File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-06.201, message 77


Date: 06 Mar 97 01:54:01 EST
From: Chris Burford <100423.2040-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-I: Re: Middle Class


I am unsubbing for about a fortnight, but I did not want to 
lose this very important theme. I will scan the archives on my
return so I hope anyone who feels like criticising or commenting
will do so in order to take the debate forward.

Regards to most,

Chris Burford


__________________________________________________


This is my line of demarcation with Will, for whose other positions
I have a lot of support:


From: wdrb-AT-siva.bris.ac.uk
Date: Mon, 03 Mar 1997 14:10:25 GMT
Subject: RE: M-I: RE: Middle Class

Can I say that I wholly agree with Jim
when he says the following:

<<<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 inmany 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. 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.>>>>

Will Brown	Bristol

________________________________


I say this, while agreeing with a lot of what Will has written in 
the past, and what Jim has written now. There are very significant
differences in the way people think in different types of employment
and linked to their own evaluation of themselves.

It is even more invidious to praise on this list than to criticise,
and I do not want to set them up, because they are entitled to 
make mistakes as any other subscriber, but the two contributors
who stand our for me in virtually every single post they send, for
their good sense, realism, lack of pretensiousness, lack of sectarianism, 
fundamental democracy, and practicality, are Will and Jon F. I don't 
want to imply that these are some wonderful personal qualities - I think
there are a large number of subscribers who are quite decent and 
democratic people - nor do I want to suggest an idealised view of 
the working class, nor do I want to imply it is a question of 
mechanical determinism. Ultimately I assume it is connected with the
fact they they have been working for a long time in what I understand
in the skilled manual working class. They rub shoulders everyday 
with others in that position. They participate in a collective 
consciousness related to that type of class position.

It may be invidious and patronising to name individuals but it is
more important that we grasp this question both concretely and 
theoretically. And if these class differences exist they exist on 
this list too, and they are better discussed openly than in 
personalised slanging matches.

Where I disagree with Will is I would say the large stratum of society 
that is called and calls itself "middle class" is quite different from
the "middle class" of the early 19th century, which was undoubtedly 
the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, still finding a place between
the proletariat, and the landed aristocracy.  Perhaps Will would accept 
this so far, but I would go on to say that the 
middle class are really working class too. To my surprise therefore
as I am very unsympathetic to anything that smacks of entrism to 
the Labour Party, I agree with some of the points in the post that 
has just come in from Neil.

Yes, "middle class" is a loose phrase, and is used on these lists
only as a loose phase. But what other terminology should we use?
Some contemporary marxist debate has analysed in depth the role
of the intelligentsia as being different from the working class.
I regard analysis of the intelligentsia as extremely important but
on reflection and reading the debates here over two years I do not
think the term can be stretched to the great majority of people 
who form the "middle classes" in contemporary capitalism.

True the m-c have probably had higher education, but their claims to 
culture depend heavily on what they learned in that limited period 
of higher education, and what they can remember. 
They are *almost* as vulnerable to the fluctuations of the job market, 
and to processes of the intensification of labour - more insecurity, 
more demands for higher output and efficiency savings.

Now by narrow interpretations of marxism, you cannot be a worker unless
you produce surplus value, by creating a commodity for the employer.
I think this approach is too narrow and not the only reading of Marx,
(who never had time to write his magnum opus on class). 
Jim gives the example of a teacher of foreign languages. Now I would
suggest a) that it is pedantic to say in *concrete* reality that
a teacher is only a proletarian if employed by a capitalist, and 
if employed by a state-funded organisation, is not a worker.
The conditions of work equilibrate through the common job market,
and anyway with increased 
pressure for accountability, state run enterprises can exploit
just as much if not more in terms of intensification of labour.
I am sure Jim knows that experience in contemporary "Britain".

The theoretical argument quite compatible with marxism is that 
the total surplus value of society is partly redistributed through
taxes and a teacher employed by the state is fulfilling a role 
necessary for the reproduction of that capitalist society.
To be more specific about language teachers - even in England with
its contemptible neglect of serious foreign language teaching, 
nowadays it is essential for the competitive survival of 
British capitalism that there is foreign language teaching.

The wide expansion of the service sector, does not fit in neatly
with the simplest models of marxism but seems to me to be in no 
way incompatible. It is true that a worker in an office will think
themselves a cut above a coal miner, even if they occasionally
get their hands dirty when the toner spills out of the photocopier,
but services can be turned into commodities and modern capitalist
society needs a large number of services.

Furthermore with relatively good basic education and access to 
an unbelievable variety of media, the culture to which the majority
of the population have access is completely interchangeable.
The children of a successful "middle class" parent can drop out
and become a lumpen or manual worker. Indeed the funding arrangements
for higher education often require students to get jobs like this.

I fully agree with the thrust of Will's contributions that 
"middle class" people do not think and behave like "working class 
people". They are poor on solidarity except when exceptionally moved
by compassion. They are brought up from birth to distinguish 
themselves from others, to find little tokens of gesture or phrase
to signal their superiority to others, and to strive competitively 
for their own self interest and that of their children. 

I am therefore leaning to the view that these strata should be 
called "bourgeoisified workers" to use a dry and technical term. 

We should be prepared to discuss the political, economic and
ideological differences between different strata of the working class,
especially how the bourgeoisie uses them to perpetuate its rule.

One of the mechansisms is the two party system, that elevates 
subjective class consciousness over objective class solidarity 
and splits the working class into two fundamentally different camps
with different material interests. 

I think the ideological differences
that Will has from time to time referred to are very important but 
I think this contradiction should be seen as contradiction that
marxists would wish to see handled non-antagonistically. Will 
may not disagree with this last point, but perhaps we need much 
more concrete discussion about how we would do that concretely.

To take the bloodiest example in front of us - but at least there
is some energy behind it: when Jerry returns to the list, assuming
he chooses to do so, and is wise enough to  compromise with the
views of the moderators, whether he agrees with them or not, I would
much prefer that he does not pursue any further a personalised 
campaign which has been fully ventilated by now about whether 
Louis P is a snitch, but argues his surprising but perhaps arguable
claim that he, as an assistant professor, is actually a member of 
the working class and that Louis P has acted in a sectarian way
towards him. What I mean is without getting into a court of law
about crimes, there is an ideological dimension to this that would
be better stated clearly and discussed concretely and perhaps 
not very much by Jerry and by Louis. And iff academics feel 
that some list members have acted in a sectarian way towards them,
perhaps they will also wonder if they might be thought to
have acted in a sectarian way to non-academics. 

This is one of the most 
immediate class questions in the actual practice of this list:
is there not only a battle of ideas, but do the ideas reflect
to some extent different classes and strata? Yes, yes yes, even if not 
mechanically so. There are contradictions between the skilled 
manual working class, the lumpen proletariat, the white-collar
working class, the bourgeoisified working class, and the 
intelligentsia, on these lists.

We are talking about contradictions here, and there is no one
word or phrase that packages the question up neatly. But in comment 
to Will and Jim, I would totally agree that these questions are 
important. I would currently vote for an expression about 
bourgeoified workers, plus the intelligentsia. I would be
strongly in favour of

a) recognising the differences

b) aiming to handle the differences non-antagonistically

Chris Burford
London.



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