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

[frogwoman]

To some extent, though it is perfectly possible for a proletarian to be richer than a bourgeois.

Of course. But ciorrect me if i'm wrong but isn't class also determined by whether you have significant(??) income from other sources besides work?

 

[frogwoman]

A footballer on silly money would probably have (but not necessarily) invested a lot of it into things like property etc surely?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

A footballer on silly money would probably have (but not necessarily) invested a lot of it into things like property etc surely?

yes, and that is why these things are complicated and multi-layered - two people doing the same job for the same money; one buys shares with their surplus income, the other buys cocaine, and suddenly they are in different social classes? I don't think you can boil down class to any single set of parameters - it is a product of a web of considerations.

 

[ymu]

How is it gained, held and inherited? It is no good writing off money, money is tied with power. It's bust to look at either in isolation but they have to be seen as operating together. Currencies of breeding or connection are well and good but they are second to an inheritance that includes land and titles

Oh - absolutely! I'm just saying, really, that there is no meaningful difference under capitalism. If you have power, you have money. Mother Theresa channelled countless millions ... dole-scum lottery winner blew millions.

It is, after all, the fundamental issue with capitalism - that it can't value anything except as a money equivalent. Money is just the physical manifestation of power ...

Just woke up ... I may make no sense.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Again, it is too simple to reduce it down to one layer - of money this time. Winning the lottery doesn't make you more powerful than the Prime Minister.

The amount of money you have doesn't of itself directly indicate how much power you wield. And having power doesn't necessarily mean you have access to large amounts of money. The head of the army has power, and is on a large wage, but need not be extremely rich, and will have many avenues towards enrichment specifically blocked to him while he is in his position of power.

 

[CyberRose]

I would also dispute the idea tho that the working class are at the "bottom of society" even if we're defining working class on the way it seems to be on this thread tho. There are people who are probably in a worse position in terms of precarity etc than most people who work, I'm thinking of people who for whatever reason are long term unemployed etc, with little social support or anything like that and with very little prospect of that ever changing.

Well then you'd have another class below working class (which some people do actually say exists and refer to it as "the under class"). I don't agree with that. Unemployed etc still have no wealth or power so I see no reason to class them apart from what I've defined as working class (which is the bottom class in the three I described). Maybe it's just semantics?

 

[TremulousTetra]

Just first, I'm not saying people have to accept this model. Marxist model. I'm just saying if you want to subscribe to a Marxist model, this is what I think it entails.

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.

that is actually a great question. And the footballer is a great example.

What is exploitation? For Marxists, the exploitation is the surplus value that is extracted from a worker. What this means is that a footballer on £40,000 a week, is more exploited than a shit shoveler who is on £100 a week. Why?

In a capitalist relationship, the capitalist has to make a profit, extract surplus value. If he's paying somebody £40,000 a week, then he has to be making say £4,000 a week out of that worker, whereas out of the person on a hundred pound a week he is only making £10 a week. The rate of exploitation is the same 10%. So in short, in pounds and pence, workers on high wages are more exploited that workers on low wages.

This may sound funny, but is not talking about exploitation in the way we generally do, it is just looking at exploitation in the economic sense, because what Marx writings were, they were an analysis of the political economy. I think they are quite moral, but I don't think they have intended to be a moral condemnation of capitalism, rather than a logical condemnation.

And that is why how much wages you are on is not relevant to the Marxist definition of class.

 

[CyberRose]

Most "lower middle class" parents don't have a spare £27k tucked away, else I think they'd be more "middle/upper middle class". How many teachers can stick their hands on about £30k up front?

Is that correct? I was under the impression that these new tuition fees would be paid back after the student graduates and under a similar system to the student loan repayments (but when you start earning £21k instead of the £15k it is now). That would eliminate the need to pay up front (and therefore for families to find this money from somewhere). It's still £40k of debt compared to the approx £10k it is now (which I've worked out will take me around 30 years to pay off so the £40k debt probably will never get paid off by most people and if you never get a job over £21k you will never pay any of it back which to me suggests a massive shortfall in the future)

 

[frogwoman]

Surely it's a case of how much benefit YOU actually get to see from that money as well, how many hours you work etc? For example someone earning 100k a year who spends the time constantly travelling, has barely any time off, if any, regularly works 12+ hours a day for very little job security and as such barely gets to see the money, or the benefits of any of it.

Im not saying this comes into the marxist definition of class but it's another way in which money isn't "everything" although it undoubtedly goes along way.


Also re: exploitation - i was also under the impression that it's also the value to the employer as well? So say your a cleaner, and get paid £5.93 p/h. The value of that work is a lot more than the wage that you've got, because your cleaning helps to keep the office tidy, help give a good impression and retain custmers, provide a comfortable environment that makes more staff want to work there, mena that the employers dont have do it themselves etc etc etc. Isn't this also part of what surplus value is, because 'm not not sure that someone's job earning £100 a week wouldn't yield a fair amount of "surplus value"

 

[TremulousTetra]

yes, and that is why these things are complicated and multi-layered - two people doing the same job for the same money; one buys shares with their surplus income, the other buys cocaine, and suddenly they are in different social classes? I don't think you can boil down class to any single set of parameters - it is a product of a web of considerations.

but, IMO, that is because you are not being clear what you want the definition for. Look at it this way.

If you open up your computer, and took a photograph of it, you would have a perfect representation of what it looks like. However, if you wanted to understand how it worked, an electrical schematic would be much more usefull, and yet the schematic LOOKS nothing like the reality..

I would see Marxist definition of class much more as a schematic, rather than a painting of every little character feature and nuance. Marx never intended to capture every little feature character and nuance, he intended to capture how the various groups interact with each other. That some INDIVIDUAL can be in two classes at the same time is unimportant.

 

[ymu]

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".

I like this, RMP3. I think Marx was a brilliant historian and meta-economist, and I think he was bang on about the dynamics and the inevitabilities.

I am a very, very poor student of Marx. I allegedly did a politics degree, but my university didn't think it necessary to make it a key part of the curriculum. I don't know what he wrote about what came next. AFAICT, the next bit was always about which bunch of his followers wielded the knife or the pick-axe with greater skill, and what they thought should happen next.

Seeing as we're the current bunch of revolutionaries, we need to be working on what happens next for ourselves, I think. I don't do heroes and villains - Marx was right, but not always. Ditto for everyone else who ever has or ever will live.

I'm going OT and there's another thread on this. But I think Marx as historian and economist is a better starting point than Marx as visionary.

 

[frogwoman]

So let's say , to go back to the cleaning example. For all the work that you are doing, you are not only cleaning, you are also:

1) Helping the company retain an attractive office and therefore an attractive image to customers, which will help the company's profits to go up.
2) Saving the boss (or whoever) money on cleaning products and cleaning, which means they have more time to spend on their work, which will mena profits will go up.
3) Helping the staff to work better and more comfortably in a more comfortable environment, which again will help productivity and profits to go up.
And so on.

Surely this is part of what the "surplus value" is as well? And you are not getting a proper share of that, you're only getting the minimum wage. That's what I always thought it meant. that the benefit to the employer (and the amount they could afford to pay you)is alot more than what you actually get in reality.

 

[ymu]

A footballer on silly money would probably have (but not necessarily) invested a lot of it into things like property etc surely?

The footballer has power to extract massive amounts of money from the masses, but he is not the elite. When he hits his 30s or gets injured, he has no more power over his future employment than anyone else with skills and no means to make them pay without an employer.

The difference is, if he's not a fucking idiot, he will never need another job to live in luxury for the rest of his natural. He is privileged and lucky, but he is only powerful whilst he has the shiny bauble. Once he loses it, it is gone.

I think Scotland could achieve paradise on earth if they keep Salmond sucking up to them for independence and protecting them from the English in Westminster, but don't actually give it to him. He'll be happy enough ruling Scotland until they give him that shiny yellow bauble, but the Scots will know it is the bauble that gives them such an excellent government and be canny enough to hang onto it.

The Scottish electorate just managed to become as powerful as Salmond's desire for an independent Scotland. And that is pretty fucking powerful. It will probably lead to them becoming a richer electorate, because that's what power does for you.

 

[CyberRose]

I think I may have come to the conclusion that class is not about money + power at all. It's just power.

I have to disagree with that theory.

Both me and you started our posts off by saying along the lines of 'we should define "class" before we define working/middle class etc' - well maybe a logical preceeding (or precluding?) question is why do we define class?

To me class is your position in society and defines what you can do in your life. But on a practical level it allows us to determine which class of people hold power, which class of people have the required standard of living to enjoy a comfortable and happy life (which should be the objective of all ideologies) and which class of people need their standard of living improving to the level that would allow them to live a comfortable and happy life.

Power is important because it is power that will affect change. But power is not necessary to attain the desired standard of living. What does result in the required standard of living is the level of wealth (in our current economic system anyway).

And altho I said earlier that 'wealth = power', well that's not entirely accurate. What I should have said was 'a constant level of wealth = power' (this allows us to explain why a 'working class' lottery winner would not be included in the 'upper class' simply due to their new found wealth).

So I can't agree that the only factor that determines class is power (especially if the definition of 'power' is based on simply 'wealth'). Those who do not have power fall into the two categories I explained above (those who require power to affect change, and those that do not require change, and therefore do not require power)

 

[frogwoman]

The footballer has power to extract massive amounts of money from the masses, but he is not the elite. When he hits his 30s or gets injured, he has no more power over his future employment than anyone else with skills and no means to make them pay without an employer.

The difference is, if he's not a fucking idiot, he will never need another job to live in luxury for the rest of his natural. He is privileged and lucky, but he is only powerful whilst he has the shiny bauble. Once he loses it, it is gone.

I think Scotland could achieve paradise on earth if they keep Salmond sucking up to them for independence and protecting them from the English in Westminster, but don't actually give it to him. He'll be happy enough ruling Scotland until they give him the bauble, but the Scots know it is the bauble that gives them such an excellent government.

The Scottish electorate just managed to become as powerful as Salmond's desire for an independent Scotland. And that is pretty fucking powerful. It will probably lead to them becoming a richer electorate, because that's what power does for you.

so technically he's middle class or even working class? i suppose you're right though. it's all very complicated.

the footballer, once he has been injured, also has very little powe and influence unless he's somehow managed to get himself on the board of directors of a large corporation, which is probably unlikely.

 

[CyberRose]

so technically he's middle class or even working class?

I'd say footballers (and most other celebraties) are at the higher end of my middle class, but I don't put them in the upper class category because they still (for the most part) don't have power (altho that could easily change if they put their mind to it as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Regan proved)

 

[frogwoman]

the problem with including everyone from self-employed burger vans owners to shop/small business owners to footballers (at the moment) worth millions of pounds in the "middle class" is that it becomes too difficult to define and ends up meaning too much of a broad range of people with a huge variety of different interests. would it be more accurate to say "the middle classes" etc? i dunno.

i was reading today that #457 on the "rich list" made his money by owning 12, 000 lock-up garages. Is he middle class or something more? Given his position as britain's 457th richest person i'm not sure.

 

[TremulousTetra]

delete

 

[CyberRose]

the problem with including everyone from self-employed burger vans owners to shop/small business owners to footballers (at the moment) worth millions of pounds in the "middle class" is that it becomes too difficult to define and ends up meaning too much of a broad range of people with a huge variety of different interests. would it be more accurate to say "the middle classes" etc? i dunno.

Depends on their level of wealth!

i was reading today that #457 on the "rich list" made his money by owning 12, 000 lock-up garages. Is he middle class or something more? Given his position as britain's 457th richest person i'm not sure.

If he's that high on the rich list then potentially he could be a member of the upper class (which from now on I'm going to refer to as 'ruling class' as I think that helps understand better what that class is). I suppose it's an interesting point about who holds power. He will certainly have a 'constant level of wealth' (which basically means the wealth is not finite as a lottery winner's wealth is). That level of constant wealth enables him to have influence in society (either by way of donating to political parties or being able to dictate their policies, along with other capitalists) - whether he exercises that power who knows? And does that person have to exercise their potential power in order to be defined as 'ruling class'?

 

[weepiper]

And does that person have to exercise their potential power in order to be defined as 'ruling class'?

No. It's all about the potential and the opportunity.

 

[frogwoman]

No. It's all about the potential and the opportunity.

that's what i thought, too.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

What is exploitation? For Marxists, the exploitation is the surplus value that is extracted from a worker. What this means is that a footballer on £40,000 a week, is more exploited than a shit shoveler who is on £100 a week. Why?

In a capitalist relationship, the capitalist has to make a profit, extract surplus value. If he's paying somebody £40,000 a week, then he has to be making say £4,000 a week out of that worker, whereas out of the person on a hundred pound a week he is only making £10 a week. The rate of exploitation is the same 10%. So in short, in pounds and pence, workers on high wages are more exploited that workers on low wages.

That breaks down with the footballer example because clubs lose money due to the amounts they have to pay their footballers. Effectively the footballer is extracting a surplus from his employer, not the other way round, due to his position of extreme leverage.

While I think Marxist analysis is very useful, I also think it is flawed - working out exactly how you are being exploited, if at all, when you are on good wages is hard to do. It may well be the case, effectively, that the exact reverse is true - that the capitalist company makes money despite having to pay you your enormous fee, which may, as is the case with football, require unpopular measures such as increasing ticket prices. Football is hugely popular in the UK - the main reason clubs go bust is the huge wages they have to pay. If anything the players are exploiting their clubs, not the other way round.

Also, I do think we should be aware that Marx was writing 150 years ago about a far more rigid society than the one we have now, in which there were really quite clear dividing lines between classes. New kinds of economic relationships have developed since then - the capitalism of today is a capitalism that has been marked amongst other things very deeply by social democracy. The Fordian idea that you have to pay your workers enough so that they can buy your goods is another idea that I would say must be borne in mind when critiquing Marxism. And I think you have to critique Marxism. Otherwise you come out with some very odd conclusions such as the one above!

 

[CyberRose]

No. It's all about the potential and the opportunity.

I'll go along with that

 

[CyberRose]

In a capitalist relationship, the capitalist has to make a profit, extract surplus value. If he's paying somebody £40,000 a week, then he has to be making say £4,000 a week out of that worker, whereas out of the person on a hundred pound a week he is only making £10 a week. The rate of exploitation is the same 10%. So in short, in pounds and pence, workers on high wages are more exploited that workers on low wages.

That assumes the footballer (or anyone else on high wages) is worth those wages. As for the footballer example, I'd say it was idiots like me that buy season tickets (or fake fans with subscriptions to Sky Sports) that are the ones exploited by the footballer earning those high wages (which would be the same for anyone else earning high wages - they are exploiting those on lower wages below them to supplement their worth)

 

[DotCommunist]

a footballers wages reflect his exchange value more than his labour value

 

[TruXta]

a footballers wages reflect his exchange value more than his labour value

Nah, it reflects the leverage that the player's agent cons the prospective buyers into thinking he has.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

as cr says anyone on high wages is exploiting those on lower wages in some way. No value to being a millionaire if everyone else is too. You can only be relatively rich if you're paid more than the people you pay to provide your needs

 

[TremulousTetra]

So let's say , to go back to the cleaning example. For all the work that you are doing, you are not only cleaning, you are also:

1) Helping the company retain an attractive office and therefore an attractive image to customers, which will help the company's profits to go up.
2) Saving the boss (or whoever) money on cleaning products and cleaning, which means they have more time to spend on their work, which will mena profits will go up.
3) Helping the staff to work better and more comfortably in a more comfortable environment, which again will help productivity and profits to go up.
And so on.

Surely this is part of what the "surplus value" is as well?

I don't think so.

And you are not getting a proper share of that, you're only getting the minimum wage. That's what I always thought it meant. that the benefit to the employer (and the amount they could afford to pay you)is alot more than what you actually get in reality.

Sort of, yes. If we take that the tools of production and raw materials as a fixed cost, then the price of the commodity has to exceed the fixed cost plus your labour costs, for the capitalist to extract a surplus value. IE FC + LC + SV = capitalist exploiter.

 

[TremulousTetra]

That assumes the footballer (or anyone else on high wages) is worth those wages.

In capitalism, there is no assumption at all for "any worker on high wages". The system is self-correcting. If any employer pays his workers higher than "the socially average wage" [memory is faulty, I think that is the term marx used.] Then another capitalist will undercut him, and drive him out of business.

As for the footballer example, I'd say it was idiots like me that buy season tickets (or fake fans with subscriptions to Sky Sports) that are the ones exploited by the footballer earning those high wages (which would be the same for anyone else earning high wages - they are exploiting those on lower wages below them to supplement their worth)

As a season ticket holder I know what you mean, but it is a different usage of the term exploitation.

 

[TremulousTetra]

the problem with including everyone from self-employed burger vans owners to shop/small business owners to footballers (at the moment) worth millions of pounds in the "middle class" is that it becomes too difficult to define and ends up meaning too much of a broad range of people with a huge variety of different interests. would it be more accurate to say "the middle classes" etc? i dunno.

What for? How does that changing of the term, increase our understanding of class dynamics?

It may be more descriptive of the appearance of things. Is that what we want a better description?