class analysis- "the middle class"

That the bourgeoisie hides its domination through the market does not do away with the fact that their status as the dominant class is rooted in domination, just the same as the state seeming legitimate by way of providing a "public service" does not do away with the domination in their relationship to society.

We really should try to 'sum up' the two positions being outlined in this discussion.

That is, the 'political domination' and the 'economic exploitation' viewpoints.

They have different philosophical roots, and while we continue to confuse the two, we're talking past each other, not least because our respective definitions of various terms being used (exploitation, mode of production, domination, etc.) are different.

Especially, because the term 'middle class' is one of these confused usages, and that's what we're all hoping to clarify with this thread, aren't we?

yawn

why the admins tolerate your constant rudeness to other posters and your attitude that somehow we're all sheep waiting to be enlightened by your sub-sociological wafflei don't know

So, you're opposed to 'tolerance', now, eh?

Fuck me, can't wait to see your version of 'Libertarian Communism'.

'Constant'? I'm very keen to be comradely and to explain as best I can, but there are always pricks who seem to think that they can be rude to me, and then start cryin' when they get a taste of their own medicine. Look in the mirror, wipe those tears, and use your brains.

In that context, I too am 'a sheep waiting to be enlightened'. We can all learn from each other, and many posters are very well read and can act as 'teachers' in certain areas of expertise. I, too, try to explain, when I think I can be of help to comrades.

Sums you up, mate. Anything that requires you to think about your ideas is condemned as 'waffle'.

Is 'cartwheels' a euphemism for 'thinking', in your neck of the woods?

admin: let's keep this civil

What do you mean by "rooted" or "bourgeois"?

The administrative class and its way of administering has changed over time and each of these organizations could called a different ruling class if all we're talking about is "domination". "The bourgeois" are defined, more or less, as the owners of the means of production. That is one class only when we're talking the relations of production being what matters. If we're talking about domination, there would be no end to the classes we might imagine.

And the thing is that a statement of their rule being being "rooted" in "domination" is so vague you could as well say "they rule is based on being the ruling class", But trying to sort it out, if you mean raw threat, then no, the bourgeois doesn't rule through just the threat of violence but also through habit, through propaganda, through deception, through people's ignorance of any alternative and so-forth. All that together is social relations, capitalist social relations in this case.

We have been in a harsh discussion before, and IMHO you can be quite rude, and provocative. Not necessary the best way to treat internet conversations (in a pub perhaps it's easier to resolve, but here we can't drink a peacemaker beer).

On the other hand, I'm with you on this one. The reason why the "middle-class" term is just right for any politician because it confuses different models of society.

In communist sense, there's no middle-class, or bureaucratic-class either. I remember, when I read DK the first time, I had similar ideas about the bureaucratic class but since then practice taught me otherwise. I think it all comes down to the very idea of the revolutionary subject. Since there's a layer of the society who is clearly not in possession of the mean of production, but is well off enough to live without the misery of the majority working class life, for the first look constitute a curious bit of the economic system. If anything, Marx, but more specifically Engels failed to understand the problematic nature of the statement, that the working class is the revolutionary class. That the working class life experience should inevitably drive everybody in the direction of revolution, radical thinking, and, in the final analysis, we share our clear-cut interest to form political class.

Well, this logic has two fundamental failure which leads to the disturbing misconception of classes and the way how capitalism works in general. One problem is that the capitalist class has an interest to produce a loyal working class. It is all spectacular when the army, the police start to beat up, torture and kill proletarians for intimidation, but in reality violence and physical coercion is just an option, and perhaps not the best one in the toolbox for many situation.

Endorsing some layers of the working class will produce a loyal group of workers, paid well, linking their salary to the success of the business (paying shares for instance) and so on. A boss can use them as the uber-worker of the business, the role-model and show an example for the rest. Rewarding the workers to be a class traitor, a scab is common practice. This mechanism works so well, that you can see in the case of mcdonalds (catering/hospitality in general perhaps?) that making everybody a kind of manager of somebody else, making tiny salary gaps disarms completely the workplace militancy, producing a wide variety of contradictory interests, personal conflicts.

Middle-class then, is the product of the domination strategy of the capitalist class, and while it feels like a "real thing" because people call themselves middle-class, vote like middle-class, act like middle-class, there is special economical role to assign to this layer of society other than their original one (which is basically working class). There's, however a political role, but this role is entirely subjugated to the interest of the capitalist class, so in the end you end up with the middle class as a tool, rather than an actor.

One of the tempting aspect to create a bureaucratic class concept is the case of the USSR because while the mode of production was clearly looking like any other industrial capitalist country, there were no owners in the same sense as in the rest of the explicitly capitalist countries. I would like to remind people, that capital is a social process, and can do without personal representation, in fact, it does away with it all the time. In the case of the state-capitalism as in the USSR, the impersonal entities like the government, companies, the Party fulfilled their role as the owner and the ultimate manager of the national property, thus forming an impersonal but definite representation of the national capital. This model less surprising given that Russia had little to none national bourgeois class before the revolution, and most of functioning capital was owned by foreign capitalists, thus leaving the operation and management of this industrial complex to the local clerics. While this layer of bureaucrats certainly made themselves independent of the foreign supervision, they could not break up with the mode of production precisely because by the "national liberation" of the productive forces resulted in the accumulation of national capital, in the form of the State. Not particularly new phenomena, given that the puritan protestantism already entertained the idea of republic based on the supremacy of the national interest, which must be translated in to hegemonical economic power of the State.

Forgive me for rewinding slightly, but this was a more compact starting place for the points I want to make

OK, you're mixing up a couple of things here. First of all, if we look back to feudalism, that relation of the local warlord bullyboy lining up the peasantry and saying "hand over some of that grain and those chickens or I'll cut your f***ing head off" does not require a state at all. Historically feudalism was a solution to the problem of the collapse of the ancient Roman imperial state. Most of the history of the middle ages and the conflicts and wars between robber barons is not that different from the turf wars between the bloods and the crips or other gangster wars in neighbourhoods were state power is marginal.

The emergence of the Absolutist state (see Perry Anderson, Benno Teschke etc) is to a degree an attempt to overcome this warrior class anarchy by imposing a power structure at the service of the monarchy, with a standing military force (mostly of mercenaries, rather than conscripts) and a tax-collecting and administrative bureaucracy. So we have a shift from direct exploitation of surplus product "in kind" (i.e. as products like grain, leather, etc, rather than money) by the local armoured boar, to paying taxes to the central state (albeit by the intermediary of a local aristocratic tax-farmer or office-holder, taking his cut at source) is a major transformation in the class structure and social relations of exploitation in society. And not one that inevitably develops from the prior condition.

That is to say, the existence of a state that has coercive power independent or autonomously from the exploiting class, is a significant historical development, and one that ultimately lays the ground for the separation between the economic power to exploit and the political power to repress, that is crucial for capitalism and market forces.

Let's put it another way. From the peasants point of view, if the local robber baron should fall of his horse and break his neck, then for a spell (until his replacement rode into the village) they are free from both the exploitative and repressive relationship, because they were united in the figure of the lord.

Whereas for the worker, if their employer should fall under a bus and the company go bust, they lose their job. This may free them from the directly exploitative relationship, temporarily, but without access to the means of production, they face starvation if they can't find another employer/exploiter. That is the relation of coercion is the depersonalised systemic effect of poverty - a social relation that cannot fall off its horse and break it's neck or fall under a bus.

This anonymous force is very real. But of course it relies on the state to enforce it - if only to stop unemployed workers seizing land or other means of production to escape their plight. For market forces to exist, the state must exist to guarantee "the rule of law" (this is the reason why ancaps are full of shit).

Managers don't generally have guns. Capitalism has inverted the class relationship to weapons and violence. Now the system is powerful enough so that the people who do the fighting and dying are overwhelmingly recruited by poverty from the working class - and overwhelmingly from the most marginalised and oppressed sections of the class, in fact. Its not the gun, its the Armani suit that is the better marker of who's in charge these days.

Quite the opposite is true. Most of the military coups in the last 40 years have not been to do away the business class with the support of the workers, but to do away with any organisations or networks of working class counter-power, in the service of the dominant exploiting class. The Portuguese revolution of 1974, being the one counter-example I can think of, but more as the exception that proves the rule.

What's interesting is the secular trend for military dictatorships to decline over the last decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and most of the then "Third World" that was integrated into the West's orbit, was a huge assembly of horrendous military dictatorships. That this whole vista was entitled "the Free World" was a monstrously sick joke of Orwellian proportions. Relative to then, a lot of those dictatorships have disappeared. Not because capitalism has been overthrown or meaningfully challenged in those countries, far from it. But because capitalism has actually developed in those countries beyond the original economic structures that were left behind after decolonisation. From a (capitalist) developmental point of view, the very image of "the West versus the rest" that seemed practically unassailable in the late 70s and early 80s, has been massively undermined (although, like the Monty Python leper, still not quite dead yet...). If military dictatorships were the predominant state form for the neo-colonial countries in the immediate post-Bretton Woods era, four decades of globalisation have changed the economic structure and the class compositions of those regions. The general picture seems to be that the rise to dominance of a properly capitalist class (as opposed to traditional large land-owners, e.g. the haciendados) has tended to go hand in hand with a move away from military dictatorships. The reasons for that are worth an article in themselves, but they are not unrelated to the move towards market forces being the predominant coercive force, to which the armed force of the military is in support of, but subordinate to, rather than the other way around. The experience of Chile is very instructive in this regard.

There's lots of things in life i generally try not to tolerate.
If i was in the pub with mates or a union/political/campaign meeting and someone talked about their experience of life and someone turned round and said 'Sorry but this is a debate, if you're unsure of anything feel free to ask'' i'd probably call them a cunt straight out. In a fair number of places i've worked i'm pretty sure a comment like that would earn you worse tbh.

I'm not particularly fussed about your ''ideas'' tbh, its not like anyones said anything particularly novel on this thread really, Its all pretty run of the mill stuff. Like i said i just don't like your attitude generally.

Anyways really can't be asked to discuss this any more so have fun.

Feudalism is not the beginning of this relationship. But the point I was trying to make ended up being summed up by syndicalistcat in a more concise way:

Even when hidden behind market forces, that does not undo the history of capital accumulation, a history that is nearly impossible without physical domination.

This is fair enough, and illustrates exactly the flaws with the way I tried to express my point. However, what is constant is that whatever class is the dominant class relies on, you guessed it, domination.

Well, that's more or less my point: that because of the necessary separation between economic and political power, or at least the need to seem separated, constitutes the managerial class as a third class.

I'm not necessarily placing managers into the managerial class. I mean to explain the managers of society, not the managers of business X. In terms of actual managers, they may constitute a "middle class" in that they simultaneously play out two roles in their day-to-day lives. But I don't find that distinction particularly relevant as it only enables them to parse their actions into the paradigms of larger classes rather than have their own distinct interest.

Regardless, that's kind of a silly way of looking at things. Ignoring the argument for the state as a third managerial class and simply looking at them as an extension of bourgeois interests, the man in the Armani suit would not have power without the backing of force. Otherwise, communism would be too easy.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of internalization of capitalist norms to go around. Plenty of people afraid to do things during the struggle because it would be illegal to just keep working at the factory when the boss tried to close it, but that doesn't change that when the workers do try to do that, the boss sends in guns (and plenty of the people with guns tend to defect as well).

Yes, the state more often than not does act in the interest of the capitalist class, but so does the proletariat. The capitalist class is the dominant class. So all classes act in their interest lest they express some level of active dissent.

I have to congratulate you, ocelot, on the way you have expressed this. I take back what I said earlier. This is the very stuff of explanation.

No, they don't rule through just the threat of violence. That tends to be a role distinctly for the state, an institution that I've been arguing constitutes a separate class.

Marx mentions the middle class, intermediate strata etc, as do later Marxists, and they don't seem to be using the same definition as the 2-classists. It's not credible that Marx & co would've used the term class if they didn't mean a class.

Much of the middle class was never "dispossessed" but evolved their roles/professions from feudal into bourgeois society without losing anything. And again, eg, MPs? They may not own property, if they do it hardly defines their role. If insisting they're not defined by social function but by selling their labour power for a wage they must absurdly be defined working class?

Marx noted that one consequence of "the extraordinary increase in the productivity of large-scale industry" was that it "permits a larger and larger part of the working class to be employed unproductively". He shows that there were slightly more domestic servants in 1860s England than industrial workers. This was labour employed as an aid to reproduction of the middle and upper classes, not to directly extract profit. The fact that middle class employers of servants also often sold/sell their own professional labour doesn't invalidate their middle classness, it's a particularity that helps define it. Or is it argued that as employers, they are automatically capitalists? Yet if they can only afford to employ by selling their labour...?

(And what of Marx himself, employer of a servant? Surely neither prole nor capitalist, but living off the capitalist family wealth of Engels - and getting the Marx's family maidservant pregnant then getting Engels to take the rap.)

I don't think economic and power relations are mutually exclusive, more co-dependent, so I don't see class as simplistically a solely economic relation; that's not solely how it's experienced, negotiated or perceived in reality. Exploitation and domination presuppose and consolidate each other.

Presumably the fact that it's the norm, eg, for m/c families in modern India to employ servants (http://www.mumbaimirror.com/index.aspx?page=article&contentid=2009061720090617042635680cd9b112a&sectid=2) while w/c slum and village dwellers don't, but are the servants, isn't a class division for 2-classists - it's just a different 'preferred mode of consumption'! After all, if (some of) the m/c also sell their labour power they're exploited too, right, and that's all that defines their relationship with their servants/'fellow proles', right? Does this situation (common across much of the world) have nothing to do with class (nor the caste system intersecting with class), with such historical continuities in those respective lives, the relative limits and outcomes have no relation to class?

Has there really never been any class barrier to working class people entering the professions; guarded largely by educational privilege/financial access and old boy networks?! Who but the self-justifying middle class would argue that? Or that a clear gap between manual and intellectual work has never had any relation to class divisions/hierarchy? Even today in much of the world that's a strong demarcation, itself related to the status derived from employing servants to do the manual tasks that are beneath you to do. I don't think ignoring such things has much to do with the Marxist tradition of class analysis. And as the Indian article above shows, the domestic relation is also replicated today in the white collar workplace with the role of the 'office boy'/general bag-carrier/dogsbody.

If one sees that the bourgeoisie was once itself a middle class then the possibility of classes existing outside a 2-class model perhaps becomes easier. Did capitalism develop any classes that were not either of the bourgeoisie nor the prole - yes, the petit-bourgeoisie, for one. Has it since developed a strata whose social function and basis of their class power is to manage the buying, disciplining, maintenance, regulation and exploitation of labour power and capital, reproduce the 'ruling ideas' and whose employment, wealth, culture, educational access, institutions, ideologies etc maintain its reproduction as a distinct class with distinct interests and function for capital? I think so.

As Skraeling says, the neo-liberal project has been dependent on, and is partly itself, a development of this; eg, quangos, management trusts, privatisations etc. (The managerial share options as part of privatisations made some bureaucrats/managers wealthy overnight, unlike their workers - gaining capital to invest in significant supplementary revenue sources - reinforcing another clear class demarcation.) That its effects may often be felt more impersonally shouldn't blind us to the human agency involved. As stated previously, is all workplace conflict really solely between ruling class and working class personified? Having one's labour power exploited can't be the only criteria for defining class - unless one ignores the actual complexities by which this occurs, its social organisation and the relationships within it. If one's labour power is 'exploited' in its primary role of exploiting labour power on behalf of capital and maintaining the conditions for that...

True. I don't consider a supporting quote from Marx or Marxists as sealing the last word on anything, but to claim or imply that 2-classism is clearly "class in the Marxist sense" is simply untrue;

(One doesn't have to agree with the article to see the empirical relevance of the quotes.) Another commentary on Marx & Engels;

Marx mentions the co-existence of various classes; bourgeoisie, proletariat, lower middle classes, middle class, petit-bourgeoisie, peasantry, lumpen-proletariat. All very far from the 2-class claims. So for what it's worth; those 2-classists trying to invoke Marx/Marxism might note that Marx's views (while not always consistent) seem to contradict the narrowly economistic 2-class claims and seem closer to other more nuanced views here.

By being forced to admit the existence of another class, the petit-bourgeoisie, the 2-classists concede that their 'theory' is misnamed and poorly conceived from the start. Just as the petit-bourgeoisie shares some commercial functions with the ruling class/haute-bourgeoisie, but in the totality of its position and function exists as a different class from the ruling class - (as argued here; http://libcom.org/forums/theory/pro-revolutionaries-academia-15102011?page=3#comment-451647 ) so, as I see it, the middle class shares a similar relationship to the working class - a shared selling of labour power/non-ruling status doesn't make them the same class.

Whether 'representing capital' is determinant of a primary role or merely an aspect seems crucial, otherwise how do we define any class relation? If classes by their agency 'make themselves as much as they are made' they do so obviously in relations formed with other classes - the notion of the domination of a totalised impersonal autonomised capital seems at odds with that. All classes have 'labour' and 'capital' as negotiated aspects of their lives to varying degrees; we arguably all 'represent capital' in, eg, every daily monetary exchange - but this is not reason to reduce all to some 'universal prole' equivalent; it would be absurd to try to strategically engage in class struggle on that basis. Even if many of us 'represent capital' to each other to varying degrees the proportionate dominance of this aspect in defining the totality of our social relations/a particular function in/for class society is part of class differentials.

http://libcom.org/library/6-classes-capital-poland-capitalist-class-transition
If social/managerial power and function, institutional privilege etc are ruled out as determinant of class power, one wonders how 2-classists would define the class relations of the old Eastern bloc regimes.

I think the argument is that the middle class is being dispossessed right now by the varieties of austerity measures we can see around us.

Indeed that was one of Marx's reframes. And it also relates to his rather contradictory definition of "unproductive". A house-cleaner who sweeps a dentist's home is unproductive, a factory worker who produces a vacuum cleaner that the dentist uses to vacuum his own home is productive. Back to the point that one version of Marx's idealized capitalism involved the production of discreet commodities in factory.

I recall Debord describing the Soviet Ruling class as a substitute capitalist class. I actually think that this bring good insight into the conditions of the USSR. One might argue that the regime surrendered without a fight because the ruling elite wasn't a "true class" and needed capitalists of the West to give them direction.

So would the absence of family servants among those considered middle class in the US prove that the classes involved are different in the two countries or something slightly more complex going on?

Like I've said, "two-class" positions can either use the approach to analyze a many strata world or they can just bullshit and say "hey we all work for a living, we're all really the same". But there's probably a similar division in three-class position.

So to start with a few negatives. Class is not a neutral category, it can either be a tool for the critique and practical deconstruction of capitalism or one for its monitoring, maintenance, reform, in a word, it's preservation. We are not concerned with some philological exercise to take note of how the term is generally used in society and from that compilation of all its uses, divine some "consensus" meaning. IMO that means that nearly all sociological use of the term is to be dispensed with.

In passing, given that I am primarily interested in a useable definition of class and that Marx never gave any such (see Volume III, Ch 52), it follows that I am not interested in a "Marxist theory of class" per se. Marx's work was incomplete, therefore he can only ever be a starting point (one amongst many), never an end point.

Class is not a socio-economic grouping. Particularly not in the sense of class struggle being the competition between different socio-economic groups over wealth and resources.

Class is not a taxonomy of social stratification. The almost universally accepted "geological metaphor" of strata, like the layers of sedimentary rock, with clear upper and lower vertical relations (and fully ordered set relations) has no analytical foundation or justification. The fact that so much of sociology accepts the vertical metaphor uncritically is simply an index of how much sociology is unanalytical apologia for the status quo.

Class is not an essence, with objectively determinable interests.

Malatesta:

E.P. Thompson:

Malatesta's statement that there are no classes may seem a provocative statement in the debate over the nature of the class struggle, and yet (at least from my reading) what he is proposing is not that different from Thompson. i.e. an anti-essentialist view of class. This is the starting point for a perspective based on class composition - understood as process, not sociological taxonomy. Thompson again:

That is "the proper sense of the term" in Malatesta's phrase, is one in which class interests exist prior to the individual's perception of their identity as being part of a collectivity and a shared articulation of what the common interests that binds him or her together with the others of that collectivity. That is to say, the political composition of the class.

Perhaps it is easier to understand the relation between the material determination of the real structures of production (the technical composition) by looking at the theoretical Absolute Zero of political composition, a.k.a. total decomposition - i.e. that hypothetical state where all workers consider themselves as atomised individuals in a hostile world, where "looking after number one" is the only social rule of conduct that matters ("Sod you Jack, I'm alright...").

Positive political composition, i.e. somewhere above that absolute zero point, is not just the practice of "feel[ing] and articulat[ing] the identity of [our] interests" and the aggregate of the subjective or cultural factors of "traditions, value-systems, ideas" but also "institutional forms". The latter would include not only the various class organisations, but also the legal-political and state institutional legacy of past struggles (e.g. social wage, right to strike, etc). (Of course we accept from a revolutionary perspective that these legacies are at best double-edged in that part of their intent is to recuperate struggles and incorporate working class self-reproduction into the reproduction of the system itself).

So hopefully that gives a brief background of an anti-essentialist, compositional approach to class. Now to return to the question in hand, by means of setting up one more external reference point, James Burnham's theory of the Managerial Revolution.

Burnham's schema came out of the dissatisfaction of sections of the Trotskyist movement with Trotsky's characterisation of the USSR as a worker's state with bureaucratic deformations. This led to two main alternatives, USSR as state capitalist or bureacratic collectivist society. The latter, also known as "new class" theory, was the idea that the CP bureaucracy in charge of the USSR were a new exploiter class and the USSR was, hence, a new form of class society that was neither capitalist nor socialist, but something else.

Burnham, originally a member of the US Trotskyist SWP party, splitting from it along with Max Schachtman. Although Burnham then left the new party and renounced Marxism shortly thereafter, his formulation of the "new class" theory still had a strong influence amongst the Schachtmanites, who later split into the Right Schachtmanites (later neo-cons) and Left Schachtmanites (amongst which people like the Johnson-Forrest Tendency of Dunayevskaya and James, who went on to link with and inspire groups like Socialisme ou Barbarie, albeit that the JFT later opted for a state capitalism analysis).

Burnham took inspiration from the rise of the bourgeoisie as a third class within feudal society, between lord and peasant. This middle class was of course destined to overthrow the aristocratic ruling class in the bourgeois revolution and usher in a new class society with themselves as the new ruling class. By extension Burnham saw the rise of a new managerial middle class in the interstices of capitalist society, between worker and bourgeois, who would then go on to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie and install themselves as the new rulers in a new form of class society that was beyond capitalism (the question of whether this new class society was any closer to socialism, was the one that eventually broke Burnham from any hope of attaining socialism). Further, that this had already happened in the USSR, where the Bolshevik revolution had leap-frogged over capitalism as a historical stage, and gone straight to the new managerial society, that all countries since the 1930s were heading towards (New Deal in the US, pre-Keynesian state involvement in monopoly cartels etc).

OK, so what's Burnham got to do with the price of iPads in China? Well directly, not a lot. For example the coordinator class theory of Parecon is at least two steps removed from it, via Enhrenreich and then Albert & Hahnel. However, even if those claims of the schema that subsequent history has shown to be false, have been quietly retired, certain echoes still appear. For instance Red Marriot's statement:

Does return to that parallel with the bourgeoisie as the middle class that split asunder the previous class society.

So I return to my starting position, that in my opinion, there is no third class within capitalism* that contains within it the possibility for overthrowing the capitalist class and ruling in its stead, in a new class society, in the way that Burnham predicted.

The class struggle remains the struggle between the proletariat's C-M-C cycle of its own reproduction, and that of the M-C-M' cycle of capital's self-valorisation. A struggle, I might add in passing, just to throw the cat back amongst the pigeons (he was looking far too smug snoozing on the sofa, anyway), that is no longer entirely contained within the wage-relationship - as irreplaceable as that is to the system as a whole.

For me, all other classes define themselves in relation to the proletariat by a double negation. In the first place as the negation of the proletariat - as being self-consciously "outside and against" the proletariat. And in return the proletariat is the negation of, not only all other classes, but all classes. Leading to the second negation. That is, the negation of any autonomy from capital's cycle of reproduction.

Capitalism may not be the end of history, but it is like a lobster pot in that you can enter in from a number of different angles, but once you're in it, there is no way out - other than through smashing through the end wall of class society itself.

Burnham and the other "new class" theorists were mistaken - the USSR was not a class society in transition beyond capitalism, but towards it. The historical role of the CPs of Russia and China was not to reproduce capitalist relations, but to produce them from a starting point of their (relative) absence. Having created market forces, the idea that the contemporary "middle class" of bourgeois society has the ambition or even imagination to suppress/overcome them again, flies in the face of all available evidence.

So in summary, although I have no problem with non-proletarian class or classes being composed of diverse fractions, I still want to hear the answer to the question about the claim that a third class exists that has "distinct interests", as to what exactly those distinct interests are?

* in the conditions of real subsumption - i.e. clearly when societies are in transition from pre-capitalist class structures to a capitalist ones, then the pre-existing class persist for a while, side-by-side with the labour capital class relation itself. For example even though tens or even hundreds of millions of people in India are now engaged in contemporary globalised capitalist productive circuits, the population of India is huge and the vast bulk of the population still live in pre-capitalist peasant conditions or the parallel universe of the slum-dweller. This provides the vast pool of cheap labour for dabbawalas and other sub-minimum wage labour on which modern India still depends. Anyway, too big a subject for a footnote (even without mentioning caste).

I have to express admiration for Ocelot's cogent argument here.

If I could summon the cheekiness to summarize my version of the overall argument, perhaps I could say that there are many stratum and divisions between groups in the modern capitalist world but for us class is reserved for those divisions which are decisive for the trajectory of the capitalist world and here, the many stratum devolve to simply bourgeois versus proletarian.

And that this statement absolutely doesn't mean that all that has to happen is for "everyone to come together" as the ninety percent or whatever. Rather that the proletariat becoming an active class defending its interests is what has to happen in challenging period of struggle.

"Elsewhere, the "middle classes" or "those who stand between the workman on the one hand and the capitalist and landlord on the other," are described as constantly growing in number and maintaining themselves increasingly out of revenues. They are also said to be a burden on workers and a social and political support for the power of the "upper ten thousand." Here, it sounds as if it is officials of various sorts whom Marx has in mind in speaking of the "middle class."

This seems to be the most useful - functionalist - analysis of the role of the middle class. It was the one I picked up in sociology classes at secondary school. The point is that the 'middle class' effectively stand between the interests of most working people and the rulers of society, be they political or economic, and prop up the system because they have a vested interest in preserving their own relative prosperity. This is why liberal reformists in political movements act against real social change and suggest minor tweaks to the status quo, like taxing and regulating the banks. This is why 'greens' fail to support workers in so called 'dirty' industries, while living comfortably from administrative jobs that that depend on these very industries indirectly, even though they mostly involve sitting at a desk. The ruling class use the middle class, who fear the underclass (who have been more or less created by society to fill this role) to suppress the working class. Some middle class people can be won over, some can't.

tbh, I have never found a thorough class analysis to be very useful in any practical terms outside of discussions about class. Sure, vague notions of some sort of privileged or under-privileged upbringing have come into play in some of the work I do, but a lot of these criteria are more dependent on place, culture, or context in my experience. I understand class divisions were probably a little more clear at the height of the worker's movement, but the waters seem to be pretty muddied at this point.

I do like typing and reading though.

Ocelot! I hope you'll have some time to arrange this post in to a stand alone article!

wow.
Ocelots comment kicks ass.
And it resonates.
I know little about any class theory, so I refrain from trying to squeeze an uninformed opinion into the thread.

Only, I have always been thinking that the habit of man to put things into boxes is somehow weird. Even more, when talking precisely about those things that are thus hidden in the boxes.

i think the passage from Thompson, which is rather famous, confuses class as an objective social relationship and the mindset people develop around it, through their experiences of struggles that are generated by class domination.but you can't really explain the subjective side of class without some idea of the objective side. why do strikes and other forms of class conflict take place?

i think the notion of class is important in terms of thinking about who potential allies are or who the target or enemy are. also in thinking about what it would mean for the working class to liberate itself. liberate itself from what? i think the notion of the bureaucratic class is important because there is the potential for such a class to be the dominant class in society and to derail a revolutionary movement of the working class.

i think this is important for understanding what happened in both the Russian and Spanish revolutions. Now it may well be that the "Communist" countries are all evolving towards some form of capitalism -- in the case of China, Vietnam and probably Cuba a system where there is still a powerful bureaucratic class, that suggests that a bureaucratic mode of production, when surrounded by global capitalism, is unstable and will tend to evolve towards capitalism. for one thing because it is an ineffective type of political economy. but it doesn't follow that there was no such thing as the bureaucratic class as the dominant class during the years when that system was flying high.

@syndicalistcat: I don't see the confusion there. The objective notion of class is a "pole" in the capitalist mode of production, that is producing all the wealth. All the wealth. And the other class, the other pole where this wealth is being accumulated, only to preserve this separation of wealth and work, production and consumption, producer and exploiter.

I am certainly not interested in the individual/personal breakdown of these poles because it is not one class that producing this dichotomy on the expense of the other, but the functioning of the mode of production producing, and reproducing these two poles of separation.

Many movements in the past and today is in search of the enemy, the real enemy for there's no distinct form of the ultimate evil, the (sociological) group to blame in, and for capitalism.

Given the economical analysis of the mode of production, I can't really make out any distinct third pole at all. There are many shades of grey in between the two of course but there's only objective direction that these groups are gravitated toward: a) The working class, which as the only source of wealth, with the distinct prospect of becoming autonomous, and ruling class, which can not possibly be autonomous of the working class.

Sure, the management positions are reflecting the power of the boss they represent, but it is a representation, as much as the power of the bosses is a representation of their capital. The managerial crowd can only do away without bourgeois class, but can not be without capital, the capitalist social relations. If anything has been shown in the course of the "socialist" countries, that the "managerial" elite has only achieved to industrialise these regions, produced capitalist relationships and when finally achieved the widespread, industrial capitalist state, it broke down as an autonomous society, giving way to a new bourgeois class. It is not a coincidence, that the managers of the "socialist" state are now the biggest national property owners of these countries. If we draw the lines very simply, capitalism is the class interest of the managerial "class" than they are nothing else but a different form of representation of the Capital, which calls in to question of how exactly they have different interest from the capitalist class?

I think that's a little unfair as a reading of Thompson's argument. Even in reduced quotes I picked above, he states clearly "The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily". Going on to say: "If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not". I don't think you could say that he was discounting the need for some idea of the objective side. I think it is possible to disagree with Thompson, Malatesta, etc on whether class interests can be said to exist independently of the subjective element of class consciousness, without misrepresenting either as "pure subjectivists", which is not the case.

The point they are making is that although workers experiences are governed by objective material reality, they still have to interpret and understand those experiences. And the consciousness framework that they use to do this is not automatically determined as if by some mechanical law.

I was recently reading an article (paywalled unfortunately ) by David Sloan Wilson on using ideas from evolutionary science to critique ideas in the social sciences. As an example he used the Gould and Lewontin paper on [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)]Spandrels[/url] as a means of critiquing Friedman's "Positive economics" paper justifying the unrealistic assumptions of neoclassical economics. To do so Friedman uses three examples pulled from evolution. I'll just quote a section:

Wilson then goes on to bring this into encounter with Gould and Lewontin's point in the "Spandrels" paper, that arguing from ultimate causation without justifying your argument with a close look at proximate causation, means you can end up telling "just so" stories about parts of what you're looking at that haven't actually been selected for by natural selection, but are legacies of evolutionary descent from previous different species and environments (think the appendix in digestive system) or just random genetic shuffling of the cards (i.e. certain genetic mutations produce more than one trait, one which may be selected for, bringing the other along as a "free rider"). They call this "naive adaptionism" - i.e. the idea that every trait you see has necessarily been adapted for.

For me the parallel to class dynamics is that we can see the class dynamics due to the laws of motion of capitalism in the abstract, as the "ultimate causation" line of argument. Whereas the actual historical processes of the class struggle in a particular time and location would be the analogous equivalent of the "proximate causation" inquiry.

But I think the analogy with the interaction between the individual "traits" of the political composition of the class in a given time and space, and the "natural selection" of the material relations of force, is a useful one. The objective situation and material realities can limit consciousness negatively (by eliminating ideas that are completely out of whack with reality, or practices that are unsustainable in terms of getting away with it, etc), without mechanically determining the "correct" consciousness that should correspond to them (and then, usually, having to come up with some theory of "false consciousness" to explain why workers don't appear to have the consciousness they "should" have).

In my first post to this thread I characterised the middle class as "an ideological shibboleth, a moment of the decomposition of the class". At the time I was making an analogy with the concept of "the master race". But I would like to go beyond that a little bit. I don't think the m/c is merely an ideological construct, whose only effect is to alienate workers from identifying themselves as w/c and practicing solidarity. I would see the "moment of the decomposition of the class" as having a more active practical aspect. That is all the types of activity that seek to create communication chokepoints to subject flows of information to the control of "networkers", the use of specialist language, skills, meeting practices, etc, to alienate or exclude ordinary people from decision-making processes and so on. All of these practices that consciously (or not) seek to reproduce within any organisation or movement the separation of a controlling minority from the mass of the organisation, and the arrogation of decision-making and strategising powers to the former. These are practical aspects of class decomposition for me.

So long as we make it a priority to resist such practices and cultures in our organising activity, and proselytise against them, then whether we theorise that as "libertarian/anarchist/anti-authoritarian" praxis, or through the language of the decomposition vs recomposition of the class, or through your language of the bureaucratic class is perhaps secondary.

What I would say, in practical terms, that my union and organising work has given me ample experience that born bureaucrats can come from any socio-economic background (sociologically speaking). So anybody who thinks that only stereo-typically middle class college graduates can be bureaucratic, and such behaviour would be alien to people from poorer working class or excluded immigrant or people of colour communities, will be in for a bit of a shock sooner or later.

The pre-WWII UK middle class commonly had servants; post-war social changes (enlarged career options for women, more domestic labour saving devices, households contracting out services to external suppliers, a less deferential workforce etc) largely ended this. How things will develop in the Indian middle class may be somewhat different, partly due to the caste aspect, who knows?

Undoubtedly true for some m/c - and a recurring aspect of the development of classes. But in parallel there will be, particularly among the professions, those m/c who gain from this refinement/restructuring/shuffling of hierarchy. But I don't think this aspect is one that can be used to ultimately explain or deny the totality of m/c character or its future.

To me they seem to be saying quite different things; Malatesta might be seen as taking a static immediate view, at odds with Thompson's historical one, and contrasting it with an ultimate ideal goal. But proletarians are not solely ruled by competitive imperatives; class struggle - the collective activity and solidarity that makes it possible - is in tension with such imperatives. Even Malatesta apparently sees politically intervening in unions as possibly counteracting these imperatives;

...Rather than general - class - interests, presumably. For generalised class action rather than sectional self-interest.

If Malatesta maintains that internal competition denies existence of a 'genuine' class he needs some identifiable collectivity (the sociological 'non-class class'?) in order to claim 'its' behaviour is denying its own existence. Is this much different from class-in-itself & class-for-itself? But is it really that it's not 'really' a class until it overcomes its internal competition (maybe only on the Great Revolutionary Day? Or is it dependent on the intervention of revolutionaries?) - or is it actually a characteristic of the class that a constant tension exists between this competition and its challenging/overcoming? For me, the latter.

I haven't been predicting any similar intent or ambition of 'overcoming capitalism' for the present middle class, just verifying their existence, so I don't see any parallel between myself and Burnham except that I also note the origin of the bourgeoisie as a middle class (as do many others). You don't seem to disagree with that either, so I don't see the parallel.

OK, so classes aren't static 'things' but fluid historical process. I don't think that was previously missing from the discussion, tbh.

On India; the servant employment in India is easily integrated into modern forms of capitalism there, as it was in, eg, UK, until well into the 20thC. As for "pre-capitalist conditions", this sounds like "stageism", as if based on an assumption that there will be a determined universal development along 'classic' western lines passing thru inevitable stages; as I showed in Nepal, Maoist-type claims of "pre-capitalist conditions" are often inapplicable clumsy western Marxist labels that don't stick (ironically for these 3rd worldists, quite a Eurocentric view). Eg, there are millions of migrating (semi-)peasants-proles across Asia more accurately described thus;

(This mass labour migration is also fed by those who've lost their land.) But more primitive conditions of production are not anomalous or somehow indicative of 'historically uncompleted' situations necessarily - they are integral components of a modern global economy; if cheapness of labour power makes it viable, they send production overseas. Hope I'm not misreading you, but I'm finding some overly-determinist strands here.

There is a vast literature of several decades debating which mode of production is operating in '3rd world' countries, (semi-)feudal or capitalist etc and when/if it came to dominance. But I think nowadays the pure 'peasant' subsisting solely without connection, trade or purchase from the global economy is becoming rare, if not extinct. Neither they nor slum dwellers are in any "pre-capitalist" state of existence. Equally, the very existence of the '3rd world' urban slum is a very modern part of capitalist development and is composed of, eg, labourers, rickshaw drivers, street vendors etc. No way is it remotely "pre-capitalist" - the '3rd world' slum is a modern urban economy with landlords, shops and billions of proletarians, a third of the world's urban population. The Bangladeshi garment workers are mainly slum dwellers;

It seems odd to emphasise such dominance for a generalised, autonomised capital (all "representing capital" to each other), then say it has such a partial presence elsewhere in the most dynamic of the global economies, leaving most of India supposedly "pre-capitalist". The over 10,000 debt-ridden Indian farmers committing suicide every year for the past decade and a half are responding to very modern capitalist conditions:

"Distinct interests"? It's not necessary to find any Hegelian historical imperative, essential ultimate grand destiny or mission for a class to have distinct interests in maintaining its own conditions and privileges, defined and bound up as they are with their relation to other classes; it's part of the classes-in-relation Thompson describes. Unless one supposes an essentialism by trying to locate a uniform static 'consciousness of 'its' historical destiny' for a 'thing' called a class. If one accepts that classes exist one would expect them to pursue those interests particular to their own condition. (If that seems a bit tautological, so did the question.) As true of the middle class as the petit-bourgeoisie. If it's implied that a lack of distinct interests beyond maintaining itself proves it is really proletarian I'm not convinced - one could say the same about 'the peasantry'; yet as pointed out, it's been a surprisingly large long-surviving non-proletarian class. (Though definition of 'peasantry' is another complex question.) And the emerging middle class/petit-bourgeoisie of China and India surely have interests distinct from - and largely opposed to - the working class, their own growth largely dependent on the general process of proletarianisation and the exploitation/domination that is the content of that class relation.

RM,

It seems like your argument kind of boils down to proving that a middle class existed in some times and places and that thus, claims it won't exist in such a form everywhere is "stagism".

The point I see is modern communism is that it looks closely at the conditions of our modern world. That's the value and, uh, freshness, that I'd see in Douve, Theories Communiste, The Situationists, Endnotes and so-forth.

What's useful about a Marxian perspective to me is that it gives us a picture of our rapidly changing world, a world still horribly dominated by wage labor but in many ways different from that of the 19th century.

Hey, you can cook arguments about different sections of the working class having distinct interests from each other too.

If we're tossing out examples, I'll just post up this article about impoverished "middle class" workers in China.

The question is where the leading edge of capitalist production and labor-organization is going.

The authentic small business owning class in India, China and the US certainly does have interests distinct from the working class. But the "middle class" that I think has been discussed here is not that group but effectively "knowledge workers" (or "professionals"), since this honest-to-god small business owner group is much small. Indian knowledge workers employed by multinationals are indeed often paid enough above average to afford servants. But the overall trajectory of world knowledge workers is not towards a permanent privileged position above manufacturing or other service workers. The movement of multinationals to gloablize there employment of professionals naturally pushes things in that direction.

No, I'm just not convinced "pre-capitalist" conditions are prevalent in India - and it reminds me of Maoist claims that such places are "(semi-)feudal".

And in two places I say pretty much the opposite of your interpretation - you say;

Yet I said;

The key question is where are the knowledge workers going?

India going a different direction because of caste system is a serious tangent. You're the one who started talking about India anyway.

What's worthwhile about the Marxian perspective is that it gives us some perspective on where we are going to be taken by the tidal wave of transformation which is modern capitalism. Of course there are unempteen regional differences but what matters is the unifying factors ... because capitalist society is only going to be overthrown by a proletariat unified world-wide and the generalized mechanisms of capitalism, as an abstract system, are basically the factors that tends to create this.

I didn't start the thread, but as it was begun by quoting my exchange with someone about the validity of 2-classism, I stated my views. Which may not coincide with yours as to what is the "key question". But 'where the knowledge workers are going' is probably some into proletarianised white collar and others moving the other way - as I previously said to you;

If after some centuries of capitalist development the middle classes are still with us - suggesting capitalism needs them - it would seem unlikely they'll now all disappear.

Agreed, that's why I only mentioned it in one short line in passing. But it might anyway be a significant and interesting tangent if it was pursued.

And what's the problem with that? You were happy to pursue it yourself with a question about US-Indian comparisons. If one wants to talk about the middle class why shouldn't we talk about it as an international phenomena with local specifics, even if it takes us out of our comfort zones? Especially if one is talking ultimately of a 'unification' of these diverse localities and situations?

The petite-bourgeoisie has been mentioned in the discussion several times, but anyway the symbiotic relationship between some professions and the p-b businesses is probably relevant but may be another one of those tangents you don't like. But I agree the terms can be confusing, as "middle class" can be used as Marx sometimes did in "the middle classes", "intermediate strata" etc - meaning collectively the petite-bourgeois, bureaucracy/officialdom, professions etc - collectively those not fitting in to the bourgeois or prole class. Alternatively it can be useful to distinguish between the white collar/managerial middle class functionary, the professions and the p-b small trader. Much the same usage occurs with 'peasantry' where it can mean 'the peasantry' collectively - or alternatively, poor, middle and rich peasants have sometimes been contrasted.

The Chinese article is a recent example of what's been a longterm problem in 'developing' countries; middle class careers/skills over-subscribed with an excess of graduates. But I don't think this necessarily indicates a new main world-historical trend; an overproduction of graduates has been a fact of life for decades in various countries and will probably remain a factor.

As it has been in the Middle-Eastern countries where we've had recent revolts described as 'middle class revolutions', a label mainly based on disenfranchised graduates' access to and skills with social media. In the Libyan war (and possibly elsewhere in the Middle East) there were reports of new local state structures being set up in rebel territory - with their composition described iirc as professionals, local businessmen, local officialdom etc - ie, Marx's "middle classes", "intermediate strata". Eg;
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/13/libyan-rebels-seek-build-civil-society-scratch/
http://utopianist.com/2011/03/in-the-face-of-war-libyan-rebels-rebuild-a-civil-society/

Maybe that's a middle class version of Ocelot's systemic crisis > leads to new political composition. Whatever, I think such developments can be significant factors in the outcome of events.

Well, as I stated earlier, I'm not convinced libcommers' views on class are particularly The definitive Marxian or Marxist perspective. But while I can agree with much of the general meaning of your statement I think analysing the local specifics - which is what real people have to concretely deal with - is important, otherwise one is likely to fail to grasp what factors inhibit and resist unification, which is not a determined automatic process, but a struggle.