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. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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