'Middle Class' it's basically just a construct isn't it...

[butchersapron]

Just to come back to this for a second, does it have any figures on how this has changed since the war?

Afraid not, but i'd guess that it follows the path of income inequality - slowly narrowing post-war years to 1974 then sharp movement of the rich away from the rest, the middle moving away from the poorest, and in last 5-10 years the rich moving ever further away from the middle and poorest and a break up of the middle with the majority moving towards the poorest. And bear in mind, this is just income inequality which misses out on things like assets and so on.

 

[Gmart]

If you look for something you will find it - people invent invisible friends all the time, it is therefore not a surprise when they also find invisible enemies.

F**K you I won't do what you tell me!

From RATM of course. Is this a 'class' cry against heirarchy? Heirachy and systems are how we organise on this planet - if we didn't then we wouldn't have got anywhere. Organisation is how we achieve anything, and the forms which involve the workers such as cooperatives in the model of John Lewis are successful. What class are those workers?

Class: a certain type of person, the other, whose actions are judged to be 'wrong' or against the ideal as others see it. The question is whether it is just part of his/her right to freedom as an individual? Tolerance would be so much easier if we only needed to exercise it for those actions we agreed with...

Then there is a decision as to whether you will stop them either through persuasion, encouragement or force?

Or you could fall back on impotent abuse.

Replacing one authoritarian nightmare with another would be a mistake and a waste of an opportunity.

[...] identify their interests in accordance with maintaining the status quo that affords them this relatively priviliged position. This historically and structurally essential key to how this society has been constructed cannot be wished away with whiny but we all work crap.

I'm more interested in the way that different groups perceive their political interests. Santino coined a phrase earlier - precarious middle class - that's useful, I think. That's what I am, I would say. And the precarious middle classes really do share the political interests of the precarious working classes. It's the 'precarious' bit that's important.

They had to compromise to have a family, compromise with a system which is evidently in need of update. Sooner or later everyone wants to experience having a family etc - why not?

Life is what you make it. While indubitably unfair, sitting around, whinging about it is just going to make things worse for others...

Certainly though BA is correct to point out that many have reinforced their position especially once they have a family. This means that we need to have a conversation about how much tax is reasonable and in what form as well as what is needed from the authorities in the form of safety nets etc.

However people get upset about their perception of being a 'slave' to the system, they refuse to engage and enskill themselves to do something useful or interesting and then are surprised when they end up close to the bottom and near disaster by default. Then they look around for easy scapegoats...

Everyone, no matter what their class, has to play by the rules.

Many do not feel part of that social contract, and with an oppressive system one cannot help but have sympathy. In fact this mutual hatred of the (poor) system we have brings everyone together. Cooperation is the key and not allowing ourselves to be divided.

...being glibly liberal...

How glib.

You exist, you interact with others, therefore you exert influence (to a small degree, true) on class.

It can't not affect you. Class infiltrates and inhabits all social behaviour. You don't see it because you're unwilling or unable to either explore how much it affects you, or acknowledge how much it affects you.

Comments which argue that 'you are either with us or against us' is divisive intrinsically and thus helps 'their' divide and conquer policy (also mentioned earlier). If we engaged our brains rather than just pointing and laughing then we might get somewhere. Everyone can escape class as a concept because it is so simplistic.
The idea that it is mandatory to engage in such simplistic analysis is to be as authoritarian as they are.

Thinking about 'class' is part of a search for the non-believer who doesn't think like you - leading to the cry of persecute. It is intolerant and divisive.

The jokes on me though considering how long it took to read this thread :doh

Simplistic identifiers:

unqualified
low skilled.
went to university.
family connections to old money.
eat avocado salad
listen to radio 4
sells labour for money
gains income from capital
own property/ personal or as an asset
have a private pension
savings
Wearing uniforms at work
using assets as leverage to maintain their 'position'
Being born into a rich family

Which are working class? Which are middle? Which are upper? If only it were so simple...

 

[Crispy]

From RATM of course. Is this a 'class' cry against heirarchy? Heirachy and systems are how we organise on this planet - if we didn't then we wouldn't have got anywhere. Organisation is how we achieve anything, and the forms which involve the workers such as cooperatives in the model of John Lewis are successful. What class are those workers?

Nothing wrong with a hierarchy to organise a task. Happens naturally and allows specialisation. The critical part is accountability and permeability of the hierarchy. The "John Lewis" model, or a co-operative model goes some way towards addressing that. Doesn't alter the employee's relationship to capital much though.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Nothing wrong with a hierarchy to organise a task. Happens naturally and allows specialisation. The critical part is accountability and permeability of the hierarchy. The "John Lewis" model, or a co-operative model goes some way towards addressing that. Doesn't alter the employee's relationship to capital much though.

I don't quite agree. The JL model changes the employee's relationship to capital fundamentally. The real question is - how does it change the employees' relationship to their bosses and their pay and conditions. What practical difference does that change in the relation to capital make? And the answer is that it improves it a bit: far better to work for Waitrose than Asda, but still both pay a lot of their employees low wages.

To me the more interesting question would be: how would things look if every company were run on the JL model? I think in such a situation, employees' pay, conditions and power to change things at work would be far better than they currently are at JL.

 

[Random]

I don't quite agree. The JL model changes the employee's relationship to capital fundamentally.

How?

 

[kabbes]

How?

£100 bonus at Chrimbo. Capital!

 

[littlebabyjesus]

How?

In the same way that a building society is different from a bank. The managers of JL do not work to provide shareholders with a dividend.

The fact that working for JL isn't that much better than working for other companies just shows that 'relationship to capital' is far from the only factor involved in changing work for the better.

 

[Random]

Class: a certain type of person, the other, whose actions are judged to be 'wrong' or against the ideal as others see it. The question is whether it is just part of his/her right to freedom as an individual? Tolerance would be so much easier if we only needed to exercise it for those actions we agreed with...

You have a fundamentally incorrect understanding of how the term class is used in politics.

 

[Random]

In the same way that a building society is different from a bank. The managers of JL do not work to provide shareholders with a dividend.

Are you, in fact, saying that John Lewis is not capitalist? You must be, for this to make any sense.

In any case you've misunderstood what capital is. The workers at JL are creating value, and the surplus of that value is taken by the company. Wage labour is at the heart of the capital-worker relationship, which explains why JL workers' conditions are little different, 'despite' not working for a shareholder company.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Why must I be?

 

[Random]

Why must I be?

Are you saying that JL is 'differently capitalist'?

 

[Gmart]

You have a fundamentally incorrect understanding of how the term class is used in politics.

I wasn't talking about how it is used politically, I was talking about how it is used in general, at the beginning of a post which went into detail.

 

[Crispy]

I don't quite agree. The JL model changes the employee's relationship to capital fundamentally. The real question is - how does it change the employees' relationship to their bosses and their pay and conditions. What practical difference does that change in the relation to capital make? And the answer is that it improves it a bit: far better to work for Waitrose than Asda, but still both pay a lot of their employees low wages.

I've gone and read up a bit on the actual details of how JL works and it's better than I thought. I had an image of a parachuted-in board with the workers milling around below, ticking the approved voting boxes. There's actuallu a fair bit of direct (at local level) and representative (national) democracy going on. The Partnership Council only has power over "non-economic" policy, however - and that's a BIG "however". Above that, the power is weighted in favour of the board (only 5 out of 12 board members are elected).

The benefits are excellent - lots of holiday, life insurance, good pension etc. Profit sharing is a %age of your salary (should be a %age of hours worked imo!). The MD gets paid £500K, which while still way over "fair" is lower than that in other companies (M&S and Sainsburys pay theirs £1m)

I'm just reminded actually - the JL store in central Bristol used to have no air conditioning. This was the staff's decision, as they preferred to use the money for something else (a pay rise or some other benefit, I can't remember).

To me the more interesting question would be: how would things look if every company were run on the JL model? I think in such a situation, employees' pay, conditions and power to change things at work would be far better than they currently are at JL.

Competing for employees instead of employers would drive such change, which would require a fundamental change in how the economy works!

 

[Gmart]

And how about public sector? The civil service in the United Kingdom only includes Crown employees; not those who are parliamentary employees. Public sector employees such as those in education and the NHS are not considered to be civil servants.

 

[Crispy]

Are you, in fact, saying that John Lewis is not capitalist? You must be, for this to make any sense.

In any case you've misunderstood what capital is. The workers at JL are creating value, and the surplus of that value is taken by the company.

Although at JL, the employees are the company. All profit is distributed to the partners, in proportion to their wage. The only (!) thing keeping the process unequal is the proportionality to wage. If it was to hours worked, then every worker would be receiving the full value of their labour, right?

 

[love detective]

Are you saying that JL is 'differently capitalist'?

here's Marx's thoughts on the topic - somewhat idealist i'd say but implicitly acknowledges the points you made above about the continued existence of capital, exploitiation and surplus value extraction within them while at the same time somewhat agreeing with what LBJ is also saying (note the passage was written in the context of an analysis of the credit system so didn't really flesh out a lot of the points that I would have expected him to do if he was writing specifically about co-ops)

The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other

 

[Crispy]

Although at JL, the employees are the company. All profit is distributed to the partners, in proportion to their wage. The only (!) thing keeping the process unequal is the proportionality to wage. If it was to hours worked, then every worker would be receiving the full value of their labour, right?

credit system

Ah, yes. There's the spanner in the works

 

[Gmart]

Competing for employees instead of employers would drive such change, which would require a fundamental change in how the economy works!

I don't know if JL is 'top heavy' or not, but with the employees on board any hierarchy is accepted more readily than at other times. Maybe Labour will go towards this kind of policy, there are enough problems for small businesses to maybe make some progress there. Nonetheless the lot of a worker will not improve while they remain unskilled in the globalised world we have.

 

[Crispy]

I don't know if JL is 'top heavy' or not, but with the employees on board any hierarchy is accepted more readily than at other times. Maybe Labour will go towards this kind of policy, there are enough problems for small businesses to maybe make some progress there. Nonetheless the lot of a worker will not improve while they remain unskilled in the globalised world we have.

What I meant was: The current economic system requires a certain unemployment rate in order to keep wages and working conditions down. If there was a surplus of jobs and companies had to compete on working conditions, the revolution can be called off and we can all ride the gravy train to utopia.

 

[love detective]

at the risk of derailing further - these two (fairly lengthy) pieces by the IWCA on economic democracy may be of interest re the discussions above

Economic democracy: the need for a vision (part 1)
In politics, being competitive in the realm of ideas is a prerequisite to being competitive anywhere else. The following is the first part of an attempt to start mapping out an explicitly pro-working class vision upon which a wider movement might be built, namely that of economic democracy as opposed to state socialism or ‘free-market’ capitalism. Part 1 attempts to cover the philosophical underpinning, the ‘why’ of economic democracy; part 2 will begin looking into the ‘what’ and ‘how’.

Economic democracy: the need for a vision (part 2)
This is the second part of our discussion of the concept of economic democracy. Why is such a discussion necessary? Neo-liberalism is in crisis, yet the left has failed to provide any kind of alternative economic model. Indeed it cannot. The staples of left economic thinking – social democracy and state socialism/Leninism – have both failed, and have failed the working class most of all: theoretically, economically, socially and politically. As a consequence of clinging to these failed ideas, the right has been visibly winning the argument for decades, and will continue to do so until our side ups its game. This is our attempt to contribute to the mapping out of a pro-working class alternative economic model. Discussion and criticism is welcomed.

 

[Crispy]

That's my lunchtime reading sorted

 

[love detective]

for the next few days

 

[Gmart]

What I meant was: The current economic system requires a certain unemployment rate in order to keep wages and working conditions down. If there was a surplus of jobs and companies had to compete on working conditions, the revolution can be called off and we can all ride the gravy train to utopia.

It maybe prefers it, but it is a natural consequence of a large, uncontrolled population and the state of education. If there were a plague tomorrow then wages would indeed go up. The only way to get a better wage is to enskill oneself.

 

[Random]

Although at JL, the employees are the company. All profit is distributed to the partners, in proportion to their wage. The only (!) thing keeping the process unequal is the proportionality to wage. If it was to hours worked, then every worker would be receiving the full value of their labour, right?

The employees are not in control of the company, though, are they? That's a fairly large issue of equality. As a quick google shows, workers at JL can be kicked out of the company en masse http://www.retail-week.com/john-lewis-faces-union-anger/297285.article

 

[Crispy]

It maybe prefers it, but it is a natural consequence of a large, uncontrolled population and the state of education. If there were a plague tomorrow then wages would indeed go up. The only way to get a better wage is to enskill oneself.

The pyramid of wealth remains the same shape. By "enskilling" yourself, you only clamber onto someone else's head. Full unemployment is an undesirable characteristic of a capitalist economy, from the capitalist's POV, as it gives the worker leverage.

 

[Crispy]

The employees are not in control of the company, though, are they? That's a fairly large issue of equality. As a quick google shows, workers at JL can be kicked out of the company en masse http://www.retail-week.com/john-lewis-faces-union-anger/297285.article

Quite. A JL partner has a better relationship to capital, but not to power.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Quite. A JL partner has a better relationship to capital, but not to power.

Yes.

 

[Kizmet]

You have a fundamentally incorrect understanding of how the term class is used in politics.

I see this said often on here, but it seems that having a 'fundamentally incorrect understanding' is no real barrier to success or achievement. In fact... I'd be very interested to know in what way a 'correct understanding' materially benefits an individual.

 

[love detective]

Quite. A JL partner has a better relationship to capital, but not to power.

they are still required to sell their labour as a commodity in the market in order to survive - there is no essential change in the wage-labour relationship they have with the individual capital of their own company nor capital in general within society - their labour power is turned into a commodity and sold to capital in order to purchase the commodified means of subsistence - none of this changes whether you work for waitrose or tesco

waitrose/JL is still an organisation which buys labour as a commodity in order to sell commodities to labour

even if workers there end up with marginally more in return for their sold labour it doesn't really change anything - the relationship to capital is essentially a qualitative relation based at the level of society as a whole not a quantitive one based at the level of the individual company (which is why marx makes the point that they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system)

 

[Gmart]

The pyramid of wealth remains the same shape. By "enskilling" yourself, you only clamber onto someone else's head. Full unemployment is an undesirable characteristic of a capitalist economy, from the capitalist's POV, as it gives the worker leverage.

It is not always a matter of 'clambering on someone else's head' - a market exchange can benefit both parties - the question is whether many people are suffering because they have been clambered on or because they were not as keen as others who also wanted their job. As I say this is more evident in the unskilled market which is why it makes sense to enskill oneself rather than get sucked into such a no win situation.
The lack of jobs is a problem of course, we need to be more productive and make better use of the resources we have. The factors of production are land, labour and capital and we could work out a rational system to have an even balance if we wanted to.