How many 'classes'?

Given that:

1. Nobody on here who holds a 2 class analysis argues or thinks this

and

2. You know this perfectly well.

Why on Earth would you say this? Seriously?

Yea, Leninism was in the interest of teachers and local government officials, and not in the interest of Russian capital. That's a GREAT analysis.

It's utterly ridiculous, and basically, reactionary. It just divides up the class as a whole (that is, everyone who has work imposed upon them by the social relation of capital). Why on Earth is it useful to play along with capitals game and divide up the class on grounds of income/status/some wanky abstract view of power? Sure, it's useful to have a view of the middle class insofar as it clearly 'exists' as something created by capital; but only to the extent it's useful to look at race - something class society has created that divides up the class. In terms of class in regards to revolutionary theory, and the class of the proletariat. The proletariat is only important as the class who can bring communism; as the most powerful class. Not as the 'most oppressed' class. I mean ffs, if we viewed class as something based on who was 'oppressed' or who holds 'status' or 'power', we might as well become Maoists and claim "Oh there's no working class in the first world, because the third world is so oppressed."

Whether you're 'middle class' or not, you're still alienated by capitalist social relations, still have the product of your labour appropriated away from you, and still have the same fundamental shared interest in the project of transcending capital.

And so did anarchism. Does that make anarchism a movement that 'came out of a middle class interest'?

Indeed. And no one would claim they were middle class either, hence why the three class model only serves to obscure the situation further.

This can drop into really dull sociological drivel trying to ascertain who or what is working class, middle class, a capitalist, etc, and miss the point of class entirely. So I'll try to steer it away from that...

Class is an illumination, a struggle concept, not a box into which you put people (the ones you like and yourself in 'working class', the ones you don't like into 'petty bourgeois', and the ones you hate who have a lot of money into 'capitalist'.)

Capital and labor are not classes, they are specific social relations that give rise to classes, and labor in so far as it is labor merely reproducing capital is therefore capital and not proletariat. The proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing, is not a class, is merely the mass of inividuals exploited by capital. It is not exploitation that makes a class, but the struggle to abolish it, to abolish ourselves as wage-labor. The proletariat is only formed as labor's aspect antagonistic to capital, against it, seeking its own abolition, organizing itself.

Capital is as much the conditions under which a specific kind of labor is formed and alienated as it is a group of people or means of production or money. All these things only become capital or capitalists in so far as they extract value in the form of waged-labor via the production of commodities, and as such, while I do think that the state becomes the capitalist class, the presence of a coherent capitalist class is unnecessary as long as the state performs the functions of a capitalist class, the primary task being separating the producers from the means of production, so that they have to sell their labor power and work for a wage.

In between are all kinds of elements that mediate the relationship, that form because capital and labor as social relations do not merely confront each other directly in some epic and obvious conflict, but through a wide range of mediations: law, religion, art, science, family, medicine, management, politics, state programs, and so on. These mediating elements, massive in this society, combine with the small property owning elements to costitute the middle classes, who are not a coherent class in any sense, but an unstable mix of elements that are proletarianized at one moment, elevate out at another, that produce new layers, etc.

But these elements are not formed on some independent basis of capital and labor. They are not a third class in the sense of struggles and will either form a coherent class of petty bourgeois and thereby act as adjunct army to capital or they will join the proletariat, regardless of their sociological status. There is no independent direction for these 'clases', they can only go to one pole or another, and their assertion of independence is always the assertion of capital's power, aka fascism, national liberation guerillas, terrorists, etc.

I will say though that in so far as these elements are the professional mediators and petty exploiters, the intellectuals, the priests, the cops, the politicians, the trade union officials, the doctors, the lawyers, the uni profs, they are more attached to capital in practice and while they can be more radical in thought when it doesn't count, they are never the elements that break first in practice and are always the source of regression in a struggle. They're the ones who can be 'radical lawyers', 'radical doctors', who can see in their profession a form of radical activity, when in fact it is only in the abolition of that shit, of labor, that there is any communist element. So I sure as shit don't trust anyone who wants to pretend that there are no middle classes, that cops are workers, etc. You tell me that cops or low-level managers and supervisors or small shop owners are workers, I won't ever attend an organizing meeting with you because you are stupid enough to allow a police agent into our mists in the name of 'class solidarity'.

chris

Not bizarre at all. I've seen it on autonomist Marxist and other boards that we should organize cops, treat them as fellow workers, etc.

Maybe it was too pre-emptive, but "once bitten, twice shy", ya know?

chris

Dunno what it's like in the US, but over here some workplaces have almost as many supervisors as they do low level staff - being made team leader or whatever often means dealing with more stress for a couple % pay rise etc.- and a lot of people end up on 'management grades' but barely manage any people - it means they just don't get paid overtime. I don't think that automatically excludes them from being workers - especially "supervisors" who earn just over minimum wage - very much depends on the individual and the content of the job, not the job title. Otherwise we're falling into exactly the pattern that modern top-heavy management theory imposes on us - ever finer gradations between workers all the time to break down any form of solidarity.

Same as "small business owners" includes a lot of people in the UK who are self-employed because the companies they work for won't pay sick pay, holiday, national insurance contributions etc. etc. - I've been "self-employed" part time at one workplace for about three years (not for much longer) and it's meant very precarious (whoops) working conditions for that whole period.

Asking how many classes is a bit like asking 'how long is a piece of string?'. You can subdivide society as many ways as you like. But for revolutionaries the important thing is the struggle of the dispossessed against the ruling class.

Here's something the worker-theoretician McCormick wrote on class a few years back:

Capitalist society is divided into two basic classes. The class which owns and controls the means of production, distribution, communication, etc. is usually referred to as the ruling class, bourgeoisie or boss class. The class which, without access to the means stated above, is forced to sell its labour power to the boss class in return for a wage, is the working class or proletariat.

The so called 'middle class' has the role of functionaries and mediators of capitalism (eg low level bureaucrats, social workers, teachers, academics, etc.) and it becomes split in times of crisis and moves either towards the bourgeoisie or proletariat. Most of the so-called middle class is simply a more 'privileged' section of the latter. On a world scale there are also peasants and subsistence farmers. They are potential allies of the proletarian revolution as they suffer the ravages of capitalism similarly.

We consider the working class to be not just those engaged in wage labour but also the unemployed, housewives/husbands, prisoners, OAPs, etc. We believe that the working class is the only class in this society whose real interests lie in the destruction of capitalism and the creation of a free, communist society. Ours is the only class capable of carrying out such a fundamental social transformation. Our class has nothing to lose exept its illusions that it has something to lose!

Do we actually have to have this debate again? Not being funny here but I'm sure it must put people off if this argument is constantly on the boards.

Especially since

was the only useful thing said on the entire thread

Yeah, me too.

I can't vote in this poll, since if you call them "ruling," it kind of infers that the bosses have a categorically different, external relation to capital. I.e. they're pulling the strings & the working class are somehow 'subjected' or trapped inside.

Whereas as any fule kno, capital is a social relation, comprising both the working class & the bosses.

The bosses' status as the "ruling class" is something which is being constantly & simultaneously consolidated, contested & reworked within the social relation that is capital.

For what it's worth, I'd hold to a 2-class analysis. However, I think problems arise from the mantra-like repitition of "It's class." There's certainly space for an analytics of the function of managers, teachers, social workers, psychiatrists & so on. But we need to get past that tired shit about "Are members of profession x working class or middle class?" and the desperate desire to work out if managers, teachers & so on are "good guys" or "bad guys." (I'm thinking Anarch here).

As the wise baldy (not me ) once said, "People usually know what they're doing. Most of the time, they also know why they do what they do. What interests me is what what they are doing does." (Or something like that).

Specifics of the new 'flattened hierarchy' model of corporations, of course lots of workers get put into 'supervisor' positions to make them ineligible for overtime and other benefits, just like they do with 'self-employed', ie TEMP workers. I'm not primarily concerned with that. Rather, my point is that the role of actually managing people, of being a professional mediator of capital, of being a really petty proprietor (actually owning a shop, actually being a landlord) tends to place these people into an intermediate or middle position, and for me it plays out very clearly in attitudes, and simple everyday conversation.

However, in fact, I will again assert that my concern is not primarily with constituted classes, but with the proletariat as a product of class struggle, of something formed in struggle, not as a mere sociological category. As such, it is mostly meaningless to have discussions of whether or not someone should have such and such a consciousness and class analysis is not designed to tell us why Jack or You or I or Lazy or whoever holds such and such ideas, acts like a twat, etc. We can describe certain actions as having a certain class content or character, but going from actions to their content is a very different thing from taking someone's "ontological" class status as your starting point to explain their behaviour.

Chris

You think? Look again, 3-class boy.

Hi

The only back up a model requires is its utility. What problems does class analysis solve? I'd suggest that the point of class theory is to develop organisational practice and test economic systems.

Overall, I'd recommend a hybrid model that is both 2 and 3 class depending on what your trying to acheive. A bit like electron wave/particle duality.

Love

LR

(edited typo)

Eh, fuck cops, strike or no strike. The only advantage is the fuckers aren't out on the streets, but then people get pissed because the other criminals and thugs still are. I hope their job is shit. The shittier the better. strike breakers. Demonstration beaters. Professional enemies of our class.

As for 'using' class analysis, this comes back to my last point. Do you want to be able to predict behaviour based on someone's sociological class? If so, why? It doesn't do very much, tho it is damn convenient for people who are trying to figure out who to recruit: Ok, I have my list of potential recruits, and i have to sort them by working class, middle class, and bourgeois.

A. works as a clerk in a shoe store, not a manager

B. is an independent contractor in the IT department for an insurance company

C. student, her mom and dad own the corner store that call the blacks and Latinos in the neighborhood racist names, but they're dirt poor too only making it by employing their 4 children

D. is atrust fund baby who inherited millions, but wants to donate lots of money and use it to overthrow capital

E. welds steel on highrise construction projects, makes twice as much as the IT contractor, owns more stock than the small business owners ever will and has more savings than anyone but the trust fund baby

F. assembly line worker at Ford, hates 'dot heads' and 'spics', beats hs wife, loves the union, goes to every meeting, hates the union leaders

Now I sort them according to their sociological class...

Or I can take mass aggregates and numerically derive an 'analysis', just like all bourgeois 'science', putting quantitative measure and static numbers over qualitity and activity. I can turn the working class into a passive object which accords to my definition.

OR

I can work through the point of communism, of the content of communism, I can look at the total social activity and qualitative relations of this society, grapple with how human beings produce and reproduce themselves, their ideas, their species being, and I can grasp the classes as bundles of common activity, as ways of doing ('doing' here meaning their total social practice of physical, mental, emotional activity.)

From that point of view, i can make a comment regarding a certain kind of activity being proletarian, petty bourgeois or bourgeois. However, class is asymmetrical. Since capital has an objective ontological status, while labor is that which constantly disappears from sight into commodities, ie bits of capital, capitalists in this society really exist and so does their class. they appear as real and everyone appears as a little capitalist, as a wannabe capitalist. That's why the pretence of everyone bein middle class, of being a petite bourgeois is a logical outcome of capital. the working class only exists as an identity, like gay or black or man or woman, as something which can be marketed to (pickup trucks, NASCAR and beer for the 'working class') or as something one does not want to be. Now if one does not want to be a worker, but neither do you want to be a petty bourgeois (also really existing, a small property owners, as supervisors of labor, as managers of money, etc) then you must be a renegade, a rebel, a savage, against civilization, a barbarian at the gates, a communist or anarchist. Or maybe saying 'I'm a proletarian' is another way of saying 'I'm a communist', but not so clear.

the proletariat, as a class, only really exists when it is challenging capital's very existence, when it is rioting against capital, when it is striking against capital, when it is negating capital and its state. And how do we know this? Is it because of the sociological background of the people doing it? what happens when the workers are striking to keep out blacks? or women? Or beating people up to support George W. Bush?

No, we know it because we can relate the activity to communism, because communism is active within our struggles for liberation or it is not and then what is active is the reinforcement of the existing social relations. Either communism is our starting point (again, not as a society, but as the active negation of all alienated, miserable, inhuman, debased social relations) or capital is. from the latter way, we have no way forward and are back at defining classes sociologically. My way, what I think is Marx's way and in fact part of a whole tradition within communist thought, is a way of talking about communism as present in what we do, in our collective activity.

So the whole 2 class or 3 class thing is a load of poop, ass gel, colon butter, organic waste material. That is bourgeois sociological class, not revolutionary class. and that notion of class tells us not a damn thing except, at best, in numerical terms just how fucking miserable this world is. But you can't quantify alienation, you can't quantify inhumanity, nor can you quantify dignity or respect.

All i can tell you, and this is the extent of the credence of the poop side, is that the labor side of the capital-labor relation is revolutionary (class with radical chains and all that), has the possibility to overthrow not merely capital, but all class society, to usher in a truly human society without classes (not without interpersonal conflict, stupidity, disease, or body odor, however), and that the majority of humanity today is increasingly in the labor side of the relation, have been pulled into it in their daily practice of labor. I can also tell you that the core of people whose labor it is to control that mass of labor are not smaller than before, but larger, while the number of rural agriculturalists outside of the capital-labor relation has dwindled to almost nothing (so most 'peasants' are today on the labor side of th caiptal-labor relation, although 120 years ago, this was not the case.)

i can also tell you that the side of labor in the U.S. is incredibly petty bourgeois right now in their activity, but that some element of their practical activity in life comes up against that and will at some point create ruptures because the antagonism of capital and labor always overrides its unity in the end. Whether or not that leads to the abolition of capital is far less certain.

So i will make an argument to dump the sociological class bullshit and look at class as an illumination of the formation of classes as activities, as active relations between people, mediated by things, some created by people, some not.)

k, that's too much.

Chris