What's so special about the proletariat?

Respectfully, this is assuming the thing in question - where or not there *is* a class difference between proletarians and slaves. I'm arguing that "proletarian" (and working class, I use those synonymously) included waged workers and slaves. I'm not saying all slaves fit into this, I don't know enough about the history of slave, but I am saying that in the late 18th and in the 19th century US slaves were proletarians.

In v1 of Capital Marx discusses women and children workers, briefly, in the chapter on the working day or the chapter on machinery, or both. They don't own their labor and yet they still seem to count as members of the working class on Marx's description. (Marx is unclear on this point elsewhere, though.) From what you're saying, you seem to be saying those people were not members of the working class. I favor seeing slaves as part of the working class, and these women and children, but ultimately I don't have particularly strong feelings either way - we can define words however, really, as long as we're clear and consistent in the definitions. I do think that Marx doesn't use the term this way - women and children who work are still considered workers, it seems to me, in his descriptions, even though they don't have a legal right to their labor or their wages (the first earnings laws for women in the US start in the 1840s, I believe, and are mostly gutted by court cases soon after).

Slaves could and did seek different owners, with some measure of success. A good book on this is The Chattel Principle, edited by Walter Johnson. And slaves were often rented out (the book on this is Divided Mastery) and sought, again with some measure of success, to shape who they were rented to.

I wish I had more to say about the consequences, I'm not at all sure there are any beyond some issues of historical interpretation. A decent book tied to all this is Gavin Wright's Slavery and American Economic Development.

Put briefly, here's where I don't get the slaves vs workers distinction for the US, in terms of value production. Marx abbreviates the repeated circuit of capitalism this way:
M-C(lp)+C(mp)...P...C'-M'

Money (M) exchanged for two basic types of commodities, labor power (C(lp)) and means of production (C(mp) which are combined in production (P) to produce a new commodity (C') which is sold for more money (M') than the original money spent. The value of the difference between M and M' is surplus value. The only real source of this difference (in general, at the level of large averages or trends) is labor -- labor power produces goods for a value greater than the value required to purchase (and maintain) labor power. There are a whole lot of very important differences between waged and slave labor but in terms of this abbreviation, there aren't any. (Just as there are important differences between iron workers and carpenters, but there aren't at the level of very general discussions of surplus value production.) This formula is not time based - the waged worker makes a repeated sale of labor power (C(lp) or in the case of women and children in many times and places they get their labor power sold and someone else keeps the money; the slave is sold once and for all (which isn't really true either - slaves in the US were resold a lot, because the value of slaves quadrupled from 1808 to 1860, in part due to the end of slave importation). But as long as the slave produces more value over the course of his/her ownership than the owner paid including costs to maintain the slave (and that generally did happen, slave production was quote profitable), there's still a surplus here. So I don't see the difference here - there are differences but I don't see the differences as "slaves vs working class." (I'm defining "working class" as the the class of those whose labor power is sold and who produce value. I'm not wedded to that definition, it's just how I use the term, again I'm only sort of hung up on the terms, main thing for me is the slave labor produces value and slaves' labor power is sold and this is true also for waged workers.)

It's not a terminology I would use so I'm not sure what to say. I believe Marx thought the working class had no interest in forms of exploitation or domination, and furthermore that victory by the working class would end all forms of exploitation and domination. That's what he meant by radical chains. Why he thought working class victory would end all oppression, I don't know. Why he thought it would end all exploitation, though, is because that's how he defined working class victory - as the end of exploitation (because the working class is the class of the exploited, so their victory can only come with the end of exploitation). He also thought, rightly in my opinion, that only the working class could end capitalism.

By nature of its place in society, under capitalism, at the point of production, and the nature of its existence (capitalism requires workers, generally more and more of them, to survive)- thus, the proletariat is a necessity of capitalism, and its necessary place in capitalist society (at the point of production) gives it the power to be the revolutionary subject.

Yeah, and I think this is where I disagree with you, respectfully of course!

I think that if you define classes only

, it is too easy to slip into seeing capitalism as a trans-historic system. You then find people saying that Rome was capitalist, because there was trade, money and banks, and indeed some proletarians.

You're right, of course, to say that in reality things are far more complex than my simple 'workers own their own hands, unlike slaves' charaterisation, but for the purposes of analysis (and to help explain the issues to workers who are showing an interest in Communism for the first time), it is necessary to focus on the central point: slaves are not proletarians.

The point has political consequences. Perhaps, as I've already said, my knowledge of Political Economy shows far too much bias to the Political, and I'm missing something in the Economic, but that's why I'm here, to learn.

LBird, what Nate is saying that in the capitalist mode of production both slaves and workers proper are proletarians because they both produce surplus-value. Before the capitalist MoP no group in society could produce value, because value only exists in capitalism. The difference between slaves and workers under capitalism then becomes simply the degree of exploitation.

LBird, would you consider prison labourers as proletarians or slaves?

Yeah, I understand that. But I could just as easily turn it around and say that 'producers of surplus-value are, by definition, all proletarians', and thus argue that therefore there weren't any slaves. But I think that we'd both agree that something would be lost by saying that slaves don't exist in the capitalist MoP. I suppose what I'm saying is that 'class' is also defined by something more, in addition to economic categories, perhaps exploitative social relationships. That is, both the economic and social [and political?] should play a part in class definitions.

At this point, my lamentable lack of economic knowledge prevents me from understanding what you mean. I know you don't mean that exploitation didn't exist before capitalism, but your specialised use of the word 'value', to me, is just confusing. To an ordinary worker, 'value' must have existed before, otherwise how could Feudal society be an exploitative society if the rulers got nothing of 'value' from the serfs or peasants? I know you will refer me to Capital, but I'm afraid that won't help, as I've tried to read the notorious first three chapters, taking the advice of posters on Libcom to listen to Harvey's lectures as an aid, but it's all still a mystery to me.

I think this is a serious problem, because the use of words to mean something that is not the same as most people understand them, only causes confusion and eventually an attitude of 'well, I'll just leave it to the clever ones who understand'. This is inimicable to building Communism, which requires mass democratic participation. I should make it clear here that I'm not blaming you for this; if anyone needs blaming, it's Marx himself. Explanations should be able to be made by Communists that workers understand.

Then again, perhaps I'm just thick, and I should leave it, as I and everyone else from my background have always been told, to my betters to deal with.

Trouble is, I'm now old, experienced and confident enough to blame the teachers who can't teach, as I know now that I know better than them. This isn't a dig at you, and I apologise now if it appears that way.

I'd consider them proletarians, because before they were put in prison they were proletarians. That background overwhelms any temporary social or economic relationship within the prison system.
I should say further that if the slang term 'slave gang' is used, that to me is a descriptive, not an analytical term. Even if they are in chains, like in Cool Hand Luke, they are not slaves.

For what it's worth, I think the issue of slaves in the Capitalist MoP is a minor side issue - in analytical terms, that is. It isn't to ignore the millions of slaves that exist now in the world, and need liberating, but just to insist that the main class for our Communist purposes by far is the proletarian.

Anyway, that's easy for me to say...

Class, at least in the Marxist sense, is defined as a social relationship, which includes the economic, the social and political. Class is thus defined whether you buy or sell the potential to work.

Sorry for using technical language. It is indeed the Marxist definition. I'll try to explain the concept. For Marx value is purely a quantitative phenomena. This is important because it can be expanded indefinitely. It only exists in capitalism, which seeks to accumulate value for its own sake, and does so by exploiting labour, which is the creator of value.

Wealth (use-value), however, is a qualitative phenomenon - it is made up of actual things (bread, books, houses etc.). While wealth can certainly be accumulated to no end, it doesn't make any sense. After all, you only need that much bread before it's essentially useless to you. Very simply you could say that prior to capitalism, exploitation was more or less done for the sake of wealth rather than value (though both happened through the direct or indirect exploitation of labour).

I dunno if that makes much more sense, but at least it's something. And I'd suggest that you do try to get through the first few chapters, it's very enlightening when you finally understand it (it did take me quite a few reads before I finnally got it).

It is a bit of a problem, but I don't think it is necessary to known the ins and outs of Marx to be a communist. Lived experience counts for more than a theoretical analysis of capitalism. Of course putting the two together makes it more powerful, but many folks have struck and revolted from arriving at pretty much the same conclusions as Marx without having read the fucker in the first place.

I wouldn't blame Marx. I blame how economics is taught today and also that the working class has "forgot" to educate itself. After all, the working class has read and understood Marx before the workers of today. Partly I think the decline of working class newspapers is partly the reason; there is no longer any culture of auto-dicativism (didactism?).

LBird, this is a good discussion, thanks, and thanks for the comradely tone. I think I said this but I don't remember and I'm too lazy to re-read... I don't know if there are any political stakes to this, for whatever that's worth. Oh yeah, before I forget - on v1 of Capital, I'd recommend that you read the 1st 3 chapters last. Either start with chapter 26 and read to the end then start at the beginning, or start at chapter 4 and read to the tend then read chapters 1-3. You will run into occasional terms that Marx defined in ch1-3 but not all that often really, and when you do you can use the glossary at Marxists.org. I tried for years to read v1 and it's only by reading the 1st 3 chapters I was able to manage.

About slaves and all that, I take your point that what I'm saying pushes in the direction of historical continuity rather than historical rupture between modes of production. I'm not sure what to do about that or why that's a problem. I do think that there's a difference between surplus value and surplus labor, though. All class societies involve exploitation in a general sense - they all extract surplus labor from some class or classes, and those classes don't get the surplus. (If I read Marx right, he says all socieities involve some labor surplus to immediate requirements, in order to exist - things like planning for the future as well as things like culture and art.) Surplus value is when surplus labor takes a monetary form, mediated by commodity sales. The majority of slaves (again, I can only speak to the US after the late 18th century or so) produced commodities sold on markets, and so were profitable to employ. Another way to put this: Marx's analysis of capitalist enterprises applies to slave production and slave property just as much as it applies to waged production and other forms of property. I don't have strong feelings about the particulars of slaves and radical chains (ie, whether or not waged laborers because of being waged laborers -- that is, because of the social form of waged labor rather than historical contingencies -- have some special potential to end capitalism or produce communism). I'm open to the idea that there's some special potential for waged laborers that is not present for slaves in capitalist slave societies, but I'd need to hear the argument and it'd have to actually be unique to waged laborers. So far I've only ever seen arguments that actually do apply to slaves as well as waged workers, from what I've read about slavery.

Sorry to bother you again, Khawaga, but your particularly dense pupil has a few more questions.

I think I mostly agree with you here, but with the addition to 'whether' of 'and how' - or do I? Does a capitalist 'buy' surplus-value from a slave? Perhaps this is where the 'how' comes in: doesn't the capitalistic slave-owner (or, to put it another way, the slave-owner who happens to live within a dominant capitalist mode of production) merely take by force, just like a slave-owner in the slave MoP? But then 'sells' as a capitalist? What are the political effects of this? Was the American Civil War a political clash caused by incompatible elements of different MoPs?

Why not call value 'banknotes' and use-value 'wealth'. Most workers can then easily see your point that 'banknotes' accumulation for its own sake is pointless, and that wealth comes in many shapes and sizes, not all monetary? That those who print and collect banknotes are worthless parasites, like Mr. Burns, and that those who produce 'bread, books and houses' [commonwealth?] are the salt of the earth, like Homer? Errr... I'm getting awfully close here to identifying myself with him, aren't I? Doh!

Well, I would! The bastard didn't even get round, after nearly 40 years of writing, to defining what a 'class' was. Thanks for your help, Charlie, mate.

Nah, that's easily dealt with. Just mention Adam Smith, David Ricardo, the bastard Malthus, etc. and point out that they all studied Political Economy, not some daft concept called 'economics', point them to The Marginalist Revolution of the 1870s on wikipedia (they'll have heard of Marshall, Walras, Jevons, etc.) and point out that these clowns rejected the entire corpus of human thinking up until then, in the name of 'marginal utility'. In my experience, talking to economics students (leaving alone the laughable academic concept of 'business studies') is like taking candy off a baby. We understand and can explain their 'theory' (sic), but they haven't got a clue about ours. Let's face it, while the bourgeoisie continue teaching neo-classical economics, we'll have an easy job. Even the police will prefer a theory that explains why they should keep their pensions (LTV), compared to the one that ensures they'll live in poverty in old age (market economics). And don't get me started on the elitist Keynes...

[hoping for at least an A- on this one, teacher!]

Yeah, perhaps I'm just a trouble-making 'historical rupturer' - strange that, isn't it, on a Commie board.

Mind you, you're in good company with that well known 'historical continuiter' Karl Marx, who apparently believed that Manhood Suffrage would allow workers to vote out the capitalists, all without the help of women, too.

Though, I hear he had his doubts, and I have mine...

I must try to be more combative, insulting and dismissive...after all, I'm aiming to become an Anarchist!

Well, must go, I'm reluctantly off to do the homework you've set - isn't there a cartoon version of chapters 1-3?

I'll write a proper reply later Lbird, but I know there is a website called dialectics for kids and that there a manga was made out of Capital.

actually, Marx references slaves in chapter 26 of capital. He makes clear that they are qualitatively different from free wage workers, and that in fact they are means of production themselves, who don't create surplus value. This is because slaves have to be bought first, and then fed and maintained etc, and their price when sold effectively includes the value of their future labour. Unlike "free" workers, who are of course "free" and only have to be remunerated for the hours they actually work.

Steven, Marx references slaves, but he doesn't "make clear" that they differ from waged workers as you suggest - that would require actually establishing the point, rather than asserting it. He may have thought he did so, I haven't looked at chapter 26 in a while but I'll take your word on it. In that case, if he thought he had done that then he was wrong.

For one thing, slaves in the US were not primarily 'fed and maintained' by slave owners. Plantation slaves in the US largely grew their own food and took care of their own (and slave owners') reproductive/subsistence needs. Slaves who were rented out for wages (appropriated by slave owners) maintained themselves in a fashion identical to how waged laborers did -- which is unsurprising because they were basically waged laborers, even though they were required to give most of their wages to their owners.

I don't find the "slave prices included the value of their future labor" argument convincing either. That would mean that slave owners paid out value equivalent to the value produced by slaves over their life time, which would mean advancing value in large sums. I don't have the figures in front of me but measured in 2009 dollars, between 1808 and 1860 slave prices ranged from $9,000 to $35,000 per slave in the US. (I got these numbers because a while back I took figures in Gavin Wright's book Slavery and American Economic Development and ran them through an inflation calculator.) Those are huge sums of money, and what you've said would make slave purchase a zero-sum with no surplus accruing. In that case, why would anyone buy slaves at all? Especially given that slaves were a fairly volatile form of property - subject to injury, escape, uprising, etc. A much simpler answer, and one that I think accounts for what historians of slavery have said about the profitability of slavery, is that slave owners did accrue a profit from slaves' labor (slave owners certainly believed they did so), but that this surplus was extracted with some unique dynamics compared to waged labor (different time, different legal arrangement, different policing, etc).

Nate, the particular sentence I was thinking of I have found. It is this:

from chapter 26, page 874 in the Penguin Classics 1990 edition.

So it seems clear to me he is stating that slaves are means of production.

As to whether I agree with it, well it seemed to make sense, but I need to think about it for a bit. Comments from any Marx-buffs would be appreciated...

Capital, Chapter 7, fn 17

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm

A proletarian at least owns their own hands; a slave does not - just a 'speaking tool'.

Marx makes remarks repeatedly that sound like he thinks there's something special about legally free workers. He doesn't really make clear what that special thing is, though, in my opinion, and it has nothing to do with surplus value production. It's also in tension with places where he talks some of the time about women and children workers but they were not legally self-owning. Over all it seems to me to make too much out of legal status. Plus, at law nowadays self-ownership of labor is sort of fuzzy. What I mean is, at least in the US, depending on the body of law and the administrative agency that oversees that law, some people can both be and not be workers. So domestics and farm workers in a lot of US states can't get workers comp if they get hurt, have different rights for organizing, and at least for domestics have limited access to unemployment benefits (not sure about farm workers on that one). They're not counted as workers according to certain bodies of law. I suppose at law they are all still considered self-owning free contracting persons. Over all, I don't see why that should matter so much in how we define the working class.

Yeah, to me too Marx is far too opaque in much of his writing. I think, though, this is only an unsurpassable problem if you think his work is holy writ, like the bible, to be followed to the letter, and our job is to bring out the essential truth, as apostles of the master.

On the contrary, I think Commies should take what we now think is useful from Marx's work. Personally, I think Marx was a genius, the most influential thinker since the French Revolution, but a bit of a lousy writer. It's probably better if we treat him as an 'idiot savant' - he's far better than most of us at some things, but at others (expressing ourselves?) we have far better people in the working class.

On this issue of defining a class (slave, proletarian, etc.), I think you're spending too much time focussing on individuals. 'Class' is a social category, a widely-drawn concept to try to understand class struggle. Many individuals will not fit every point, in law, in consciousness, or in real history. But this doesn't mean that the concept is invalid. It seems to me its point is to capture socio-economic oppositions.

As an example, a spectrum is a concept which we all understand (roygbiv). But if someone insists on pointing out that there are many areas at the changeover points where colours are fuzzy, where red merges with orange, etc., so this proves that orange and red don't exist, we wouldn't agree with them. A spectrum isn't meant to clearly delineate colours. It's a higher level concept.

And so it is for class. 'Slave' and 'proletarian' are social, not individual, categories, so finding problems in fitting every real-life slave into the concept of 'slave' is not surprising. There will always be contrary pointers in reality.

The reason, it seems to me, to talk about 'slave' and 'proletarian' is to pose them in opposition to 'slave-owner' and 'bourgeois', to try to indentify their likely political possibilities, to seek to understand society.

'Slave' is not a descriptive or legal category to help describe what individuals experience; it is an analytical category to help us to take political action.

If you're looking for the truth in Marx, you're going to be disappointed. 'Truth' is a social construct, so we'd better get on, as Commies and Anarchists, with constructing our world, through action and reflection, in opposition to prevailing bourgeios 'truths' like individualism, which seems particularly influential in the USA.

Steven,
Have you read de Ste. Croix's The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World? He discusses Marx's views on slaves and proletarians on p. 58, and in Appendix 1, pp. 504-5. You might find it useful. Then again, he might, like Marx often, be talking bollocks...

LALALALALALALALALALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU I CAN'T HEAR YOU I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!!!

hey LBird,
Jokes aside...

"'Class' is a social category, a widely-drawn concept to try to understand class struggle. Many individuals will not fit every point, in law, in consciousness, or in real history. But this doesn't mean that the concept is invalid. It seems to me its point is to capture socio-economic oppositions."

I respectfully disagree. I think every individual will fit, in the sense of not contradicting the category, if we make the categories right. If a general category is directly contradicted by an individual case then it's a category that needs some tweaking. Consider the difference between "Internet discussions suck" and "Internet discussions tend to suck." The first is incompatible with the existence of the occasional useful discussion that happens online. The second is not. This doesn't mean we should expect general categories to tell us everything, just that if our general categories tell us things that are contradicted by reliable evidence then those categories need revising.

I agree with you on one important aspect of this - we shouldn't try to derive particulars from the general categories. That's pretty important. This sort of came up in the "why do we lose with the unions?" thread as well. But that's different from saying individuals don't fit into the bigger categories. Here's another way to put this: sometimes people talk about general categories in ways that mistakenly universalize particulars. Like with the example of slaves, people sometimes take the conditions of plantation slaves in the US in the 19th century to be the conditions of slaves as such, when they say "slaves" they think of qualities that were specific to plantation slaves in that era. That's a mistake, not a matter of different conceptual registers.

I agree with you when you say this:
"The reason, it seems to me, to talk about 'slave' and 'proletarian' is to pose them in opposition to 'slave-owner' and 'bourgeois', to try to indentify their likely political possibilities, to seek to understand society."

That doesn't clarify the categories of slave and proletarian, though - whether there are two categories (slave and proletarian) or one category with two subdivisions (enslaved proletarians and waged proletarians, with other variations as I mentioned and as you allude to). Both of those fit into what you said.

That, then, is a point of fundamental disagreement. I don't think every member will fit into a generalisation, some members of a category will contradict it, and any attempt to make a generalisation 'right' by extending to all members is doomed to failure. The point of a generalisation is to capture 'essential' features of members, not 'all' features of members. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a generalised category, it would be just a complex description of reality. 'Class' doesn't need 'tweaking'. It is perfectly satisfactory for its purpose.

The purpose of class analysis is to analyse society, not to describe all the features of proletarians, slaves, etc.

The clarification required is one that most workers will understand, to help them analyse Political Economy.

The method of clarification should be:
a) Workers posit separate defintions of, eg., a slave and a proletarian;
b) we subject these to a vote of our fellow workers;
c) workers then try to employ the 'winning' definition in understanding and changing their world;
d) if it seems to help this purpose, keep this definition (and finish);
e) if it doesn't, try the initial 'losing' definition;
f) if it seems to help this purpose, keep this definition (and finish);
g) it neither helps, reformulate our definitions;
h) go to a).

We are not, like medieval theologians, trying to discover how many angels fit on a pinhead. We are trying to find useful definitions as guides to political action. This is a practical, not just a theoretical, issue.

I think defining a slave as someone who does not even own their own hands, unlike a proletarian, helps in this process. I suggests that, not owning their hands, they are unlikely to own their minds; that not having even the [theoretical and legal] freedom to decide to change their employers and geographical location, they are unlikely to want to expand this freedom. These factors mean that they are less likely to be organisable. And the form of ownership will, I think, have implications for the political actions of the slave-owners, and for conflicts between slave-owners and the bourgeoisie, who are separate categories.

These points are tendencies, to help analyse. They are not disproved by cases of slaves rebelling en masse, escaping as individuals, or victories like Toussaint L'Overture in Haiti in the 1790s.

Now, all we have to do is take our conflicting suggestions to the local Workers' Council, for discussion, debate and democratic, but possibly temporary, decision!

Thanks for the discussion.

hi LBird,

This is getting fairly philosophical, but I like that, and thanks as well for the discussion. You're implying a difference between social generalizations and philosophical ones. See, because you say "I don't think every member will fit into a generalisation, some members of a category will contradict it, and any attempt to make a generalisation 'right' by extending to all members is doomed to failure." Part of what you've said there is "every generalization will be contradicted by some important cases." Which is itself a generalization, one which will be contradicted by some important cases - meaning that if your generalization is mostly true then there must also be some generalizations which are not contradicted...

For me, a generalization which is contradicted by factual cases is one that should be revised to not be contradicted by factual cases.

Also, I agree with you that "The purpose of class analysis is to analyse society, not to describe all the features of proletarians, slaves, etc." But there's an important difference between "this generalization leaves out important aspects of the description of some cases" and "this generalization is contradicted by aspects of some cases." The first are generalizations indifferent to some particulars (like what I said above about surplus value... I like those abbreviations from Marx, M-Clp+Cmp...P...C'-M' where M' then becomes the M for a new repetition of the sequence. This is a generalization, defining capitalist enterprises as those which use money to buy labor power which is set to work and the product of which is sold for more money than was spent and where most of that surplus is re-invested repeating and extending that sequence. That generalization fits both slaves and waged workers, and is indifferent to the differences between them, and the many differences among slaves in different labor and waged workers in different labors). The second sort of generalizations are ones directly contradicted by cases (like, "the working class are free to sell their labor power" even though among the actually existing working class there are women and children who work or have worked for wages and were not doing so freely, did not own their labor power, did not own the wages they received, etc).

Your method of clarification and the bit about taking this to our councils is funny. As I said I don't know that anything political hangs on this issue of slaves, but your pargagraph beginning "I think that defining a slave..." just sounds in accurate to me from what I've read on the history of slavery and slaves' narratives. Slaves wanted desperately to expand their freedom and attempted regularly in a great many ways. Often unsuccessful, but there's no evidence of this lack of desire. You're also implying a very strange relationship between legality and consciousness. I don't see why legal ownership of one's self is a precondition for a desire for freedom. I'm open to the idea that in some cases law helps create a certain consciousness, but I think it's also true that in some cases law codifies consciousness - because at least some of the time legal change is the result of struggles. I think this is one of the things implied in Marx's discussion of the English factory acts.

Also, in the US in the 19th century, it's simply untrue that slave owners and the bourgeoisie are distinct categories. There were slave owning bourgeoisie (the vast majority of slave owners), non-slave-owning bourgeosie, and non-bourgeois slave owners who owned small numbers of slaves. Unless you just want to define "bourgeois" in such a way that it must include "non-slave-owning." People can define words however they like, but I don't see why that's an illuminating definition and it's not an argument in favor of considering slaves as not proletarians, it's more of an assertion of that view.

Final thought - you say "These points are tendencies, to help analyse. They are not disproved by cases of slaves rebelling" I wonder then, in your view, are these sorts of tendencies/analytical categories ever subject to being disproved? if so, under what sorts of conditions? Because as you've said it here these sound more like basic points that shape inquiry but are not themselves subject to revision in response to inquiry. (I don't have clearer things to say on this but I think lurking in the background here is some issue about historical materialism and method, I'm going to think more about that.)

I'm using the scientific method, as outlined by Imre Lakatos.

He would argue that science uses, to paraphrase you, 'analytical categories' that can't be 'disproved', 'basic points' that 'are not subject to revision in response to inquiry'.

He calls this method 'research programmes', and says that at the heart of these are a 'hard core' of ethical or ideological beliefs which can't be falsified by empirical evidence, and this centre is protected by 'auxiliary protective belts' of ideas and sub-theories which could be altered, to protect the hard core of belief.

More details, for eg.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos
Excerpt:

"Falsificationism, (Popper's theory), proposed that scientists put forward theories and that nature 'shouts NO' in the form of an inconsistent observation. According to Popper, it is irrational for scientists to maintain their theories in the face of Nature's rejection, yet this is what Kuhn had described them as doing. But for Lakatos, "It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO rather we propose a maze of theories and nature may shout INCONSISTENT"[6]. This inconsistency can be resolved without abandoning our Research Programme by leaving the hard core alone and altering the auxiliary hypotheses. One example given is Newton's three laws of motion. Within the Newtonian system (research programme) these are not open to falsification as they form the programme's hard core. This research programme provides a framework within which research can be undertaken with constant reference to presumed first principles which are shared by those involved in the research programme, and without continually defending these first principles. In this regard it is similar to Kuhn's notion of a paradigm."

I presume you're using an outdated scientific method, like Popper's Falsificationism or Kuhn's Paradigms? Or even 19th century Positivism?

Don't forget, it was Einstein who said, 'it is the theory that determines what one can observe'.

And Communism is the proletarian 'research programme'.

Dude...! If you can read that stuff, you can read Marx, easy. As for outdated methods etc, that's not an argument. Also, from your wikipedia quote, I see little difference between "revise a generalization when we run into cases that it gets wrong" and "if some case cries out as inconsistent with our generalizations then we alter our auxiliary hypotheses." As far as I can tell, what we've really come down to here with regard to the higher level/meta disagreement here is that I prefer that generalizations not be contradicted by evidence and you're okay with contradiction by evidence as long as it's below a certain scale (individual cases). You want to define proletariat and slaves as different. You're welcome do to so. But you don't have evidence or an argument supporting that definition, just a preference. I don't have strong evidence for including slaves as proletarians, except that any of the definitions I've seen that apply to waged labor either strike me as including ideas that are problematic (like the point about law and consciousness above) or else they apply pretty clearly to slaves as well. What I think is going on is that there's a sort of intuition on your part to define slave and working class as distinct, and your looking for justifications (I personally think that a lot of philosophical/theoretical argument works like this, justifying intuitively held positions). I've run into this before in discussions of this topic, I get that "slaves were part of the proletariat" is counter-intuitive.

LBird, I don't think your views on the "scientific method" make much sense. First of all, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and 19th century positivism are not the only methodological views available, although they usually recieve most of the attention (on Wikipedia as well as in textbooks). Also, I don't think they can be summarily interpreted as different "scientific methods". While positivism (both 19th and 20th century) and Popper deal directly with the question of method (i.e. with the procedures of obtaining reliable and well-justified knowledge), Kuhn, for example, is interested in how scientific progress takes place and leaves the question of any "general" scientific method open at best (and shifts the focus to paradigms and extra-scientific "sociological" factors in progress instead).

On Lakatos, first of all, the "hard core" consists not simply of ideological and ethical beliefs, but of theoretical statements in general (in the example you've quoted, for instance, the three laws of motion are mentioned – these are neither "ethical" nor "ideological", they are general laws). Second, on your misinterpretation of Lakatos' "sophisticated falsificationism" scientific progress would not be possible, as the "hard core" in a discipline etc. would never change. But that's not Lakatos' view. A Lakatosian research programme can be either progressive or degenerating. If a certain RP can not plausibly account for new facts, make surprising predictions etc. or it faces unresolved conceptual problems, it degenerates and has to be replaced with a new one. Let's say we look at a certain theory of classes as a scientific programme. If it can't be reconciled with empirical evidence or it is unable to resolve theoretical contradictions, then it is degenerating and we should look for alternatives. If the "hard core" could not save Ptolemaic astronomy, then it certainly won't save a theory of classes.

I'm sorry, but it seems like you're only throwing around stuff you've read on Wikipedia to impress people.

Well, I think at this point I've had a good run for my money, and we'll just have to agree to disagree. Thanks for the debate. I think the only real resolution to our comradely disagreement is how our differing notions of 'class' are used by workers to try to understand and change the world. My definition has the political advantage of simplicity, I think, but that in itself doesn't make it correct. Let's face it, if the only measure workers use when choosing concepts to help themselves fight is 'simplicity', we're all doomed. But if simplicity can be combined with usefulness, perhaps it is a good quality.

Cheers!

You are right, of course, that motion is not an ethical category; I chose the words 'ethical' and 'ideological' in the context of a political , not a physics, debate, because I thought they might be useful words to help someone who I thought had no knowledge of Lakatos' theories. I'm well aware that, at first glance, Lakatos' views are very strange as they contradict the 'common sense' view of science, which is that it consists of disinterested scientists producing objective knowledge. I was trying to capture the fact that theory always precedes practice, and often the theory can be contradicted by empirical evidence and yet it is the 'evidence' that is rejected, not the theory. It seems useful, given Lakatos' views, which I accept, to ask questions of the centrol core of belief, both in science and politics. The main point to make, however, is that we all have beliefs, Communists, Anarchists and capitalists, which precede evidence. In many ways, what constitutes 'evidence' is pre-determined by the theory. Hence Einstein's statement, 'it is the theory that determines what one can observe'. If this is true for physics, it's likely to be true for politics.

The hard core did save Ptolemaic astronomy, for those who believed in Ptolemaic geo-centric astronomy. Most of us just don't use that hard core anymore. We tend to use Copernicus' helio-centric astronomy - that's because it's more useful to us, not because it's 'objectively true'. There are historical class reasons for this shift.

It's a shame you've stooped to abuse. It would be better if you outline the method you're using to understand the political world, as a Communist, because that's what this discussion is really about, not whether individuals are being boastful or not.

For what it's worth, I've got Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' on my bookshelf, photocopies of Popper's ideas both on the searchlight theory of mind and his immense anti-communist views, and I've been reading secondary sources on all the above thinkers, and having discussions with other workers, for about 20 odd years. I still don't really think I understand any of it fully, hence my friendly discussion with Nate. I'm sorry if you think this is all about impressing people.

Perhaps I'll drop it now. I'm obviously giving the wrong impression. I just hope it's been worth it for some readers.

Sure, but holding on to a theory in the face of many falsifications or conceptual problems amounts – for Lakatos, at least – to participating in a degenerating research programme, i.e. a pseudoscience. Are you saying that as communists we should stick to certain beliefs no matter what? I don't think Marx and the majority of people who take science seriously would agree with such view, for example.

And if we can't agree on some common ground – e.g. what would constitute evidence for disproval of a given theory of class, what criteria such a theory should meet etc. – then obviously no discussion is possible, so why bother at all? It seems to me you invoked the "hard core" because you are not willing to engage critically with your own views or confront them with some of the arguments Nate raised.

OK, but now you're trying to use Lakatos' theory against its very purposes. Lakatos attempted at a synthesis of a (perfected) falsificationism with the anti-cumulativism of Kuhn, while trying to avoid the kind of relativism (associated with Kuhn or the "strong programme" of the sociology of scientific knowledge) you are pursuing here.

I am not saying there weren't any social forces that kept Ptolemaic astronomy in place or forces that led to the shift to a different kind of astronomy, but Lakatos certainly wouldn't agree that the shift to heliocentrism (which only took place long after Copernicus) was due to "pragmatic" reasons only (i.e. how "useful" a theory is). Ptolemaic astronomy ran into terrible conceptual problems when trying to incorporate new observations and took the degenerating path. There were rational reasons for it to be replaced.

It was you who accused people of using an "outdated" "scientific method". BTW, I don't think bringing philosophy of science in can be of any use to a discussion on classes.

Well, I'll leave it to others to judge. Perhaps if anyone does think this has been a useful discussion and now thinks that there are links between the philosophy of science and class analysis, they could make a short post in acknowledgement.

Waits.....

[tumbleweeds pass; night follows day...]

Well, I've been hoisted on my own democratic petard, haven't I?

Yep, and likewise.

Honestly I don't think anything except historical matters hang in the balance here, since legal slavery is basically abolished. I found it clarifying to talk this stuff out though.