Date: Thu, 06 Mar 1997 00:52:14 +0000
From: Nick Holden & Kate Ahrens <glengate-AT-foobar.co.uk>
Subject: M-G: Re: M-I: RE: Middle Class


James Hillier was beating himself up for being 'middle class':
> 
> Just so that you do not start to think I am being pompous, let me tell you
> that as a state school teacher of modern languages, this category applies to
> me every bit as much as it does to the vast majority of the British left.

It struck me that this position tends to support the idea that people can have "false consciousness" in many 
different ways. Many workers believe they are 'middle class' in some way, and think that this is a good thing.

It seems evident to me that we have to explain to them that they are mistaken, that their interests are class 
interests, and that in class terms they are workers, not bosses.

But James Hillier believes he is 'middle class', and feels immensely guilty about it. Engels owned factories, 
however, and it didnt stop him being a communist. I think we are on safe ground to assume that James, as a 
school teacher, does not own factories, or employ others to work for him. It seems fairly safe therefore to say 
that he is proletarian and not bourgeois. He is certainly not "petty bourgeois", a term he now interchanges 
with middle class:

> OK, then, substitute petty bourgeois whenever I use middle class as an
> adjective, and petty bourgeoisie when I use it as a noun. I tend to use middle
> class instead because the Trotskyist left here call everyone petty bourgeois,
> everyone that is who they haven't already called Stalinist. I was using the

But Jim, you are consistently posting messages calling a large section of workers "middle class", or, now, 
petty bourgeois. I would hope that Trotskyists, and all Marxists would use the term petty bourgeois in the 
sense it is intended for - to pick out a particular group of people: shop keepers and the like, who do not work 
for a member of the bourgeoisie, but work for themselves.

You seem to be happy calling teachers petty bourgeois, however. I do not see how this could fit into a 
Marxist definition of petty bourgeois. Teachers are not self-employed, they do not control their own working 
conditions. They just don't get dirty at work. But that is not, and has never been, the defining principle of 
proletarian culture.

> I was referring to the privileged layers of salaried
> employees who experience decidedly UNproletarian conditions (though they face
> a constant process of partial erosion of this privilege, or if you prefer the
> threat of proletarianisation) from which the left draw so many of its members.

Unproletarian conditions? I think you are in danger of romanticising the working class.

> There is a real distinction to be made, because it is a real distinction in
> life, between the privileged layers and the mass of the proletariat, the
> working class proper. You can call it the labour aristocracy - though this is
> not quite right in many cases because whatever else they do, these people do
> not labour. You could call t intermediate strata. I am not at all sure what
> the correct term is in a rigorous scientific sense.

The correct term, where correctly applied is declasse, that is, without class. For example students are 
declasse, because their relations with the rest of society are not on the basis of class forces and class 
relations. They do not work, yet they do not own the means of production either.

But you cannot apply that to well paid workers. They are just that, well paid workers. It may be more difficult 
to persuade them of socialism. It may even be more difficult to mould them into a proletarian party, because of 
their experiences and expectations from capitalism. But to classify them as anything other than working class 
is making an even bigger mistake.

 But when people try to
> wriggle out of a real, debilitating problem that the left faces - that it is
> not organised in the poorest, most oppressed, and most disadvantaged layers of
> the working class - then my blood boils. When I am told by an SWPer that
> teachers are the working class in the same way that street sweepers or factory
> workers are,  know they are just telling themselves gentle fairy stories to
> make them feel better. The working class needs many things, but it doesn't
> need this kind of whistling in the dark.

Teachers are not working class "in the same way" as street sweepers. But then two street sweepers may well be 
working class "in different ways": one may own their own home, the other rent. One may be a self-employed 
subcontractor (technically petty bourgeois, but there's been so much privatisation going on that people have 
been forced into this state, and that, for me, means it is not self-controlled) while the other may be part of 
a large workforce. Every worker is different, and requires relating to on their own individual basis. But their 
class interests are, at root, the same.

> In short, Carrol, I think the left must be proletarian or it is nothing at all
> at the end of the day. The likes of the SWP are content to remain
> unproletarian in composition, so long as they can out forward some kind of
> theoretical argument to brush the whole problem under the carpet.
> So what is left for the non-proletarian Marxist? Continual self-abuse for being 'too middle class', or an 
attempt to go to the working class and embed your organisations among the class?

Thing is, the main reason why so-called middle class lefties don't do the latter is not because they are 
middle class; it is because they have neither confidence in nor respect for the 'less well off' or less well 
educated sections of the class. Thus when working class people vote Tory, the intellectuals dismiss them as 
'middle class', when they vote Labour, the intellectuals dismiss them as being 'conned' or whatever.

Jim believes his organisation must have a proletarian outlook.

But not so proletarian that seeing Labour defeat the Tories (which the vast majority of 'proletarians' want to 
happen) at the next election becomes an important question.

Nick



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