Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 16:03:04 +0700 From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (jones-bhandari) Subject: Re: Working class and marginal groups Jon posted the following: >So what about a more general debate (invoking and describing analyses >garnered from Negri, Castell or whomever) about the relation between the >working class and "marginal groups" and how either are to be defined? I would also like for this debate to be opened up. He is busy trying to launch the information age. Below I comment on my understanding of the working class and the existence of marginal groups within the capitalist system. Aren't marginal groups part of the working class? Drawing from Carchedi, I don't understand the working class as only those workers who produce surplus value. Non-productive sectors tendentially realize the average rate of profit (though deducting from the mass of surplus value); and if they are to do so, wages in these sectors must be homologated to those of workers in the productive sector. The priviliges of the so-called intellectual worker are illusory. These latter workers are oppressed (as opposed to exploited as they are not directly producing surplus value) in that if capitalists in unproductive sectors are to receive the average rate of profit they must endeavor only to pay workers there the value of their labor-power--no more and no less. So once the conception of the working class is so broadened, it follows that it has not so dwindled that it cannot be the agent of change. The law of value still governs the life of oppressed workers. They must sell a commodity (labor-power) in order to receive the Money necessary to purchase those commodities necessary to reproduce themselves. C-M-C. And their one commodity will only be purchased if its use will enable a firm to tendentially realize the average rate of profit. I would like to offer a few comments on marginal groups and new social movements that apparently lie outside proletarian politics. First, I have been attempting to argue that much oppression of so-called marginal groups is understandable only in the context of Marx's theory of accumulation and crisis. This is obvious in the case of the neo-Malthusian persecution of many "marginal" groups (Marx used different concepts of course). This is obvious in the inability of the capitalist system to provide a safety net for many people just as its stagantion turns the relative decline in the demand for labor into an absolute one. But this was all argued (quite beautifully I thought) by Juan Inigo in his posts on the general law of accumulation (Hey Juan, where did you go?) Now there are other sorts of arguments involved here. About a decade ago in New German Critique Moishe Postone attempted to understand anti-semitism in terms of the epistemological catergories of the dialectic of abstract and concrete labor. For example, he explored that tenet of fascist mythology which glorified the industrial entrpreneur (concrete) and demonized a financial conspiracy (abstract). I thought that this was very interesting, though I think that I remain partial to Franz Neumann's classic thesis (and explanation of the said tenet of fascist mythology) that anti-Semitism was the logical result of a reactionary Proudhonism peculiar to the small businessmen who experienced economic crisis in the form of the restriction of credit--which was then perceived to be the result of a Zionist conspiracy. That is, Neumann pointed to epistemological weaknesses inherent in the position of the petty bourgeoisie. This was (I believe) a brilliant marxist analysis of the persecution of a so-called marginal group. Finally, I would like to say something about the family. As I have been saying over and over, I think that it would be a good idea to look at Schumpeter's chapter Decomposition in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. There he blames the decline of capitalism on the erosion of the bourgeois family. For him Kinder, Kuche and Kirche was the implied solution to increase the savings rate. Patriarchy finds its justification here in a very economistic (and hopeless) attempt to shore up the status quo. He opens up a side to the importance of family values other than the family as a site of unpaid labor and the reproduction of labor power. >From Schumpeter"...we need only recall tha the family and the family home used to be mainspring of the typically bourgeois kind of profit....Consciously or unconsciously (economists) analyzed the behavior of the man whose views and motives are shaped by such a home and who means to work and to save primarily for wife and CHILDREN...He loses the only sort of romance and heroism that is left in the unromnatic and unheroic civilization of capitalism--the heroism of navigare necesse est, vivere no necesse est [seafaring is necessary, living is not necessary]. And he loses the capitalist ethics that enjoins the working for the future irrespective of whether or not one is going to harvest the crop...." The rest of this paragraph is very interesting, and has informed the work of George Gilder, Steven Schlossstein and other influential ruling class ideologues on the importance of bourgeois patriarchal family values, which leave little room for feminists, gays, and lesbians. I do not think that "marginal" forms of oppression (racism, patriarchy, anti-Semitism) or new social movements have thrown Marxism into any sort of crisis as a theory and critique of the capitalist system, class interests and bourgeois ideologues. At any rate, the problems are quite simple. In 1839 Constatin Pecqueur wrote; "One fact is certain, general....It is the silent but very decisive struggle of the wokers against their masters with a view to forcing the captains of industry to raise their wages...How can one not see that to leave [the wage earners] dependent on the insufficiency of a fluctuating wage is to wish to find oneself surrounded in times of crisis and general unemployment by a famished multitude, to create riot and civil war, and perhaps to arm new Spartans..." Quoted in Henryk Grossmann, Journal of Political Economy, vol LI, no 6 (December 1943). jb ------------------
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