Class

Class is ultimately about where your long term material interests lie. In what way does, say, a doctor or a teacher have more to lose from a communist revolution than a bricklayer or a tube driver?

Middle class is a pretty messy, ill-defined concept, IMO.

The working class is not those who must sell their labor capacities to employers. It is also necessary to add that they occupy a subordinate position, the use of their labor capacities are controlled by a managerial hierarchy. Apart from the investor class and the working class, there is a class that consists of those who have a relative monopolization over the conditions of power over social production. This includes managers and the top professionals, such as corporate lawyers who assist management, top engineers who design products and design jobs, architects who design workplaces and so on, finance officers who assist management, and the like. The prospects and power of this class are not derived from ownership or private appropriation of wealth, unlike the capitalists.

There is a fuzzy boundary line between this class and the working class because there are whole segments of skilled artisans or "professionals" whose situation is subject to proletarianization due to job redesign. E.g. in the USA there are capitalist education consultants selling school boards on how to implement more exact curriculum controls, controls over exactly what teachers do, taking away their craft autonomy.

This is important since the class of managers and top professionals became the ruling class in the so-called "Communist" countries, with the virtual elimination of private ownership of means of production.

Merely changing the ownership structure of a society is not sufficient to liberate the working class. It is also necessary to eliminate the class division between the class of managers and professionals and the working class. This would require very extensive education and skill development, and extensive redesign of jobs.

t.

I tend not to really believe that the middle class exist materially - I like to think that they are often just working class people with delusions of grandeur. Of course, though, managers and small business owners might be said to be 'really' middle class in that they have real power and privilege. And there are cultural definitions of class that will include 'professionals' like teachers and so on.

I suppose I don't really think that the professionals are separate from the working class in a material sense. It is messy and complicated.

But I certainly don't think that 'the middle classes' are the enemy in the way that it was implied in a couple of Direct Action articles recently.

Cheers,

Jon

I think both definitions of class can be useful in their own way, but its important to make a distinction between them as they mean completely different things.

working/capitalist class = the fundamental division of society. "Its class". Here we find the revolutionary potential.

sociological definition = cultural capital, life chances etc. Has more in common with gender and race than (the marxist idea of) class. You're probably best off being male, white and middle class than female, of an ethnic minority and working class. But you're still a worker and you're still oppressed.

Sociologists following Bourdieu argue that there really is a 'lower middle class', too (the 'petite bourgeoisie') who attempt to 'distinguish' themselves as belonging to a 'real' middle class through what's become known as 'expressive consumption' (think Changing Rooms, What Not to Wear, etc.). This argument has some obvious merits (many people are aspirational), but I'm not so sure that this petite bourgeoisie really exists; like you, I tend to see this as w.c. folks with delusions of grandeur.

Sure, the identification exists; but I was questioning the objective reality (gulp) of a petit bourgeois class which shares common material interests beyond hairstyles and scatter cushions.

Well no, small business owners generally aren't, but artisans (as much as they exist these days) obviously are.

Not at all - in fact, I'd argue that if it's not argued purely economically, then it misses the entire point of having a class analysis. Viewing society in terms of class isn't about siding with the working class because they are poor, or because the working class has some inherent value to it.

Anyone who moans about teachers or whoever not being working class is justg spouting shite identity politics. In the same way that just because blacks/gays/women are 'more oppressed' than whites/straights/men doesn't mean we give primary importance to these groups, just because a teacher might watch BBC2 instead of 1 and have a better chance of getting a mortgage than a labourer doesn't mean we'd side with a labourer as any more 'working class' than a teacher.

Sure, you recognise that such differences exist and work towards overcoming them, but to glorify the 'blue collar' working class is just a retreat to liberalism.

I've recently read an article by David Gilbert which makes an interesting distinction between exploitation and oppression. Exploitation is more about how much a capitalist makes from employing a person, and oppression is about the amount of restriction in a person's life. For example, high-tech employees are the most exploited, though they are hardly the most oppressed, while migrant workers are the most oppressed, thought definitely not the most exploited (at least in absolute terms).

I don't think "middle class" is ever a helpful term, but petit bourgeoisie, labor aristocracy, and professional-managerial class are. The first two might get confused about the fact that their long-term class interests lie with the capitalist class and the working class respectively. The third is a little more interesting and I do think there is merit in recognizing that the entire basis of the professional class is automation and deskilling for the working class.

I don't think we need to quibble over whether to count two or three fundamental classes. The task at hand is to destroy the basis of the professional-managerial class by attacking the separations of directly- from indirectly-value-adding tasks, and general from specialized knowledges, at the site of the labor process. Dissolving the professional-managerial class (ok and assaulting the color line) is the hard part. If that can happen, if we can recompose our class, capital won't stand a chance--the capitalists are a tiny class who have only maintained their social power by financially facilitating the primacy of professionals.

If we're intent on doing this we have to recognize that the professional-managerial class's various fantasies of autonomy from imperfectly rational capital are just watered-down versions of capital's desire to rid itself of workers. In this specific sense the middle class IS the enemy.

Hi Jack John etc.

Whether or not you think that middle class is useless to theories of revolution, do you think that it is appropriate to ignore it in everyday life?

If taken as similar to patricahy, I see that it could be acknowledged without it becoming identity politcs. Do you disagree?

oh come on there's a good bit to middle class cultural capital than that, being able to navigate educational establishments for a start.

I guess that its difficult to challenge this sort of thing; in a different way to poatriachy. But its not like you can just give the utopian solution that it'll just work itself out with everything else. So what answer is there?

Maybe just to organize against amangers, which would be symbolic and perhaps practical - who knows. What other solution is there, bar shutting oneself off and hoping that, like I say, it sorts itself out.