Date: Wed, 4 Mar 1998 18:51:11 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Who is Working-Class?


Very briefly (more later) --

Broad proletariat is anyone belonging to the one of the three great classes
of modern society (proletarians, capitalists and landowners) whose members
only have the sale of their labour power to live on. The capitalists own
the means of production and live off the profits they get from exploiting
labour power in production by paying less to the providers of labour than
the value of the labour they impart to the products the capitalist has
complete control over. Landowners own the land and extract a portion of
surplus value from the rest of society in the shape of rent, and they can
do this partly because they have a monopoly on the land, and partly because
the capitalists let them get away with it and in fact in a lot of cases
have fused with them.

So that definition of proletariat includes everyone without means of
production or land of their own to make a living off. This is good because
it definitely includes those unable to support themselves by their labour
in the general class definition. A problem arises with those who solve
their predicament by doing unproductive work for the class enemy, in which
we might include some kinds of crime. Marx and Engels called this group
servants and lumpen proletarians.

A narrower definition, and the one about which there is most discussion
(and we've had it several times here on the lists), is the classic
Bolshevik definition that the proletariat consists of producers of surplus
value.

This is narrowed even  more if the class is defined as those with the most
effective political and industrial clout, the workers in big manufacturing
industry.

So, the problems are basically to what extent are knowledge workers etc
productive of surplus value, to what extent are carers, teachers and others
in the public sector productive of surplus value and to what extent are
so-called service workers productive of surplus value.

There are some powerful clues in Capital, where Engels speaks up for the
exploited clerical workers, regardless of the fact that their work is not
productive of surplus value but merely consumes surplus value produced
elsewhere.

The classical spot for the Marxist definition is in Theories of Surplus
Value I, in the section on Adam Smith and productive and unproductive
labour, although there are also passages in Capital I along the same lines.

Marx's view is that anyone whose labour time is organized by a capitalist
and whose labour can be quantified and the product of whose labour can be
sold as a commodity, regardless of whether it's material, durable or not,
is productive of surplus value. This means that person will be a member of
the working class.

Marx gives examples of teachers, cooks, literary hacks and others.

In my view most service workers (McDonalds etc) are workers in this sense,
and that's one of the reasons why it's so shortsighted to speak of the
disappearance of the working class in the USA etc.

The question of the status of workers in nationalized industries and in the
public sector centres on very contradictory features of a mode of
production that's outlived itself and is in a state of transition to
socialism behind everybody's back, so I'll come back to that one.

Teachers etc by the way are productive of the commodity labour power, and
we should never forget this. All the moralizing crap about education for
its own sake and so on is just a smoke screen helped by public sector
organization and the fact that the commodity labour power is capitalism's
best kept secret.

Given all the distortions of monopoly and market failure and non-capitalist
organization, and the worse distortions of the imbecilic confusion of
bourgeois economics and its categorization of labour, it's best to keep a
broad non-sectarian perspective on the question and see the working class
as those with concrete historical interests opposed to those of the
capitalists and landowners, and for organizational purposes to concentrate
on those with the most obvious interest and record in combating capitalism.


As I said, more later.

Cheers,

Hugh

PS Louis Proyect doesn't know shit about any of this, but he might try and
persuade his Wall Street comrade-in-arms Doug H to enter the trenches on
his behalf. We'll see.




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