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Author Topic: what's class got to do with it?
the bard
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posted 05 March 2005 01:24 AM      Profile for the bard     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Hi I just picked up a book called "What's class got to do with it" edited by radical economist Michael Zweig, at SUNY Stony Brook. This volume argues for an understaning of class based not on income or lifestyle, but by as a question of economic and political power. Focusing on the US, Zweig divides it into the working, middle and capitalist classes.

"The working class is made up of people who, when they go to work or when they act as citizens, have comparatively little power or authority. They are the people who do their jobs under more or less close supervision, who have little control over the pace or content of their work, who aren't the boss of anyone. They are blue-collar people like construction and factory workers, and white-collar workers like bank tellers and writers of routine computer code. They work to produce and distribute goods, or in service industries or government agencies. They are skilled and unskilled, engaged in over five hundred different occupations tracked by the U.S. Department of Labor: agricultural laborers, baggage handlers, cashiers, flight attendants, home health care aides, machinists, secretaries, short order cooks, sound technicians, truck drivers. In the United States are by far the majority of the population. Over eighty-eight million people were in working class occupations in 2002, comprising 62 percent of the labor force.

On the other side of the basic power relation in a capitalist society is the capitalist class, those most senior executives who direct and control the corporations that employ the private-sector working class. These are the "captains of industry" and finance, CEOs, chief financial officers, chief operating officers, members of boards of directors, those whose decisions dominate the workplace and the economy, and whose economic power often translates into dominant power in the realms of politics, culture, the media, and even religion. Capitalists comprise about 2 percent of the U.S. labor force."
[Zweig, p. 4-5]

Zweig defines the ruling class as being comprised of interlocking directors on multiple corporate boards plus the top leadership in the federal government.

As for the middle class:

"The 'middle class' gets a lot of attention in the media and political commentary in the United States, but this term is almost used to describe people in the middle of the income distribution. People sometimes talk about 'middle class workers', referring to people who work for a wage butlive comfortable if modest lives. Especially in goods-producing industries, unionized workers have been able to win wages that allow home ownership, paid vacations, nice cars, home entertainment centers and other consumer ammenities.

When class is understood in terms of income or lifestyle, these workers are sometimes called 'middle class'...'Middle class workers' are suposed to be 'most people', those with stable jobs and solid values based in the work ethic, as opposed to poor people - those on welfare or the 'underclass'- on side, and 'the rich' on the other. When people think of classes in terms of 'rich, middle and poor', almost everyone ends up in the middle.

Understanding class in terms of power throws a different light on the subject. In this view, middle class people are in the middle of the power grid that has workers and capitalists at its poles. The middle class includes professional people like doctors, lawyers, accountants, and university professors. Most people in the 'professional middle class' are not self-employed. They work for private companies or public agencies, receive salaries, and answer to supervisors. In these ways they are like workers.

But if we compare professional middle class people with well-paid workers, we see important differences. A unionized auto assembly worker doing a lot of oertime makes enough money to live the lifestyle of a 'middle class worker', even more money than some professors or lawyers. But a well-paid unionized machinist or electrician or autoworker is still part of the working class. Professors and lawyers have a degree of autonomy and control at work that autoworkers don' have. The difference is a question of class" [p. 6]

Zweig's middle class also includes supervisors, from foremen to managers right below the top level, as well as small business owners. While foremen and some small business owners work alongside workers and often have working class roots, they have more power (making them middle class), while well-off managers and corporate lawyers and accountants are also middle class (despite belonging to the same country club or what have you) because they're not the final decisionmakers, the capitalist class holds ultimate authority. The middle class is 36% of the U.S. labor force.

I hope I didn't violate any rules by quoting (with reference) Zweig, or anything else. I have some disagreements over Zweig's definition and am somewhat uncomfortable with the term "middle class" but I think it's a good starting point to discuss class issues. What do others think?


From: Toronto | Registered: Mar 2005  |  IP: Logged
The Wizard of Socialism
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posted 05 March 2005 01:24 PM      Profile for The Wizard of Socialism   Author's Homepage        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Interesting. I'm not sure if class is truly quantifiable, or like most things, is a matter of perception. I've always considered myself in the middle, like most people. I was born and bred in the NDP, raised SYND, and am now thinking about having a little Party member of my own. I'm a working man who drives a late sixties car. I dress modestly and wear no jewellry. Yet despite all this, because of my support for the left, I have been on several occasions called "a traitor to my class."
From: A Proud Canadian! | Registered: Jul 2002  |  IP: Logged
N.Beltov
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posted 05 March 2005 02:51 PM      Profile for N.Beltov   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Class consciousness is knowing what side of the fence you're on. And class analysis is figuring out who is there with you.
Knowing "who is there with you" is essential for determining likely or successful political strategies for policies that benefit working people. Class analysis is a great antidote to liberal fantasies of constructed social harmony. As the great Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn once sang, "Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight." Amen, brother.

A useful term that should be used more often is "class loyalty" to indicate a person's class partisanship. Even the son of a big businessman (like Fred Engels) can, by dint of effort and hard work, take the side of working people and become a protagonist of same. It's not impossible - it's just that it's likely that such a person will carry their class prejudices with them and, therefore, will need some help in overcoming those prejudices. It is a special kind of arrogance that presumes partisanship for a class can be learned quickly or turned on like a switch. (This is why, in part, left wing parties insist that newcomers not just support some policy objectives but make it their business to belong to some active part of the organization. The newcomer learns "our" ways...if they don't know them already.)

Lenin's classic definition of classes is still useful:

quote:
...social classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.

V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 421.

What basically determines the difference between classes is their relation to the means of production . It is also important to understand that the emergence of classes in human history is associated with the development of the social division of labour and the emergence of private ownership of the means of production. Every antagonistic socio-economic formation is characterized by its own class structure, its basic classes born of the dominating mode of production, such as slaves and slaveowners, serfs and landlords, workers and the bourgeoisie. Alongside them are the intermediate classes and social strata, whether the heritage of previous formations, or representing the newly emerging classes of the subsequent formation.

The classic Marxist argument about the working class is that, by virtue of being tied to the most progressive form of economy, i.e., large-scale production, the working class is, therefore, the most revolutionary, conscious and organized class that history has ever produced. Of all the productive forces in society, goes the argument, the greatest ever is the activity, energy and creativity of the working class that has by its own hands and brains produced the stupendous wealth of our age. And, goes the argument, the glaring contradiction between this stupendous wealth on the one hand, and its private appropriation on the other hand, is projected (NOT PREDICTED! Marxism is not teleology.)to lead to a new epoch of social production where this jarring contradiction is ended. "Socialism or barbarism," as the saying goes. Right now it feels more like barbarism.

For some recent developments and a theoretician of class that I have been very impressed with, I would reccomend reading Erik Olin Wright . Wright elaborates a theory of class that includes what he calls "contradictory class locations" - a dynamic view that recognizes how people can be pulled in different directions, class-wise, at the same time - and bases his categorization of classes and sub-classes on a solid material footing by refering to the location of a person in social production. Kinda like describing a "position" or job that a person has as opposed to how they, as an individual, carry out that job. Know what I mean?

[ 05 March 2005: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]


From: Vancouver Island | Registered: May 2003  |  IP: Logged
The Other Todd
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posted 05 March 2005 03:29 PM      Profile for The Other Todd     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Thank God! Somebody's talking about class! And others are talking about it intelligently!

You folks have made my day.


From: Ottawa | Registered: Jan 2005  |  IP: Logged
the bard
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posted 05 March 2005 04:12 PM      Profile for the bard     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
One problem I have with Zweig's defintion of middle class is that I think it is too large. I estimate that capitalists are maybe about 4%, the professional-managerial or what Michael Albert calls the coordinator class maybe 20%, and the remaining three-quarters are so working class.

Zweig seems to put virtually all professionals in the middle class. In terms of power and autonomy, nurses and public school teachers are in my view essentially working class. So would say, computer programmers and lab technicians. An adjunct professor with insecure status would be working class in my view, but not a tenured university professor.

And I'm not sure about having all "supervisory workers" being part of the "middle class" either. Does Zweig mean that a shift manager at Wendy's is working class, because that person is someone's "boss"?

Also, should small business owners be seen as part of the capitalist class or "middle class"? What about foremen/forewomen? Are they "middle class" or working class?

[ 05 March 2005: Message edited by: the bard ]

[ 05 March 2005: Message edited by: the bard ]


From: Toronto | Registered: Mar 2005  |  IP: Logged
Gir Draxon
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posted 05 March 2005 05:39 PM      Profile for Gir Draxon     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by the bard:

And I'm not sure about having all "supervisory workers" being part of the "middle class" either. Does Zweig mean that a shift manager at Wendy's is working class, because that person is someone's "boss"?


No, I beleive that Zweig was arguing that people like a "supervisor" at a fast food joint are still working class because their designation is mostly arbitrary- they don't make important decisions.


From: Arkham Asylum | Registered: Feb 2003  |  IP: Logged
the bard
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posted 05 March 2005 07:39 PM      Profile for the bard     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Maybe, but doesn't Zweig say that workers "aren't the boss of anyone"?

So who did Lenin count as being in an "intermediate" position? The vanguard of radical intellectuals who were supposed to lead the masses to a bright future?


From: Toronto | Registered: Mar 2005  |  IP: Logged
N.Beltov
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posted 05 March 2005 07:56 PM      Profile for N.Beltov   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
the bard:So who did Lenin count as being in an "intermediate" position? The vanguard of radical intellectuals who were supposed to lead the masses to a bright future?

If you actually READ Lenin's definition, you may have noticed that he didn't use the term "intermediate" at all. But I think it would be fair to assert that he didn't elaborate, as part of his classic definition, a more detailed analysis of intermediate classes. So the theory should (and has) developed.

My turn for a question. Since you are willing to use the term "middle" class in a serious discussion of class, tell us what "middle class" is the MIDDLE of?

The Marxist definition of social class has the merit that it is objective, and not arbitrary. Orthodox (bourgeois) sociology makes use of some linear scale of INCOME, or falls back on "social status" and "psychologizes" (uses subjective criteria)the whole thing. Social class then becomes, as with the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland , whatever "I" say it is.


From: Vancouver Island | Registered: May 2003  |  IP: Logged
the bard
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posted 05 March 2005 08:12 PM      Profile for the bard     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I mentioned that I have serious problems with the term "middle class", and I haven't found the word that substitutes for the group between capital and labor. Albert calls it the "coordinator class", others have called it the "professional-managerial class" and things like that.

The reason I dislike "middle class" is that implies that this group doesn't have an outlook, it's merely sort of capitalist, sort of working class.

So where do you think that a tenured university professor or a physician employed by a hospital should fall? Small business owners? Foremen/forewomen?

I've read Wright's half-Marxist, half-Weberian analysis, it's interesting, though I'm not sure if I buy all of it.

[ 05 March 2005: Message edited by: the bard ]

[ 05 March 2005: Message edited by: the bard ]

[ 05 March 2005: Message edited by: the bard ]


From: Toronto | Registered: Mar 2005  |  IP: Logged
N.Beltov
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posted 05 March 2005 08:20 PM      Profile for N.Beltov   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Here's a link to a previous discussion on babble - I think I made some contributions about Wright.

Middle class?

And another thread on (bourgeois) intellectuals:

Bourgeois intellectuals: credit where credit is due

A quick comment: To me the best definition(s) are the ones that show their usefulness by, among other things, helping people to figure out who their likely social allies SHOULD be. But that's no academic exercise.

Wright has some problems. To the best of my understanding, he rejects the labour theory of value altogether, which I find troubling. But he is interesting. In particular, his analysis seems to better reflect the DYNAMIC of classes, their fluidity, and so on.

[ 05 March 2005: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]


From: Vancouver Island | Registered: May 2003  |  IP: Logged

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