Perhaps the conflict is between structure (class as a thing) and process (class as a dynamic relationship)
Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class?
- Thread starter brogdale
- Start date
Perhaps the conflict is between structure (class as a thing) and process (class as a dynamic relationship)
RD2003
Got a really fucking shitty attitude
This all sounds a bit JG Ballard. It never ends well with that kind of people trying to run the show.
What makes a Marxist? Because dlr has used Marx's theories to illustrate his point.
if a worker earning 100,000+ and someone on a zero hours contract are both working class. With the former perhaps paying of a mortgage and the lattter paying through the nose to live in a shared cramped flat, What use is a Marxian Analysis. Insofar as trying to show both there is an alternative to capitalism. both might agree that they are being exploited according to the definition. But the former is likely more Sanguin if not comfortable with it. So what then.
The left failed to articulate a cohesive alternative. that is the problem. No one is going to notionally give up the little they have. Unless it is less than the other guy. Your guy on 100 K might be perturbed at owners owning the means of production. Zero hours contract friend yeah why not got to be better than this.
The best explanations for these points can be found in the Bible.
But I’m not a Christian.
But I’m not a Christian.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
Back when I was a freshly minted teenage leftist, I articulated similar thoughts about not just criticising and fighting capitalism, but also giving some mind as to the shape of what would replace it. Such thoughts were dismissed as utopian, which I found to be pretty shallow.
While I do now understand there is a good point in not getting bogged down in the details of a society that doesn't even exist yet, I'm still somewhat sympathetic to the idea that socialism needs a positive programme, something to fight for as well to fight against.
RD2003
Got a really fucking shitty attitude
I agree about the way the question was routinely dismissed on the far left. Something that was repeated in my early days on here when leftie/anarchist theoretical routines and tropes were even mildly challenged ('I don't have a blueprint' etc.)
It was particularly frustrating as an inexperienced youth working in manual labour, among the very people we were supposed to be encouraging to rebel against their present conditions, and who were, however much they could see the sense in certain practical proposals concerning their present conditions, the most sceptical audience you could imagine for ideas of wholesale revolution. Little of substance to say to them was forthcoming from the comrades.
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
I don't believe anyone is claiming that the material interests of the working class are completely flat.
Some members of the w/c have more access to social capital than others, some members have high wages, and there are the other modalities that class is lived through (race, gender, sexuality). And some members of the working class who can accumulate capital may start have interests that begin to align with capital.
But that is not some new thing! It has been the case from the start.
Members of the working class sharing the same relationship to the means of production does not mean everyone who is a worker has identical materials interests. It means workers share the material interest that is key to fighting capital.
The reason why a 'Marxian Analysis' (using this in a very wide sense, I would not call myself a Marxian) is crucial is not (just) because it shows there is an alternative to capitalism, or it provides a better analysis of capitalism but because it provides a structure for organising the destruction of class, and capitalism.
Ever since the publication of Capital there have been those who argue for replacing class with some alternative, but none of these political philosophies have been able to identify a coherent strategic point for the destruction of capitalism.
In the strike action we are seeing at the moment there will be some workers that see their interests better aligned with capital than with their fellow labourers. Some members of the working class may see their interests more aligned those of the same race/gender/etc. The challenge is to organise in such a way that builds on the materials interests that workers share, and against those that divide them.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Framing the whole political project as about people 'giving things up' is misplaced and never going to get traction. Talk about what we have to gain rather then try to convince people they have to give up the little security and resources they have now.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
The use of a 'marxist analysis' is nothing to do with articulating alternatives, its use is in explaining and understanding the struture of capitalism. And that explanation clearly explains why you have some workers on high wages and some on low, and why they are both exploited by capital. Yes, of course individuals are going to have different positions and reactions to their position under capitalism, with that also complicated by a myriad of other factors as well as wages, but that doesn't negate the general wider analysis.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Using elements of one theory means nothing more than using elements of one theory. Dlr has never hidden his anarchism and never claimed to be Marxist
locomotive
come on baby, do the locomotion
These conversations are so frustrating.
The Marxist analysis of class (even if the people using it aren't Marxists) points to the essential characteristic that working class people share which, whilst being the source of their oppression, is also the thing which gives then strength and makes them potential agents of revolution.
The other analysis being used in this thread is purely aesthetic and doesn't say anything useful on a structural level. It can't highlight a single thing which makes someone working class or not. Wealth and class are not the same thing.
ETA: people's positions in this are so entrenched I don't actually know why I've bothered to reply
The Marxist analysis of class (even if the people using it aren't Marxists) points to the essential characteristic that working class people share which, whilst being the source of their oppression, is also the thing which gives then strength and makes them potential agents of revolution.
The other analysis being used in this thread is purely aesthetic and doesn't say anything useful on a structural level. It can't highlight a single thing which makes someone working class or not. Wealth and class are not the same thing.
ETA: people's positions in this are so entrenched I don't actually know why I've bothered to reply
Kevbad the Bad
Amiable Bowel Syndrome
I'm not a Marxist, for a variety of reasons. Mainly historical ones where Marxists in (and out) of power have so often abused human rights etc, and got involved in schismatic ideological battles which have achieved nothing. I also have no head for economics, so can never grasp the Marxist version, even though I know many anarchists who accept it. I try my best but it never quite all sinks in, or not long enough.
So like most people i use the term 'class' in its everyday I'll-defined usage. Which is deeply flawed, and does include such things as eating hummus or your family background or where you live.
Realistically how are we ever going to change our everyday usage of the term 'class'? If we have to explain it every time we have a conversation down the pub.
So like most people i use the term 'class' in its everyday I'll-defined usage. Which is deeply flawed, and does include such things as eating hummus or your family background or where you live.
Realistically how are we ever going to change our everyday usage of the term 'class'? If we have to explain it every time we have a conversation down the pub.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Realistically, how are we going to change anything without constant explanation? You know the "e" bit of educate, agitate, organise
Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
I'd say the trouble is more that it can't be settled at all and is in a constant state of flux. "Working class" is obfuscated in one way or another, deliberately or not, by almost everyone who discusses it and has grey areas in practice which render it more of a a spectrum than a definable box in any case. Meaning its definition is a both an inherent and deliberately stoked point of conflict.
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
Yup. The class war is being waged on us all the time and part of that war is a propaganda war, telling us, amongst other things, that we’ve got common interests with the bosses.
We can of course give up and say it’s useless, but.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Disappointingly some of the responses on here are predictably dire
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
It's about trying to read the currents of economics/society at large. Why has flatlining or falling incomes produced relatively little discontent in Western countries until now? There are two main answers to that question. Globalisation, while taking away a lot of jobs, delivered cheap Asia-produced goods to everyone, meaning it didn't always feel like a falling standard of living. And a significant proportion of the population has been 'bought off' by being hitched to the rising asset prices that are the corollary of a falling share of GDP to wages. So for a while if you wanted a mass movement against flatlining wages, you either needed to work primarily with those who don't own houses (who are still a minority in the UK), or wait until house prices started to fall and you'd have a chance of including everyone. Falling wages and rising interest rates together however do create a lot more discontent, as we are now seeing, as that has serious effects on homeowners. I used to be mystified by the lack of reaction to ten years of austerity until I began to understand the role of housing. It has been promoted as the plug to fill the hole left by flatlining wages and a much-reduced welfare state, as this article argues: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2014.951429 Of course it doesn't work in the long term, but for a while you convince people they're winning because their house has doubled in value and now their kids have left home they can downsize.
What you can also gather from this picture is that rising wages in China etc will result in falls in the standard of living in Western countries, and so will have political consequences that are to some degree predictable - i.e. the government of the day, whoever it is, will get blamed, and people will try to choose a government that promises to restore their standard of living even though that will not be possible without raising wages, which neither major party will in fact aim to do. It will be a political mess of grand proportions and it's a shame 'the left' is not preparing for something so predictable. We're straying a bit from class per se, but I think by focusing so exclusively on the conflict of workers vs capitalists it becomes very difficult to read what is happening in our society and prepare for what is coming.
ska invita
back on the other side
I agree that Marx's analysis is fundamentally correct in describing the position of people within capitalism. Lets agree on that. It remains something worthy of everyone in the world to understand.
As well describing peoples position in relation to capitalism it is also meant to be a way of understanding oppression within capitalism. And here is where it starts to come undone, because when talking about the UK people in class categories that according to Marxist categories are oppressed may enjoy a range of material conditions to which they are politically committed in protecting.
They have become stakeholders in society, may enjoy significantly valuable assets , have material wealth putting them in the top 10-20% of earners in the world globally, may have experienced (particularly if they are older) that working what would be considered a working class job has been enough to buy them a big house, a villa, and afford to bring up kids <- using Tony Walker that east end cabby in the 7 Up series, coming of working age in the late 70s/early 80s as an example.
You could take a person leaving school now with an identical Marxist structural position as that cabby in 7 Up, get them doing the knowledge and in a cab for life and they will not be able to accrue assets and capital in the same way, their life will be precarious on a completely different scale.
Saying to someone in a precarious/no-asset/scraping rent existence that they are identical class as someone with a villa a big house in the suburbs and two well looked after kids, one who does horse riding IIRC, shows clearly the limits of saying "you are both working class". Tony voted Tory his whole life (although I think in the last episode in his 60s he went off them, forget why now)
Barbara Ehrenreich talks about how nursing was a middle class profession in the 70s/80s and has now become a working class one - the first ever nurses strike backs that change up. The difference between then and now is pay and its relation to costs of assets. I dont see how a Marxist class category on its own can account for that shift in class status <would be keen to hear an answer to that.
locomotive
come on baby, do the locomotion
The only answer I can give is that those people are in the same class position. They have different experiences, stresses, privileges and challenges but their relation to capital is the same.
You've conflated two different things - class as a descriptor of your relationship to capital and class as a social identity - and stripped them both of any value as an analytical tool in the process.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
...but class isn't giving up. It will continue to place us in certain positions in the * coughs * reproduction of capital regardless of what words we use to describe it
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
But Marxian thought has also not come up with a coherent strategy that works to destroy capitalism. At the risk of stating the obvious.
ska invita
back on the other side
??
i havent mentioned identity at all, im looking purely at material position
locomotive
come on baby, do the locomotion
Also, getting all of those people to realise they are members of the same class and have the same interests is the only way we're going to make the big changes that will improve life for everyone.
ska invita
back on the other side
on the simplest Marxist level they are the same - i get that.
and yet on a material level they are massively different and their experience leads to having politics in their own interest that couldn't be more opposite
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
How useful is an analytic tool that assigns two people in extremely different circumstances the same value?
I agree with ska that Marxist analysis is still extremely relevant. But it is a starting point, not an end point. And there are of course many complicating factors in play two centuries later. Analysis now needs to include the assets people can or can't accrue. It needs to take account of the fact that taking out massive debt, whether for a home or for an education, is now a social norm. Plus there is the globalisation aspect in which people in rich countries can benefit materially from the low wages of people in poor countries. I suggest that these are new kinds of thing that didn't exist in the same way in the 19th century. Do they affect notions of class? Yes, I think they really do.
This hasn’t answered my question of what makes a Marxist. You mean a Leninist?
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
i mean a marxist - no one's said m-l about dlr. for me what makes a marxist in political terms is someone who accepts marx's view that there will be a proletarian revolution. that when the stars are right or whatever the working class will rise up and seize and destroy power (withering away of the state). ok, that's putting things really simply, but there you go
ska invita
back on the other side
also I think Marxists are tied to an inevitable collapse of capitalism, based on Marx's understanding of capitalist contradictions like the tendency for the rate of profit to fall - that capitalism will inevitably create the conditions for its own demise. The last century seems to have proven those people wrong and shown that capitalism can be incredibly resilient, though I expect climate change will be the final cost that cant be dodged.
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