Date: Tue, 16 Apr 1996 15:34:16 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Group or individual -Reply -Reply



Lisa wants to reduce class struggle to conflicts of interest between
individuals. If there are enough individuals similarly situated whose
interests conflict with others similarly situated, you have classa nd
class struggle.

I don't think this will do. The "similarly situated" is covering up the
structural aspect of class. What makes an individual a bourgeois or a
proletarian, withou those specific interests, is her relations to others
in the context of a system of production. Proletarians own their own labor
power and no means of production and so must work for the bourgeois, who
own the means of production. So regarded, individuals are, as Marx put
it, Traeger, bearers of class relations and interests. No one has the
interests of a proletarian or is a member of that class outside the
network of social relations. 

There is a further question that Lisa alludes to, of class identification.
Class struggle notoriously depends on consciousness of and identificationw
ith proletarian interests in opposition to bourgeois ones. Mere similar
situation in the network does not guarantee that one has the corresponding
consciousness, as Marx remarks in The Class Struggles in France,
explaining why the French peasants are a group, "like potatos in a sack
of potatos" and not a class (for itself, as he puts it elsewhere, in The
Poverty of Philosophy). 

I think rational choice theory has a lot more to tell us about why class
consciousness is hard to develop than it does about why classes exist and
struggle. (Insofar as class struggle is a zero sum game inw hich what one
wins the other loses, it may have a lot to tell us about _how_ classes
struggle.) RCT also has little to offer in the way of explanation about
why class consciousness _does_ develop. This is something even Elster now
admits, and another RCT Marxist, Przeworski, attributes the development to
class consciousness to conscious party leadership,a t least in part,
rathera  Leninist position, although I don't know whether P say it as such.

Could the existence and development of classes be amenable to RCT
explanation in austerely individualistic terms? We'd have to see a story.
There's Brenner's account of how bourgois class relations developed out of
feudal ones in the context of the specific conditions of late feudal
England as opposed to France (say), but this is is only
semi-individualistic, since it starts with people in one set of class
relations and circumstances and then uses RCT to explain how they move to
a different one. So I would say that so far, we have no good RCT account
of how classes develop de novo or why they exist, rather than perhaps of
the circumstances in which one set gives way to another. 

--Justin

On Tue, 16 Apr 1996, Lisa Rogers wrote:

> Leo:
> > I would take a different posture, following
> > Poulantzas, that for a Marxist class struggle is central.
> 
> Adam:
> Yes, but why do classes exist ?
> Why do they struggle against each other ?
> 
> Lisa:  These are all interesting, and I think related to my interest
> in foragers.  The obvious difference is that if there is a non-class
> society, foragers are it.  But...
> 
> I think that classes struggle against each other because there are
> conflicts of interest between _people_.  If they have similar
> interests, opposed to those of some others, under some specific
> circumstances they may be called "classes".  This is only one aspect
> of conflict/cooperation that in various forms are found among all
> social animals.  
> 
> Cooperation [or apparent cooperation, which can occur by several
> different mechanisms, as abstracted by game theory] is generally a
> result of people trying to serve their mutual interests.  
> 
> This is one way to look at a class - it has conflicts [of interest]
> within it; at the same time it has common interests, which it may
> unite to pursue, against the interests of members of another class. 
> So, class struggle can be seen as one of the forms or social outcomes
> of a situation in which there are both conflicts and commonalities of
> interests, and people sort themselves into various groupings as each
> one sees one's _own_ interests.
> 
> I guess this is an example of how I try to 'get inside' 'sociality',
> to see how things work in terms of various people each doing
> something 'individual'.  Pretty far from 'sociality' as a
> metaphysical given or previously evolved 'thing in itself', I know,
> but there you go.
> 
> This is not incompatible with Marx as I've seen him so far, IMHO,
> FWIW.
> 
> Lisa
> 
> 
> 
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