Students as workers

No but just because they don't overlap perfectly with current qualified doctors or lawyers does not mean they can be easily lumped in with other students. Anyway I was more talking about the experiance of the sons and daughters of lawyers, doctors and architects.

Some students go because their degree will be necessary for a specific career or field: Architecture, medicine MBAs etc etc
some just get a degree because it is generally puts you a step ahead going for jobs. Others go even though they don't really need a degree because they'll be sorted out anyway.
This is a gross simplification but there is a basic stratification within student life and while they may not have the status of someone in their future career they do often have the same mindset (you try working in an elite law library and you'll see what I mean)

jef hits the nail on the head and even better gives me an excuse to slag off wanker law students, fuck i hate them, especially the "cool" ones who want to keep some edge and so do it with politics and human rights, tossers!

HAHA yeah, with a music degree.

'Tard.

true, it will take whatever posh cunt ejaculated into your mother to bail you out.

Mr Welfare-State.

Well they could if you abstracted from reality to imagine everybody havin the same possibilities, which obviously isn't the case.
But that is actually missing the point, which is not whether any one individual might or might not end up ruling class, but that while a large proportion of students will end up working class, a large proportion will not.

Obviously you are also making the point that you disagree with people's class being characterised in terms of where they are going in society. Personally I think understanding where people are going, or even just trying to go, in terms of their class (and other things), provides a more strategic vision of their real possibilities.

If you think that Jef's "I didn't stop being a worker for a day when I went on a health and safety course" is a good analogy, what can I say?
Obviously a fairly large proportion of students weren't working class when they started their course, and a good few who were won't be after they've finished it. How they managed to be working class in the intervening period I don't know.

Tbh i probably agree with this, although my views on it aren't particularly clear. I did say that the number of students ending up in working class jobs was not only "a lot" but was "increasing".
I'm open to the possibility that my "definition" of the worker has something of the naive realist about it. (On the other hand, at least I can still tell workers from students )

I've got to go now cos its Valentines day and the missus is champing at the bit. So on that bombshell...

In my current situation I'm technically more working class than many people on here, what with not owning any property whatsoever.

yeah, the rest of us are all property tycoons with wide stock portfolio's.

I bet you own a Thesaurus renting company anyway.

Yeah did you get that idea off Saint Marx's collaborator?

And no, but perhaps I could start an anarchist related one, featuring such words as 'contumacious' and 'jacquerie'.

Oh yeah, and my predilection is not for Byron but the anarchist Percy Bysshe Shelley.

lol jacquerie, are we still in the 18th century squire?

19th century? Vide Marx.

I was talking about the use of jacquerie, a phrase much bandied about in the 18th century in light of the french revolution, though it's roots are in the 14th century frencg peasantrys revolt during the Hundred years War against tax rises.

Well, I don't know how things are in the UK, but in Israel about 20% of the population gets at least a B.A. or a B.Sc. degree in something, so generalizations about the 'non-working-class' students seem out of place. As for whether they are from the higher or lower strata, the higher you go up the wage scale the higher the student percentage is of course. There's also the ethnic mix - the more oppressed ethnic groups form less of the student body than their percentage in the population (not the Russian immigrants, though).

Anyway, the large majority of students live quite an exemplary working-class life. (Illustrations based on what I know about the Technion in Haifa:) Their 'bubble' consists at best of lower-cost student dorms and relatively inexpensive cafetrias (sp?); but to balance that they can usually only get shit jobs (at least until their studies are almost over), and sometimes even the 'bubble' mini-mart overcharges them compared to stores outside campus (this happens where I study), and many of the dorm rooms are rather hellish (the older dorm section is nicknamed 'Ghaza heights'). The differences for the richer kids are basically that they can rent a decent apartment (or live with their parents if they're from around), maybe they have a car (which they can't bring into Campus most of the time), and most importantly, they don't have to work their ass off to finance their studies. Does that put them in a different social class? Well, not with respect to relations of production over the course of their lives in general, no... but it's certainly a world of difference in what your student life is like.

Finally, like some people have observed, you have to distinguish the Palestinian girl from the conservative family in a Galilee village who studies Education and will likely become a teacher, earning a very modest wage, from the hotshot lawyer's son who's getting an M. BA. and making inroads into the corporate elite by forming useful personal connections.

Precisely.

For instance, it depends on what uni you go to. If it is Oxbridge then you can do any degree and probably still go into a highly paid job, unless the job is very specialised.

There are those who want to use their Philosophy degree as proof that they can jump through hoops to impress someone who is going to give them a fat paycheck. There are also those who did a Philosophy degree merely to learn and don't necessarily go onto earn mega bucks.

What large proportion would that be? Of all the people i knew at uni pretty much all of them are either still in education or have pretty average jobs. The only exceptoion would be one or two liberal party types, but thats about one or two out of hundreds of people i can think of.
Admittedly i went to essex, which is hardly the most reputable of establishments, but even so, its not like a 'large proportion' of students become members of the ruling class.

They, like the rest of us probably aren't going anywhere. Bt if you were going to judge things on where people wanted to go under capitalism, then you'd be lost, because most of us with the exception of some whinging idealist anarchist ascetics would want to be powerful and loaded.

You could start by telling me what this supposed huge gaping chasm is between me doing an nvq in care-work or a work related training course of some description, a nurse doing a degree in occupational therapy and another student doing a BA so they can teach.

Again with this fairly large proportion business, be more specific.

You must have some pretty magical powers then Because when i ordered coffee in town earlier i couldn't tell if the person serving me was a student or a worker.
No but seriously, its not realist its just naive to think students have somehow evaded proletarianisation.

These were the basic arguments we put forward for defining the students' movement in France last spring as a proletarian movement. It tends to reinforce those who are emphasising the changes in the situation of students today compared to that of the 1960s :

"The movement’s proletarian nature
1) The current mobilisation of students in France is already one of the major episodes in the class struggle in this country in the last fifteen years. It is at least as important as the struggles of autumn 1995 against the reform of the Social Security system and as the one in the public sector in Spring 2003 on the issue of pensions. This affirmation may seem paradoxical, since it is not wage earners that are mobilising today (except for those participating in a certain number of days of action and demonstrations on February 7th, March 7th, March 18th and March 28th) but a sector of society that has not yet entered the field of work, young people in further education. However, this in no way puts into question the profoundly proletarian nature of this movement. This is for the following reasons:

in recent decades, changes in the capitalist economy have led to a growing demand for a more skilled and qualified workforce and a large proportion of university students (which includes the University Institutes of Technology responsible for providing relatively short training courses for future “technicians”, in reality qualified workers) will, when they finish their studies, rejoin the ranks of the working class (this is no longer confined to classic industrial blue collar workers but also includes office workers and middle management employees in private industry as well as nurses, the vast majority of teachers in primary and secondary education and others in the public sector);
at the same time, the social origins of students have also changed significantly, with a considerable increase in the number of students coming from the working class (in line with the above criteria), leading in turn to more and more students (about 50%) having to work in order to study or at least to achieve a minimum independence from their families;
the main demand of the students is the withdrawal of an economic attack (the new law, “Contrat de Première Embauche”, CPE) that affects the whole working class and not just today's students (i.e. tomorrow’s workers) or existing young wage earners, because the presence in the workplace of a workforce living under the Damoclean sword of immediate and unmotivated redundancy during first two years of employment can only bring pressure on other workers.
The proletarian nature of the movement has been evident from the start when most of the general assemblies withdrew exclusively “student demands” (like the demand to withdraw the LMD, the European system of diplomas that was recently imposed in France and penalises certain students) from their list of demands. This decision corresponded to a desire expressed from the outset by the great majority of students, not just to seek solidarity from the whole working class (the term “wage earners” was generally the one used in the general assemblies) but also for it to join the struggle.

The general assemblies are the heart of the movement
2) The profoundly proletarian character of the movement is also demonstrated in the forms of struggle adopted, notably the sovereign general assemblies which express a real life that has nothing to do with the caricatures of general assemblies so often called by the unions. There was clearly a great heterogeneity among the various universities at this level. Some assemblies were still very similar in many ways to union assemblies, while others were the living centre of an intense process of reflection, with a high degree of involvement and maturity on the part of the participants".

http://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students

I guess cantdocartwheels didn't care how much Margaret Thatcher slashed education funding and funding for research, since it was just money for the dirty bourgeoisie or soon-to-be bourgeoisie.

You fucking what?! Jesus, get a clue and go back and actually read what i wrote rather than randomly clutching at straws, because i argued the exact opposite of that.

To be fair to james Woolley it's not like you can look up your post in a thesaurus.

Using a thesaurus is well bourgeois. Its just taking a good honest working class dictionary and giving it a fancy french name.

at Alan for being properly middle class!

Since Alan accepted that his original proffered definition of working class was unworkable, there has been little attempt to offer a replacement. Revol inists IIRC, that it must be 'a subjectivity'. Alf suggests that proletarian movements are defined by their adoption of certain organisational form and programmatic content in action - implying (?) that all those who take part in proletarian movements are proletarian.

But neither of these definitions are complete or uncontroversial, and the huge number of tensions set out in the brief discussion above signals that there's not much hope for a coherent definition.

In my 'umble opinion: 'the working class' at the moment is a close to useless analytical term - and anyway has little subjective/rhetorical value, i.e. as a pole around which identities of struggle can form, outside the left-wing millieu.

For decades, academic sociological analysts of class have discarded models of class which attempt to divide western societies into 2, 2 or even 4 classes - I seem to remember that Erik Olin Wright's had 15 or so. It's time for serious socialist and communist politicos to wake up, and smell the post-fordist decaff.

When Marx was definining class, whichever of several different definitions he was using, his common objective was to describe a real historical movement - i.e. a set of people who would tend to act in a number of historically significant ways. The reason that members of the set were included was that the set therefore became useful shorthand.

Class is not principally a technical, an economic, a moral, or a cultural category, it is a historical one.

Marx also realised that common tendencies to action were founded in common experience, and common activity. In Britain today, experience and activity is widely differentiated. Hence, tendencies to action are widely divergent. Hence, there are very many classes - considered, that is, from a historical point of view. And boundaries between them are blurry. It has been affirmed at one time on these boards that up to 90% of people in this country are 'working class'. From any historical point of view, this is nonsense; there is no sense in which 90% of people are members, or potential members, of a common movement.

It has also sometimes been argued that class, 'as a system of individual classification' is useless. If it cannot classify individuals, then it cannot classify anyone, and cannot classify anything useful, socially, at all. That is not to say that class needs to be capable of offering an unambiguous definition of each person, with coin sorter-type reliability. But it needs to be able to say: in these ways, to these extents, but not in these others, this person is a member of the class in question. Perhaps this was implied by the point, I can't remember, but I don't think it was.

The important thing about the working class, in Marx's argument, was its participation in the struggle for communism. If students (or rather, if some particular set of students, under some circumstances) tend to take part in movements of a socialist character, then that is enough, that is what is important. One semantic strategy is then to define them, or their movements, as 'working class' - ala Alf's post above. But this is a semantic strategy with more concern for the preservation of slogans than describing facts in an intuitively sensible way.

Identification with the status of 'working class' is patchily related to any sort of economic status or political tendency. When struggle breaks out, people find and create their own definitions and identities - as Ashwin Desai documents a case study of in We Are The Poors. There is a common assumption that it is the job of socialists to hold on to 'working class' as the name for the identity which people should define themselves by. This often makes them sound irrelevant, and quite possibly gets in the way of the continuous recreation of that identity in any sort of helpful way. Not that I'm not saying it's totally useless - it clearly isn't, and many valuable struggles are still carried out under that banner by people who earnestly identify with it.

Such is my current feeling, anyway.

academic sociological analysts also tend to pull a face like this : :? when you mention wage labour. at what point of my bosses' toyotist lean management program did i cease to be forced to sell myself to capital in order to live?

This thread is severely fucking embarassing, 30% of people go to uni, they are mostly working class. end of.

The idea of the 'middle class' is perhaps the biggest barrier to class struggle, leading tonnes of young people who have a degree, own some habitat furniture, or does a reasonably paid office job to think that therefore they aren't working class or that they are somehow 'priviliged', it absolutely disgusts me to hear the same leftist salt of the earth bollocks and whinging about sociological phantoms repeated on libcom of all places.

I agree with this. However, "middle class" is what a lot of working class people think they are. So how do you address this on a concrete day-to-day level? Tell them they've got a bad case of false consciousness?

57% identify as working class apparently

the problem is working class (as we use it) and 'middle class' as commonly used aren't even of the same genus

While three class models are a load of shite, it's pretty fucking clear that some sections of the class are priviliged over others, there's a lot of milage in the idea of cultural capital.