Students as workers

Well i know, i'm just responding to their being a thread bashing students for being middle class on libcom, where there really shouldn't e such a 'bad case of false consciouness'

I suppose addressing it on a concrete day to day level is a problem that most of the time could only be approached in practical action or in a long and probably slightly circular debate in which you try and point out who the actual ruling class are.

Exactly. If I was revol, I'd say that when it comes to "middle class," it's a question of "tarrying with the negative" as far that concept's concerned.

What I mean is, "middle class" appears to have some kind of explanatory power*, and be a marker of certain things about status, relative wealth, lifestyle, etc. This things need addressing in a more nuanced way than simply saying, "ah but you're working class really."

* In the Mausian rather than Durkheimian sense of "social fact" in that it informs and organises seemingly quite distinct practices and institutions.

Yeah, I think I'd go for option 1, ta.

(And let the answer to option 2 emerge through engagement in option 1 )

Some people earn more than others, thats capitalism. I have a better standard of living than 90% of the population of romania, again, its shit but its capitalism.
Sorry if i sound like i'm whinging here, i just tend to lose it a bit with how rubbish and counter-productive three class stuff is. I'll shut up now.

I'm sure there was none, what's your point? What's your definition of working class?

those without property income on which they can live, and without the power to hire & fire

Lawyers, GPs, surgeons, Stock-brokers, university professors?

Plus not all managers have the power to hire and fire, but still exercise co-ercive power over workers in a way that seems the same day to day - don't see why it's the crucial thing to put them in a different bracket. (Though I can see why from the Wobblies POV it's a useful demarcation point.) And it's ambiguous. e.g. (not to bring up the whole debate again, but...) in the SSP, the MPs don't have hire or fire power. That's held by an elected committee of party members. So are the members of that committee not working class, whereas the MPs are?

FWIW, I'm all about a generalised political programme of prioritising solidarity with relatively poor people with jobs, especially if they're fighting industrial battles. But that's a different set of people from what is generally meant by 'working class', I think.

insofar as they work for a wage, don't draw property income or hire and fire, yeah those would represent the wealthiest outliers of the working class. that said, my definition only alluded to alienation - some of the above may well have control over the content and meaning of their work more akin to a self-employed person i.e. petit-bourgeois (although in turn, many self-employed people are essentially proletarian).

i mean if frank lampard on £100,000 a week doesn't put any of that money into capital investments or you could say he represents an anomalously high-paid worker. but nobody's claiming that every working class person is in exactly the same material situation, or that capital's attacks on different sections of the class are uniform and that all working class people are potential revolutionaries while all bourgeois people are immanently counter-revolutionary.

sure just like disciplinary/surveillance powers are often decentered to low-paid proles, i know someone on £6/hr with firing powers etc. i mean if you try and demarcate 'human' from 'animal' using all sorts of measures, number of chromosomes, self-consciousness, you name it, you come up against anomalies, outliers, overlapping sets; but it doesn't mean we can't speak of 'human' and 'animal' as meaningful signifiers.

well i've been quoting this a lot lately, but ...

(although dauvé's rhetorical definition would exclude all those with something to lose, which would exclude those who enjoy certain amounts of authority or particularly high material rewards such as stock-brokers and managers withot formal firing powers etc).

on another point which may or may not relate much to you, focussing on the poor rather than the dispossessed seems to be the classic leftist trap of substituting materialism for moralism; communism is not an act of mercy or charity, but the negation of the social order which separates us from the products and meaning of our labour.

I reckon this makes nonsense of the definition. Stock-brokers, working class?!? Can't we do better than this?

And this isn't even including the fact that (e.g.) most Americans get property income in the form of shares... though I guess you said it had to be enough to live on, so maybe you don't fall foul of that problem. But then there's the question of what's 'enough' and what people 'need', etc.

Wouldn't you agree with me (and Marx) that capitalists also experience alienation though? And I guess that you're accepting that the definition you're offering doesn't have alot of usefulness in terms of describing a historical agency? Then, what's the usefulness of defining it in terms of alienation anyway? Sure alienation's bad, but (even if capitalists didn't it experience it), that's a moral point. And lots of other things are worse than alienation, so unclear why it should be singled out.

I think that picking out 'the content and the meaning of their work' hits on an interesting point though. Are you adding it to your definition or not?

Alienation can be a historically relevant fact - e.g. Mai #68, SDS - but it's fairly rare, and again, not clear why it should be singled out.

Yeah... but it's not about exactly - Frank Lampard and someone working the TESCO checkout aren't even roughly in a similar material situation. Not even close. They have close to nothing relevant in common. As you imply, the owner of the small shop who has to spend alot of time on the till has more in common with the person in the TESCO.

No, not exactly, but there should be some fairly strong correlation, which is to do with the aspects of the definition. If it's muddying your definition, wouldn't you be better adding an income limiter on the top end of working class, and then importing the miniest petty-bourgeois into your 'working class' - wouldn't that make it historically (hence politically) more useful? (Random example: small shopkeepers can be expected to be allies in campaigns for higher wages for the people living round them.)

So by your own definition they're not working class? What is your definition of working class for? Or maybe I'm missing what you're saying here - perhaps you're modifying your definition.

I actually reckon you can rigidly demarcate humans from all other animals fairly easily. e.g. by genetic disposition has X number of chromosones and, and opposable thumbs, and has a visible sclera/ Or this was true of their forebears within three generations, etc. But I take the point. Anyway.

I don't want a definition that makes every individually unambiguously and without tension a member of one class or another. But I want it to be roughly sensible. I want the signifiers to be as reasonable as possible, as close as we can get to defining a historically significant group.

In that sentence, Dauve is most obviously criticising the exclusion of some workers from the 'proletarian condition' based on the physicality of their work, or their location in traditional blue-collar industries. I totally accept that there can be a white collar working class. But this isn't something I've disputed.

EDIT: I haven't read any Dauve. But the exclusion from the proletariat of those who have 'something to lose' (from a transition to communism) doesn't sound very useful. Most of us have somethingto lose. And anyway, without alot of utopian speculation, it'd be hard to work out who that covered until after the social revolution anyway.

(Incidentally, I may be prepared to accept someone defining the 'working class' in some way on an international level, and the implication of that being that only 20% or so of the British population or so is 'working class'. But then all sorts of difficult problems come up about whether the British section of the class is capable of autonomous political action, Maoist rubbish, etc.)

I'm assuming that the phrase in bold is the wrong way round. I am all about substituting materialism for moralism. Indeed, I think your definition avoids both materialism and moralism. It's just weird. Why should I care about a unit that includes David Beckham as well as me? 'Materialism' (in Marx's sense, which it sounds like is the one you're using) isn't just any material fact. If it were, then 'works while sitting down' would be a perfectly materialist way to distinguish members of a class. It's a mode of analysis that looks at change: at historical circumstance, and historical change. And your definition has nothing to say about that - not at this moment (and thus not in the fullest material sense), anyway.

Also, what is important about being dispossesed (of capital, I assume)?

And there's nothing wrong with relative/absolute poverty being part of the definition a class. It shapes experiences and incentives, so it's perfectly valid for it to be part of a definition. Of course it can't be all of a definition, but that's not what anyone's suggesting.

yeah exactly, which is why i cited him as an extreme outlier to warn against using individual exceptions supposedly falsify a group, but you weren't doing that apparently ...

so why doesn't a lack of property income (i.e. material alienation) cut it as the simplest possible definition? after all, the worldwide ratio of stockbrokers and doctors to office admins, checkout assistants, call centre workers, sweatshop workers etc is pretty one-sided ...

(are you sure *most* americans have a stock portfolio?)

ok, sorry... didn't realise that.

Firstly, beause it doesn't deal with the real confrontation between managers and non-managers which is a universal and important feature of what people call class struggle. Second, the ratios world-wide are one sided, but that's not the case in Britain (especially once mid-way points like engineers of various types and minor public servants are taken into account). And then you've got the following problem: what % of the British population are meanigfully (i.e. historically) working class, and what implications does that have for their opportunity for autonomous class-based action, until the class is intenationally united?* Thirdly, the objective isn't (and I didn't say it was) the simplest possible definition, it's the most accurate one. You can keep on adding qualifiers for a good while for all I care, as long as it turns out the best possible workable definition, from the point of view of historical analysis. I'm accepting that it's never going to be perfect, and I'm fine with that. But it seems to me that while you're letting in the vast majority of the international financial elite, you can probably do with being a little more specific!

EDIT: took out fourth point. It was ok, but a bit shaky.

Not all of those are great, but between them I think there're good enough reasons to reject the most simplistic view. You also might exclude e.g. couriers who own their bikes, hauliers who own their lorries - who're technically self employed, who own their own tools of work, but who share all the fundamental features, and sometimes more, of those of whom this isn't true.

* Obviously if you can deal with that problem, that's fine, but I think a number of sacred cows might have to be slaughtered in the process.

No. OK. But it's not too far off.

Yeah I'm starting to realise that this is the way people are reacting to what I'm saying.
I'm not bashing students. I used to be a student myself, and I hated it when some inverted snob arsehole would wave their working classness around instead of engaging with you like an individual. I'm just maintaining a basic ability to recoginise real class distinctions, and not dissolve all of society into one big working class melting pot of wishful thinking.

I mean Eyal Rozenberg says

Well thats kind of my general point isnt it?

(Cantdo, I'll tell you what I think the middle classes are in a wee while.)

yep, oops, typing into a minimised browser whilst looking over my shoulder at work

yeah i agree, our lives for starters. i meant to include a link (the quote's in part 1). i think it's exaggeration-for-effect, rhetoric. anyway ...

fair call, in fact something thats come up before is it's more an issue of who manages the deployment of capital rather than simply who owns it (which comfortably excludes stockbrokers and the like, i was being a bit slack earlier cos i agreed with this point when it came up before), which again, like 'how much power' is going to call for a somewhat arbitrary cut-off as to what constitutes 'management' that's going to fall down at an individual level where all sorts of contradictory class positions will abound at the margins.

i'm pretty sure the ratio's still pretty emphatic, i mean 600 people work where i do, and there's maybe 30-60 (at a push) managers/directors in total i.e. 5-10%. there's more including 'team leaders', but in terms of management authority/wage/self-identity they're very much of the shop floor. i mean even if my workplace is a paragon of toyotist flat hierarchy, it's pretty unbalanced. i'm not sure why you'd include an engineer, any more than myself (a data analyst who just writes spreadsheets/database queries all day), or the blue collar (literally, actually ) skilled machine operators whose skills more specialised than mine. i mean there are hierarchies of knowledge all over the place (not just white collar vis blue collar), i don't know that makes a lot of difference.

accurate for what though? classifying people? i mean it's only meant to say that in aggregate the interests of the first group (the dispossessed) are opposed to those in the second group (those who own/manage the deployment of capital), and that the former group can exist without the latter but not vice versa. i mean you're right, self-employed people are often closer to the former in practice but the latter on this definition; i suppose this contradiction is located in their close personal exposure to the market which makes their practical experience closer to that of those workers in the labour market than a manager in a large firm, for example.

(note: throughout i'm avoiding the productivist definition of 'those who produce surplus value', because that either leads to a small group of 'real' workers, excluding housework, the unemployed etc or Negri-esque flights of fantasy saying everyone's 'productive', Fortunati's the worst at this, claiming a baby's smile is productive! )

Ok, I thought I'd been pretty clear about this, but just so theres no more misunderstanding - I am talking (I thought we were all talking) about how to class students as a group, ie as students.

What i'm saying is that they are not a coherent group in terms of their class.
I am not saying that a student cannot be working class. I'm saying its stupid to class students as a group as working class, because the class composition of students is mixed.

( And I've added my personal view that I think the best way to estimate this class composition is in terms of the kind of jobs they're likely to end up in in the long term. And I've said from the beginning that many of these will be working class.)

Right, after making me spell it out that fucking simply, anybody who keeps misinterpreting it is definitely either wilfully obtuse or seriously thick.

Do the other 46% not work at all, or just not necessarily in steady, documented jobs? Also, do those who don't work, among Brittish students, do so because they can afford the living expenses of an independent adult, or because they still live with their parents (and thus have much reduced expenses, plus their non-working status is somewhat more similar to that of children)?

Can you read?

The first time you appeared to misunderstand what I was saying I could put it down as genuine, but to pretend you still can't understand after I've spelled it out so painfully simply is just embarrassing.
Happens a lot on the internet I've noticed. A really miserable way to negate any chance of a real conversation.
Annoying, but not my problem.

If everyone can be GP/stockbroker under the confines of capitalism. Then what's the point in communism?

Yeah, but wasn’t the context in which this got raised you proffering a definition of working class solely founded on the extraction of surplus value, and which has got more to do with take home wages than the form or content of the work? I also suspect that an increasing number of companies aren’t structured so much like yours. I have no time to find data.

Accurate for the purposes of historical explanation, as I’ve already intimated. If a group of people can usefully be designated as a class in explaining what happens, that’s enough. What is the significance of one group being bale to exist without the other but not vice versa? What importance does this have in class analysis? And what does it even mean anyway – surely if all the working class disappeared, the managaers wouldn’t cease to exist, they’d just demote some of their body to be workers in a smaller industrial base. But it sounds like broadly you’re taking my earlier points.

And what do you mean by ‘interests’? There are three obvious types of interest. One, the ones we feel, the ones that motivate us. Two, the objective interests we have in consequence of us being human – the ‘interest’ (some would deny it really is such) that everyone has in communism, for example. Three, the felt interests that a class would have, were it to be entirely ‘demystified’. This is ‘class interest’. (It can’t be the interests that everyone would have if they were entirely demystified, because then it would just be the same as the second type.) But it should be apparent that to use the third type of interest in defining class begs the question, by needing to assume that the class is defined before the interest is defined. Dialectics provides no answer to this, real experience and movement needs to define a class first. And you can't use the second one, because then the class would be by definition concious all the time. And the first is only useful from an idealist POV.

This last para might have shaky logic – I’ll have to come back to it, because I can't find anything wrong with it in the 2 minutes I've got to post before I get kicked out of this cafe. But there it is for now.

I don’t see how you can say I’m failing to engage ‘with the issue of class itself’ when you’ve still not provided a definition of what you mean by ‘working class’ (and, by extension, in a two class model, what you mean by ‘bourgeoisie’), and what you want from a class analysis! (And no one else has, either; and not – at least in Joseph K.’s case – for want of trying!)

I’m certainly not responding to a post-modernist discourse – not that I’m aware of anyway. Am I responding to a bourgeois discourse? Hard to say, since you haven’t defined ‘bourgeois’. But I think you should flesh out what you mean by that. Are you just saying that professed non-communists are more concerned with ‘de-alignment’ than professed communists? That’s true, but it’s a question of who’s right.

What do you mean when you say class is the defining factor in our lives? What about class is it that is defining for us? (I’m not saying I disagree with this bit, I just think it’s really unclear what you mean.) What is the issue of class itself? Can you incorporate it into a definition of actually existing classes?

By the way, on a tangent, like I say, I may not understand postmodernism properly, but isn’t it an epistemological, not an ontological matter? (i.e. it’s to do with what’s knowable, not what is; scepticism about the accessibility of truth, “meta-narratives”, not facts in the world.) It’s not the same as crude, liberal subjectivist relativism, which says that many claims (e.g. about value) do not even have real referents, aren’t even candidates for being true.

The fundamental questions (still unanswered emphatically on this thread, despite being asked a few times) for anyone with a class analysis are as follows:
1) What are your definitions of the classes in your model – e.g. working class, bourgeoisie, etc? (And if there are only two, why on earth would you want there to only be two?)
2) What is your class analysis for? i.e. What does it explain, justify or describe, and why is that important?

I can at least give an answer to the second: In order to facilitate analysis in the spirit of historical materialism, by linking the experiences, pressures and activity thrust upon people by the structure of society to their tendencies to take historically significant action. Contingent upon this, and secondary in importance, to encourage ground a discourse useful for the creation of a socialistic identity among members of a class, or classes, to which I am well disposed. The former is important in order to have a plausible political strategy, apposite to the moment in which we act. The latter is important because common culture and meaning amongst a group aids their organisation and identification, and hence their political efficacy.

As for my answer to the first… it’s more complicated, because I’m not going for a two class model, and there’d be a need to have a look at a lot of data. Also, because the structure of society is changing very rapidly at the moment, it’s hard to make clear calls (and for self-conscious class identities to be formed.)

[I also think you’re being harsh on Cardinal Tourettes, what he’s saying does make sense.]

I have two further points on the topic of class which I’m going to make so as to have them out there. I’m less sure about these, better Marx geeks than I can correct if I’m wrong.

Marx assumed that working class would be forged during a period of high and growing unemployment. Why would a class, perhaps the majority of which would not be working, be nominated as such? Simply because Marx believed that members of the class would cycle relatively evenly in and out of employment. Membership of the ‘reserve army of labour’ would, broadly speaking, be experienced by all working class people. Thus, there would be no division of experience of interest between the employed and the unemployed, thus they would be the same class.

But, in practice, we know this isn’t the case. Unemployment typically becomes highly concentrated. Sections of society (often geographical, cultural) become ‘residualised’. Social mobility between the ‘under class’ and working class is very low – not only for individuals, but across generations of families. As patterns of expectation, and access to contacts and resources drains away from sections of society. So, given this finding (material, in the best sense), do we have to re-evaluate Marx’s assumption? What implications does this have?

Here’s the second thing I’m going to raise. It isn’t right to make an argument like this:
a. Come the social revolution, the revolutionary force will roughly be a set of people described by definition X.
b. Definition X describes a class at the moment of social revolution [according to my characterisation, above, of what a class analysis is for – historical analysis].
c. [False implication] Definition X therefore describes a class at this moment.

This is the danger in trying to make class a matter of ‘essential contradictions’, or somesuch. The question isn’t so much ‘which are the most essential contradictions?’, it is: which have historical force, now? So ‘wage labourers’ or ‘those who have their surplus value extracted’ may well describe the members of a class at some point in the future, but may not now. Obviously, if contradictions are sharpening fast, then it makes sense, on a polemical and analytical level, to stress the coming form of class tensions. But this isn’t the case now, so it doesn’t. I hope that makes sense.

nope;

so nothing as narrow as surplus-value production, i deliberately opted for a negative definition, which i subsequently modified as it was inadequate. but anyhow, surplus value has everything to do with the form of the work (wage labour) and little to do with the take home pay per se.

me neither, but the current tendency seems to be towards flatter management structures ...

everything, we, as producers (though not as proletariat), can exist without a class expropriating part of our labour, therein lies the possibility of rupture, of communism, the dialectic isn't closed....

got a meeting now, i'll try and respond more later

Pardon my ignorance but how does debt fit into all this? If you are up to your neck in it what your background or income is might almost be irrelevant.

antifaanarcho, well not really. a boss up to his neck in debt has to squeeze more out of his workers, a worker up to their neck in debt was to work more hours etc. which obviously doesn't tell us what 'bosses' and 'workers' are, so getting back to posi ...

i mean that in general we want more money for less work, and bosses want more work for less money, basically (plagiarising John. here ), this often expresses itself at an individual level, but when workers recognise this commonality it gets labelled 'class conciousness.' this has roots in our everyday experience, we are always being asked to do more work for no raise, and when we are strong we demand a raise, or less work/hours for no cut etc.

Interesting statistic. What's your source?

I'd have thought it somewhat higher.

Yeah, I've not met many students who didn't have some form of job.