Margaret Coleman wrote:
> jim devine makes some good points, just to add one more observation..... in
> many senses the strict, and abstract, marxian definition of class has been used
> in an exclusionary sense/ F'rinstance, since working class was defined by a
> person's relation to the means of production, and women were frequently in
> service jobs, they weren't considered working class by many dogmatists.
Of course in this context "means of production" were mere lumps of matter,
rather than a relation. And that makes more or less nonsense of anything that
follows. But I don't think that the main trouble was that they were dogmatists
but that they were fucking ignoramuses and quite wrong in their understanding
of both Marx and the world.
> Women,
> particularly women-of-color, could only be working class via their husband's
> relation to the means of production because women worked in service or pink
> collar jobs where the 'production' was not sold as a commodity.
Here again "means of production," "commodity," "job," etc. were understood
as things rather than as relations. Incidentally, I remember reading somewhere
that Gramsci (pre-prison but I don't know if he ever changed) thought the
wives of workers were petty producers because they controlled their own
work or some nonsense like that.
> This
> effectively promoted the oppression of women as a group within the working
> class community........... maggie coleman
Yes -- except that it might be better to reverse it: the oppression of women
within the working class community promoted really stupid ideas about what
the working class was/is.
I suspect that it is only under rather exceptional conditions that
"working class consciousness" arises. A strike is not really exceptional
enough, hence its power to generate consciousness is both limited and
short-lived. (The cause/effect langauge I've used in this post is itself
quite misleading and tends to reduce relations to things mechanically
bouncing off each other.)
Carrol
