Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class?

[Raheem]

the work I do is mostly manual and not regarded as high status in anyones eyes, but there's no way I could organise collectively to improve my conditions.

It might be unrealistic, but I doubt it is impossible in principle.

 

[Winot]

Does nobody read my posts? I answer all these points every single time. But people keep saying the same things. It’s fine to disagree with me, but for people who have read this stuff before to just keep making the same ill-informed mispronouncements about what Marx’s analysis says is pretty demoralising.

(That was at the discussion between Raheem and littlebabyjesus , by the way).

I read your posts - this one in particular which was helpful thanks:

Its role in the structure of capital is what’s important:

I have a question though if you don't mind? If I understand it correctly, what distinguishes the mc from the wc (in the Marxist sense) is that the wc carries out the labour and the mc supervises the wc. I can see how that makes sense when a product is being produced.

However in the service economy, what is the 'labour'? In practical terms it seems to me that everyone (including supervisors) are labouring. I can see that in theory you could have someone whose role is solely supervisory, but in practice I think that's pretty rare. In that case wouldn't most employees - including supervisors - be wc?

 

[discokermit]

I read your posts - this one in particular which was helpful thanks:



I have a question though if you don't mind? If I understand it correctly, what distinguishes the mc from the wc (in the Marxist sense) is that the wc carries out the labour and the mc supervises the wc. I can see how that makes sense when a product is being produced.

However in the service economy, what is the 'labour'? In practical terms it seems to me that everyone (including supervisors) are labouring. I can see that in theory you could have someone whose role is solely supervisory, but in practice I think that's pretty rare. In that case wouldn't most employees - including supervisors - be wc?

foreman is the loneliest job. literally everyone thinks you're a cunt.

 

[butchersapron]

foreman is the loneliest job. literally everyone thinks you're a cunt.

Don't have to buy rounds though i suppose.

 

[butchersapron]

I read your posts - this one in particular which was helpful thanks:



I have a question though if you don't mind? If I understand it correctly, what distinguishes the mc from the wc (in the Marxist sense) is that the wc carries out the labour and the mc supervises the wc. I can see how that makes sense when a product is being produced.

However in the service economy, what is the 'labour'? In practical terms it seems to me that everyone (including supervisors) are labouring. I can see that in theory you could have someone whose role is solely supervisory, but in practice I think that's pretty rare. In that case wouldn't most employees - including supervisors - be wc?

Labour - in this thing you're asking about - means 'productive labour'- that means activity that produces the thing called surplus value. Not just work. Surplus value is the exploitative relationship where you are engaged in say - 10 hours work, yet you are paid for that work by 1 hours work. The other 9 going to your boss. That 9 hours is the surplus value. Just saying that we all work is offering nothing.

 

[discokermit]

Don't have to buy rounds though i suppose.

when i was a teenager we had one who was a right cunt. one night his sierra cosworth lookalike was nicked, he came to work all blotchy faced from crying. "some bastards nicked me car", he announced to us, voice breaking and trembling. i said "you think you feel bad, think about how bad the robber will feel when he finds out it ay a real cosworth!" and the four of us who worked under him howled like monkeys with laughter.
i got sacked two weeks later. lol.

 

[discokermit]

we used to wipe our dicks on his sandwiches when he left the cabin where we had our break, which was also his office.
teenage lads with their dicks out whooping and hollering as they ceremonially passed round his ham with extra cheese and wiped their nobs on em. fun times.
got chlamydia two weeks later. lol.

 

[campanula]

One of my (vague) definitions of class is predicated on the relationship of labour to capital...but in my mind, the categories of wc, middle class and so on, are determined by an older distinction relating to property. The insane volatility and rampant inflation in the housing market, where a home-owner earns more in equity than salary, where the conditions for home ownership are cut loose from wage earnings, has, for me, illuminated clear class divisions - between owners and renters.
This is only a supposition on my part though...

 

[Louis MacNeice]

If you work for Waitrose you are a part owner of the business...

As a 'partner' working the tills do you own enough capital to live off the surplus value extracted from others?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

 

[danny la rouge]

I read your posts - this one in particular which was helpful thanks:



I have a question though if you don't mind? If I understand it correctly, what distinguishes the mc from the wc (in the Marxist sense) is that the wc carries out the labour and the mc supervises the wc. I can see how that makes sense when a product is being produced.

However in the service economy, what is the 'labour'? In practical terms it seems to me that everyone (including supervisors) are labouring. I can see that in theory you could have someone whose role is solely supervisory, but in practice I think that's pretty rare. In that case wouldn't most employees - including supervisors - be wc?

I see butchersapron has already answered this. Happy to come back to it if it needs further clarification.

 

[hitmouse]

I read your posts - this one in particular which was helpful thanks:



I have a question though if you don't mind? If I understand it correctly, what distinguishes the mc from the wc (in the Marxist sense) is that the wc carries out the labour and the mc supervises the wc. I can see how that makes sense when a product is being produced.

However in the service economy, what is the 'labour'? In practical terms it seems to me that everyone (including supervisors) are labouring. I can see that in theory you could have someone whose role is solely supervisory, but in practice I think that's pretty rare. In that case wouldn't most employees - including supervisors - be wc?

I posted this earlier in the thread, but think it's relevant to your question - I do think there's not enough talk/analysis of the whole supervisor thing, but thought this article about supermarket supervisors was a really good one: Human Shields and Supermarket Managers

It’s not enough for workers to have a grievance in order for them to mobilise - they also need to have a clear sense of what actor is to blame for that grievance, and what they can do to force that actor to change what they’re doing. The muddying of managerial waters is one key way to prevent this transition from passivity to organisation. The human shields play a very effective role.

For instance, if you’re a worker and you get a last minute text asking you to cover a shift on a day off, your instinct is sod it, it’s my day off and I’m gonna play Fifa. In some situations you might be pressured by management bullying, the threat of reduced hours or how broke you are - but at my workplace that wasn’t how it worked. Instead, the thing that drove you to go into work was the sense of guilt that if you don’t do it your duty manager is gonna be working a staff shift, after having already done 40 hours this week. So you turn off Fifa and put on your trousers.

There is no solution to problems like these, until shop floor workers and low level supervisors overcome the false distinction between one another and begin recognising that one can turn into the other literally overnight. So if something is in the interests of shop floor workers it is more than likely in the interest of low-level supervisors and vice versa. The proletarianisation of management creates false divisions within the working class that need to be overcome through organisation.

Callum Cant's book on riding for Deliveroo also has some interesting stuff about how this works when your boss is an app - the whole layer of managerial/supervisory positions has basically been abolished in these companies, and instead they rely on the piecework system to get people to supervise/discipline themselves because the faster you work, you more you can earn. Obviously, I don't think it'd be useful to say that Deliveroo couriers are middle-class because they supervise themselves, although I'm sure someone somewhere would probably make that argument.

 

[butchersapron]

Yes the notes from below from oxbridge view.

 

[Winot]

Labour - in this thing you're asking about - means 'productive labour'- that means activity that produces the thing called surplus value. Not just work. Surplus value is the exploitative relationship where you are engaged in say - 10 hours work, yet you are paid for that work by 1 hours work. The other 9 going to your boss. That 9 hours is the surplus value. Just saying that we all work is offering nothing.

OK I think I understand that. But wouldn't any employee create surplus value (assuming the company is run rationally) because otherwise there is no point employing them?

Also, if the employee is paid for all of his work (i.e. he gets 10 hours in your example) then he isn't being exploited. But that means that his position in the class structure is dependent on his wage which I thought wasn't the case.

 

[hitmouse]

Do we need to have a 12 page thread about "what class are Notes from Below editors/contributors?" Also more seriously do you have any other recommendations for stuff that talks about the whole diffusion/proletarianisation of management thing, because it feels like a fairly big and important topic but I think that apart from that one article I'd genuinely struggle to think of anything else I've ever seen that even talks about it?

 

[butchersapron]

OK I think I understand that. But wouldn't any employee create surplus value (assuming the company is run rationally) because otherwise there is no point employing them?

Also, if the employee is paid for all of his work (i.e. he gets 10 hours in your example) then he isn't being exploited. But that means that his position in the class structure is dependent on his wage which I thought wasn't the case.

Where does the profit come from? There must be a profit.

No, only certain work produces surplus value.

Where this magic surplus appears from is key. It's called exploitation.

 

[butchersapron]

OK I think I understand that. But wouldn't any employee create surplus value (assuming the company is run rationally) because otherwise there is no point employing them?

Also, if the employee is paid for all of his work (i.e. he gets 10 hours in your example) then he isn't being exploited. But that means that his position in the class structure is dependent on his wage which I thought wasn't the case.

No, they are employed for 10 hours - during that period they produce their own wage + many hours work/value. This + is surplus value.

 

[butchersapron]

Do we need to have a 12 page thread about "what class are Notes from Below editors/contributors?" Also more seriously do you have any other recommendations for stuff that talks about the whole diffusion/proletarianisation of management thing, because it feels like a fairly big and important topic but I think that apart from that one article I'd genuinely struggle to think of anything else I've ever seen that even talks about it?

I think a few posts is enough ta.

 

[butchersapron]

Do we need to have a 12 page thread about "what class are Notes from Below editors/contributors?" Also more seriously do you have any other recommendations for stuff that talks about the whole diffusion/proletarianisation of management thing, because it feels like a fairly big and important topic but I think that apart from that one article I'd genuinely struggle to think of anything else I've ever seen that even talks about it?

Which ones are mates then?

 

[Winot]

Where does the profit come from? There must be a profit.

No, only certain work produces surplus value.

Where this magic surplus appears from is key. It's called exploitation.

So any work that produces a profit is work that creates surplus value?

 

[butchersapron]

So any work that produces a profit is work that creates surplus value?

No. Surplus value is not profit. Can make plenty profit via non surplus value means.

Capitalism does not just equal making money. It means making money and ideologically ordering society in a very specific way. That way is the exploitation talked about earlier.

 

[butchersapron]

So any work that produces a profit is work that creates surplus value?

What is a profit?

 

[Winot]

OK, I'll try again - so surplus value is value that the worker could have got for himself had the exploitative relationship not existed but instead is taken by the owner? And that's different from profit because profit depends on factors which lie outside of the relationship (e.g. price of raw materials, what the owner sells the finished product for etc.)?

 

[Pickman's model]

Does nobody read my posts? I answer all these points every single time. But people keep saying the same things. It’s fine to disagree with me, but for people who have read this stuff before to just keep making the same ill-informed mispronouncements about what Marx’s analysis says is pretty demoralising.

(That was at the discussion between Raheem and littlebabyjesus , by the way).

I always read your posts, in the vain hope of hypnotism tips

 

[butchersapron]

OK, I'll try again - so surplus value is value that the worker could have got for himself had the exploitative relationship not existed but instead is taken by the owner? And that's different from profit because profit depends on factors which lie outside of the relationship (e.g. price of raw materials, what the owner sells the finished product for etc.)?

No. You're thinking in moral terms. It's not.

1)Pay you for a days work.
2) my wages are paid in an hour
3) 7 hours free

 

[Winot]

OK I'll go and do some reading.

 

[nogojones]

I always read your posts, in the vain hope of hypnotism tips

My corgi just barked "No war but the class war at me"

 

[Flavour]

Tbf I thought that book about being a deliveroo rider in Brighton was OK, even if it did contain the between-the-lines message of the PhD studying writer obviously being destined for greater things and this being a bit demeaning, like you say butchersapron - in the absence of books written about the rider experience written by people who don't aspire... Then again I doubt you'll find many riders who don't think of the job being anything more than a temporary stopgap - - that's part of why the exploitation works so well (not just here, see also casual hospitality jobs worked by a mix of students /immigrants) when the exploited are encouraged to grin and bear it as some sort of coming-of-age experience

 

[Raheem]

No. You're thinking in moral terms. It's not.

1)Pay you for a days work.
2) my wages are paid in an hour
3) 7 hours free

This works fine for explaining the relationship between workers and capitalists, but not so much when you introduce the idea of some of those workers being middle, as distinct from working, class. So the question is what makes this distinction. As indicated, I don't think it can done successfully except by reference to money.

 

[butchersapron]

.

Do we need to have a 12 page thread about "what class are Notes from Below editors/contributors?" Also more seriously do you have any other recommendations for stuff that talks about the whole diffusion/proletarianisation of management thing, because it feels like a fairly big and important topic but I think that apart from that one article I'd genuinely struggle to think of anything else I've ever seen that even talks about it?

The whole point of this is that material conditions have a large say in what you think and how you act - what the working class is doing, how it acts - is basic to this then. What and how these people decide to investigate from below is 100% relevant.

 

[butchersapron]

This works fine for explaining the relationship between workers and capitalists, but not so much when you introduce the idea of some of those workers being middle, as distinct from working, class. So the question is what makes this distribution. As indicated, I don't think it can done successfully except by reference to money.

In your limited frame of reference. Equally in mine/ours. We're recoginisng it. You're doing it twice wrong.