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Let's have a class thread! It'll be fun!

gunneradt said:
nonsense - it's a 7 year-olds grammar
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Well, that's because I am 7. I an 8 in September and it will be Year 4!

My auntie ymu taught me how to spell before I started school because I was writing my name in my book so much I got bored and told her to tell me something else to write.

She said "daddy". Mummy only taught me letters then so I did not know how. I said she had to say what letter to write first. But she didn't tell me!

She said "what letter does daddy start with?" and I said "d?"

She smiled and I wroted a d.

It was EASY to finish "daddy" like that but we had a long time in the car so I told her to say more. We did "mummy" "happy" and "sad" and then the car was at home.

When the car was stopped my mummy said to my auntie that we only did letters and I had only written my name before. I liked spelling new words. I told mummy to do it with me and she did.

My Auntie ymu said to tell you that you are so silly that if you went to my school they would have to invent a new reception class because there aren't any babies smaller than you at the school and you would not keep up with the work my little suster did at school before.

My sister is grate. :D:D:D

have to go before auntie ymu is in trouble with mummy for letting me read to her too early for little girls

b
ye
 
Anyone who works for a wage is proletarian.

Anyone who receives money from capital investments is bourgeois.

Most people today are both.

And yet the class positions of proletariat and bourgeois are no less contradictory for that.

So the class struggle has become internalized.
 
yield said:
How has it been internalised? The class struggle is social relations.
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How can it be "social relations" when the same person occupies two class positions simultaneously?

It can be internalized because each class position produces a corresponding ideology. So if you occupy two contradictory class positions, you will possess two contradictory ideologies.
 
phildwyer said:
Anyone who works for a wage is proletarian.

Anyone who receives money from capital investments is bourgeois.

Most people today are both.

And yet the class positions of proletariat and bourgeois are no less contradictory for that.

So the class struggle has become internalized.
Click to expand...



I have no savings accounts and no investments of any kind, so I'm pure proletarian if this is true.

After 2008 the banks and the various funds can fuck off.
 
Blagsta said:
I have a mortgage, I don't receive anything from it!
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But you probably will eventually.

Consider the difference from the C19th, when the vast majority received no income from investments at all, while many of the bourgeoisie did not work at all.
 
In the Marxist sense, class has nothing to do with wealth or income.

The logical contradiction is between capital and labor.

In the C19th capital and labor could be identified with two visibly distinct social classes.

But that is no longer the case.
 
I'm not really sure where I stand on this as it's largely circumstances beyond one's control. For example, neither Mrs SFM of myself come from backgrounds with any money so we tend to be very careful in terms of financial planning, shopping, etc. as there is no back-up and we are on our own.

Other friends of ours come from rather more affluent circumstances and have a markedly different outlook on life - one of the biggest differences being an expectation of financial help from their families. For example, one friend has just announced his engagement. Immediately, his family have given them £10k and her family have chipped in £15k. His mother didn't give them so much as she paid the deposit for their house, bought them a car last year and is paying for them to go on holiday. This is all considered normal within his family (and among others I know).

I'm guessing that he's middle class - a different world altogether! ;)
 
But someone's relationship to the means of production is going to be to a very large extent determined by how much money they have.
 
frogwoman said:
But someone's relationship to the means of production is going to be to a very large extent determined by how much money they have.
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not always.

Karl Marx class analysis wasn't just about analysing capitalism. It was about understanding, "the history of all the hitherto existing society, is the history of class struggle".

So if you look outside capitalism, at feudalism, we can see there were two groups that owned the means of production, the land. These were the Lords and the Kings on one side, whose personal wealth, ownership of the land etc, was a decisive factor in their relationship to the means of production. But the other group, the church, were part of a bureaucracy that controlled the land, and so they controlled the land, but importantly they didn't own it personally. The institution the church owned the land.

Now I'm not saying that certain members of the bureaucracy did not reap great financial reward, but the amount of personal wealth they had did not determine their relationship to the means of production, their control of it did. And this is where I disagree with your party. For me the same is true in the USSR. Again there, it wasn't the personal wealth of those bureaucrats that made them the ruling class, they didn't own the means of production, it was there bureaucratic control.

And this was not just made up by the SWP, Marx himself spoke about how the means of production could be controlled by bureaucracies, and not owned by them personally, but this still constituted a capitalist mode of production.
 
phildwyer said:
To some extent, though it is perfectly possible for a proletarian to be richer than a bourgeois.
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precisely, and it overcomes the problem of what people were saying before about the pilot on £100,000 a year, or the plasterer of electrician and £40,000 a year.

Whilst you have to have wealth to own the means of production, you don't necessarily have to work wealth to control the means of production, or control workers.

You could have a quite poorly paid manager, but what we are examining is his role in the political economy relationships, in the class relationships. How the various groups interact with each other, and why.
 
gunneradt said:
but true
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Nah, depends what course. I have a politics degree from a Russell Group Uni which got me absolutely nowhere, and a postgraduate nursing professional qualification from an ex-poly which enabled my career. You'll be better off with something practical from Bolton or South Bank than many courses from Kings, Durham or UCL in the current climate - unless you have the wealth to be able to do internships etc.
 
ResistanceMP3 said:
precisely, and it overcomes the problem of what people were saying before about the pilot on £100,000 a year, or the plasterer of electrician and £40,000 a year.

Whilst you have to have wealth to own the means of production, you don't necessarily have to work wealth to control the means of production, or control workers.

You could have a quite poorly paid manager, but what we are examining is his role in the political economy relationships, in the class relationships. How the various groups interact with each other, and why.
Click to expand...

I would contend that the amount you earn affects/is a symptom of (a dialectical relationship!) your role in economic relations regardless of your actual job. It is an indication of the amount of leverage you can exert. A footballer on millionaire wages may strictly speaking be in the position of a simple worker for a wage, but in reality his leverage is such that, far from him having his labour value exploited, he can exploit those that pay his wages to take more money than he really ought - forcing ticket prices to increase, clubs to go into massive debt, etc. And then, if you do earn a big wage - again regardless of your actual role at work - you then have surplus income that you can put into capitalist investments and, crucially, you are in a position to provide for your children that which they do not get from the state, such as, in years to come, a university education.
 
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