in the form of dividends and such like. But simply having $25 million from a baseball career doesn’t make him a capitalist.

It is therefore for that very reason that Marxists don’t see socialism or communism as simply income equality, and actually picture it as BG briefly described in post #167, with the important exception that the soviet replaces both the CEO and the Board of Directors, and makes the foremen and supervisors directly responsible to them (and since the soviet is made up of the workers in the company, to whom the soviet is directly accountable and responsible, the foremen and supervisors thus become directly accountable to the very people they are supervising).

BG is also right in stating that going on strike does not make a symphony violinist the class brother of a sanitation worker; what makes them class brethren is that they both sell their ability to work. Going on strike for better wages and conditions only works towards helping them both realize that. It’s called ‘solidarity’. Who someone chooses to marry (or envisions themselves being able or unable to marry) is not an indicator of class at all.

RickJay, there is a major difference between selling one’s ability to work and selling the product of one’s labor. Let’s compare Athenian wheat farmers to a modern-day sanitation worker, for example. Both have to work in order to survive; this is true enough. But the wheat farmer, to start with, supplied himself with the materials he needed to get the work done, and they became his property - seeds, a plow and a horse or mule to pull it, a scythe to mow the grain, a place to store the grain in, and so on. And when he harvested the wheat, it was his and his alone to sell on the market. Nowhere did he sell his ability to work to someone else; any money he used in purchasing equipment or livestock (or goods he bartered away for the same purpose) came from disposing of the results of his labor - ie the wheat.

The sanitation worker, on the other hand, doesn’t own the truck he drives or the compactor on the back of it, or oftentimes even the uniform he wears while on the job - it’s all company property. The only thing he brings to the job are his hands, his body, and his brain. In other words, his ability to work.

As a matter of fact, this is happening to a lot of farmers as well, if you consider things like agricultural companies attempting to control what seeds are used (such as GM plants that don’t produce seeds of their own, pushing farmers to have to come back and buy more each year) or what crops are grown (through contracts), leaving farmers only with the choice of which company to work for, and thereby really only selling their ability to work. Vastly different than the situation with the Athenian farmer of Solon’s time.

BG: If I ask “Show me a class” and you say “This, but it’s not actually a class”, how in the hell do you consider that an answer to the question?! I’m also still waiting on you to identify the source of the quote I provided in #161.

[BrainGlutton]

@Olentzero

Both of you are making an assumption about my definition of class that is unwarranted. Nowhere have I said that class is defined by income level . . .

No, by economic function. That is your mistake.

[Olentzero]

How so? What other objective basis is there to define class? And what about that quote in #161, if you’d be so kind?

[BrainGlutton]

@Olentzero

How so? What other objective basis is there to define class?

The bases political theorists have been using for centuries, already explained, and every bit as “objective.” Marx made some great contributions to modern sociopolitical thought, but to that he added nothing of value.

@Olentzero

And what about that quote in #161, if you’d be so kind?

Oh, I know it’s from the DOI. Everybody does. I don’t even need to look it up. But, since I had already addressed the general point for the moment – and expressly allowed for the possibility you might be right, I’ll get back to you – your bringing it up after that, at a point where it could contribute nothing to the direction of the debate, was so embarrassing to you that it was wisest to ignore it. You should not have made things worse by repetition. Debate is one thing, and heckling’s another.

[Olentzero]

Of course it contributes to the debate. You stated, in #160, regarding the nature of the American Revolution, that it was

not characterized by any expectation of making vast fortunes in manufacturing or foreign commerce. That lay in the future.

I came up with a quote from the Declaration of Independence, the very list of reasons why the revolution was being carried out, that explicitly refutes your assertion.

As for post #168, the author of that quote (I’m assuming it’s Fussell) is looking at a subset of one class and trying to argue that it a class all by itself, something you tried to do with your example of professionals but were forced to admit otherwise even before you finished the sentence. The institutional elite may predominantly come from a class, but they are not a class in and of themselves. Their functions are entirely dependent on the needs of the class running society.

[Olentzero]

@BrainGlutton

But, since I had already addressed the general point for the moment – and expressly allowed for the possibility you might be right, I’ll get back to you

I went back over your posts subsequent to my citing the DOI to see if I’d missed something along these lines, in which case I’d gladly and humbly offer an apology. But I don’t see anything like that.

[Olentzero]

@RickJay

Wouldn’t all self-employed people constitute another class?

I missed this the last time around and it is worth a few lines of consideration.

No, self-employed people are not another class. They straddle the line, for the most part, between working class and petty bourgeois; which side of the line they fall on depends on whether they do all the work themselves (like me when I was a freelance translator) or hire others (for example, the head of a small home repair firm who may or may not be out on the job alongside the people s/he hires).

A freelance translator may have a few items s/he owns completely, like the laptop I’m writing on right now, and dictionaries, and some computer-aided translation software, but s/he still depends on selling the ability to translate to various clients. It’s not like they go around collecting documents, translating them, and then going to an online market to see who’s interested in buying a Russian-to-English translation of electrical installation regulations. They have nothing to sell but their ability to translate. Working class.

The home repair company owner owns the tools and equipment and a few other things necessary for operations, but obviously he can’t do it all himself so he needs to hire people - in other words, buy their ability to work. And to make his company succeed, he needs to continually expand - find more work, pull down more income, and sink more of that income into more and newer equipment, better facilities, and more workers to handle the increased workload. And so on and so forth. Capitalist.

The key element here, as always, is whether you sell your ability to work or you purchase the ability of others to work. A translator who works independently but does very well is no more a capitalist than a home repair entrepreneur who hires people but barely breaks even is working class. Income has nothing to do with it.

[Muffin]

Nice to know that rich lawyers are working class, and that their income has nothing to do with their class.

Now what class are people who live on investments? Are retired workers shifted into the capitalist class once they retire and live on their investments? Are workers with investments or businesses on the side both workers and capitalists, and what is their responsibility when it comes to revolution? What if a veterinarian operates on a working horse?

The more one digs down into Marxism, the more stupid it becomes.

[BrainGlutton]

@Olentzero

The key element here, as always, is whether you sell your ability to work or you purchase the ability of others to work.

Many people do both.

[Olentzero]

And therefore what?

[BrainGlutton]

@Olentzero

And therefore what?

So who’s the prole and who’s the bourgeois – the lawyer or her nanny?