Re: British middle-class society invents a new way of reaching and maintaining equilibrium

[Jurriaan Bendien]

The reference I posted in regard to pedophilia was in fact a photo by Lewis
Carroll with a caption, but somehow the posted url didn't show that.

What I intended to say is that a narrow focus on pedophilia, or a hysteria
about it, is pharisaical insofar as the problem of adults effectively
treating other adults as if they are their children (who consequently do not
have adult rights) is a much more bigger problem, even if, as the word
pedophilia suggests, this is done with a self-perceived "loving" intention.

Because the neo-conservative interpretation of human society as a hierarchy
of parents governing over children (or a hierarchy of kinship systems) just
isn't very emancipatory at all. It is predicated on a denial of rights to
adults on the ground they are just children, whereas conferring these adult
rights is necessary for these adults, who are perceived correctly or wrongly
to be children, to emancipate themselves, assume their responsibilities, and
grow up.

For free term papers on Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan, see
http://www.brechtsthegoodpersonofszechwan.co.cx/

J.

Re: British middle-class society invents a new way of reaching and maintaining equilibrium

[joanna bujes]

Thank you Yoshie, I stand (happily) corrected.

Joanna

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

"Why this specific focus on pedophiles ? "

I believe the answer is, because of the astronomical recidivism rate.

Joanna


That's not empirically true (see below).  The truth is that
pedophiles in modern society -- unlike in the days of _The Tale of
Genji_ by Murasaki Shikibu -- are considered to be the lowest of the
low (in prisons, guards tacitly allow other prisoners to attack
pedophiles, sometimes resulting in extrajudicial executions -- for
instance, the recent case of John Geoghan), so a sensational focus on
pedophiles serves as a wedge issue to erode support for civil rights
and liberties.
*   Sex Offenders: Does Treatment Work?
by Eric Lotke
. . . How Much do Sex Offenders Reoffend?

Contrary to popular belief, convicted sex offenders have relatively
low rates of recidivism compared to other offenders. On average,
untreated sex offenders sentenced to prison have a recidivism rate of
18.5%. In comparison, recidivism rates range around 25% for drug
offenses and 30% for violent offenses. 6 Thus, people convicted of
sex crimes tend to reoffend less than people convicted of many other
types of crime. . . .
Does Treatment Reduce Recidivism?

A popular misconception is that nothing can cure a sex offender. This
myth can be traced largely to a paper published by Lita Furby in
1989. Furby's paper, however, focused on the lack of sophisticated,
reliable data with which to evaluate treatment regimes. It concluded
only that evidence of the effectiveness of psychological treatment
was inconclusive. Politicians and the mass media picked up this
judgment, often converting it to the claim: "Nothing Works!"
That conclusion, however, is against the general weight of the
evidence. Most research shows that sex offenders do indeed respond
positively to treatment. A comprehensive analysis by Margaret
Alexander of the Oshkosh Correctional Institution found far more
studies reporting positive results than otherwise 8 (see Figure 1).
Alexander found that recidivism rates after treatment drop to an
average of 10.9%. Thus, a picture has begun to emerge in which
treated sex offenders reoffend less than untreated sex offenders.
Many sex offenders appreciate the wrongness of their conduct and
intensely desire to reform themselves. Treatment helps them to
achieve this end (see Figure 2).
Moreover, treatment has become more effective as more attention has
been devoted to the problem. When Alexander classified the studies by
date, she found recidivism rates in recent surveys to be 8.4% (see
Figure 3).
The conclusion that treatment reduces recidivism can be refined
further by distinguishing between different kinds of sex offenders.
Treatment cuts the recidivism rate among exhibitionists and child
molesters by more than half, yet cuts recidivism among rapists by
just a few percent. Juveniles respond very positively to treatment,
indicating that treating sex offenders as soon as they are identified
can prevent an escalation of their pathology. The state of Vermont
reports offense rates after treatment as: 19% for rapists, 7% for
pedophiles, 3% for incest, and 3% for "hands-off" crimes such as
exhibitionism. 10. . .
(figures and footnotes omitted but available at
)   *
--
Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! 
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
,
, & 
* Student International Forum: 
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: 
* Al-Awda-Ohio: 
* Solidarity: 

Re: British middle-class society invents a new way of reaching and maintaining equilibrium

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

"Why this specific focus on pedophiles ? "

I believe the answer is, because of the astronomical recidivism rate.

Joanna
That's not empirically true (see below).  The truth is that
pedophiles in modern society -- unlike in the days of _The Tale of
Genji_ by Murasaki Shikibu -- are considered to be the lowest of the
low (in prisons, guards tacitly allow other prisoners to attack
pedophiles, sometimes resulting in extrajudicial executions -- for
instance, the recent case of John Geoghan), so a sensational focus on
pedophiles serves as a wedge issue to erode support for civil rights
and liberties.
*   Sex Offenders: Does Treatment Work?
by Eric Lotke
. . . How Much do Sex Offenders Reoffend?

Contrary to popular belief, convicted sex offenders have relatively
low rates of recidivism compared to other offenders. On average,
untreated sex offenders sentenced to prison have a recidivism rate of
18.5%. In comparison, recidivism rates range around 25% for drug
offenses and 30% for violent offenses. 6 Thus, people convicted of
sex crimes tend to reoffend less than people convicted of many other
types of crime. . . .
Does Treatment Reduce Recidivism?

A popular misconception is that nothing can cure a sex offender. This
myth can be traced largely to a paper published by Lita Furby in
1989. Furby's paper, however, focused on the lack of sophisticated,
reliable data with which to evaluate treatment regimes. It concluded
only that evidence of the effectiveness of psychological treatment
was inconclusive. Politicians and the mass media picked up this
judgment, often converting it to the claim: "Nothing Works!"
That conclusion, however, is against the general weight of the
evidence. Most research shows that sex offenders do indeed respond
positively to treatment. A comprehensive analysis by Margaret
Alexander of the Oshkosh Correctional Institution found far more
studies reporting positive results than otherwise 8 (see Figure 1).
Alexander found that recidivism rates after treatment drop to an
average of 10.9%. Thus, a picture has begun to emerge in which
treated sex offenders reoffend less than untreated sex offenders.
Many sex offenders appreciate the wrongness of their conduct and
intensely desire to reform themselves. Treatment helps them to
achieve this end (see Figure 2).
Moreover, treatment has become more effective as more attention has
been devoted to the problem. When Alexander classified the studies by
date, she found recidivism rates in recent surveys to be 8.4% (see
Figure 3).
The conclusion that treatment reduces recidivism can be refined
further by distinguishing between different kinds of sex offenders.
Treatment cuts the recidivism rate among exhibitionists and child
molesters by more than half, yet cuts recidivism among rapists by
just a few percent. Juveniles respond very positively to treatment,
indicating that treating sex offenders as soon as they are identified
can prevent an escalation of their pathology. The state of Vermont
reports offense rates after treatment as: 19% for rapists, 7% for
pedophiles, 3% for incest, and 3% for "hands-off" crimes such as
exhibitionism. 10. . .
(figures and footnotes omitted but available at
)   *
--
Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! 
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
,
, & 
* Student International Forum: 
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: 
* Al-Awda-Ohio: 
* Solidarity: 

Re: British middle-class society invents a new way of reaching andmaintaining equilibrium

[Jurriaan Bendien]

> That is standard wisdom, but I read somewhere recently that it was
> simply not true that pedophiles were "incurably so."  I can't cite my
> source, and hence can't give any indication of its validity.

I think you are correct. From a statistical point of view, we know that the
concept of pedophile describes an aggregate, and once we make a disaggregate
analysis of the pedophile experience, it turns out that the life-experiences
and inclinations of different sorts of paedophiles are quite different, and
generate different sorts of motivational patterns behind the sexual
attraction to infants, reflecting not simple a certain stage of sexual
development by the pedophile, but a qualitatively different path of sexual
development by the pedophile. Thus, for example, pedophilia may range from
mild sexual attraction to infants to the compulsive need for sexual contact
with infants, and it may also range from incidental sexual contacts with a
child, at the child's own request, to frequent attempts to seduce infants
into sexual activity. But, in my own (obviously this is controversial)
opinion, the "true" pedophile's erotic attraction to infants is entirely
platonic.

Reference:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/theme.php?themeid=th007
&row=6

J.

Re: British middle-class society invents a new way of reaching andmaintaining equilibrium

[Carrol Cox]

joanna bujes wrote:
>
> "Why this
> specific focus on pedophiles ? "
>
> I believe the answer is, because of the astronomical recidivism rate.
>

That is standard wisdom, but I read somewhere recently that it was
simply not true that pedophiles were "incurably so."  I can't cite my
source, and hence can't give any indication of its validity.

Carrol

> Joanna

Re: British middle-class society invents a new way of reaching and maintaining equilibrium

[joanna bujes]

"Why this
specific focus on pedophiles ? "
I believe the answer is, because of the astronomical recidivism rate.

Joanna

British middle-class society invents a new way of reaching and maintaining equilibrium

[Jurriaan Bendien]

We all know about the Trilateral Commission and bar-coding, but now in
Britain they have discovered something new, namely a way in which you can
track consumer and investor choices in the marketplace in such a way, that
if you stuffed the data into a computer and devised a programme to analyse
the transactions, you can devise completely new ways to ensure equilibrium
is reached and maintained. The secret is that you don't just bar-code
commodities and services, but you bar-code individuals, as described in some
futuristic movies, such as "Sleeping Dogs" starring Sam Neill, enabling
close monitoring and market behaviour. None of this Homeland Security shit,
this is the real McCoy, instant exact information on request.

This discovery was made in the process of working out what to do about
paedophiles. As we know, in Britain just as in many other countries, the
middle classes like to treat adults as though they were children. (The
concept of what a paedophile is, is of course relative. Human beings are all
at different stages of their development, and hence perceptions of what
stage of human development people are at, differs according to one's own
stage of human development).

 Hence the application of a new idea, which is described in today's
Guardian: "Paedophiles are to be electronically tagged in the UK for the
first time in a move that could prompt a revolution in the treatment and
monitoring of sex offenders. A British company is to hold talks with
Ministers in the next few weeks with a view to launching a Home
Office-backed trial involving between 100 and 500 child sex offenders. It is
also talking to government officials in the United States, Italy and Ireland
and is to tag a number of paedophiles who have volunteered to wear the
device."

The really interesting question is, why stop at peadophiles ? Why this
specific focus on peadophiles ? Why not play tag with the whole world
population ? Of course, there are still certain problems to be overcome.
Some technical problems need to be resolved. Certain programmes have to be
written. And, of course, the whole exercise has to be economic, and
attractive to investors 9the money of the project has to come from
somewhere, either from investors or taxpayers). But, at least in principle,
the perfect way to ensure equilibrium has at last been discovered, even if
it still needs some time to be implemented.

J.

Middle class and unemployed

[Louis Proyect]

Boston Globe Magazine, June 15, 2003
Middle Class and Out of Work
When white-collar professionals get the pink slip, they face a reality 
they never expected: Getting back into the work force is a full-time – 
and often futile – job.

By Carlene Hempel, 6/15/2003

Tracy Vachon is standing in the dinky, cluttered apartment of a woman 
who is hosting a Tupperware party. Vachon's flustered, because there's a 
pet parrot squawking in a cage next to where she has to set up. And 
there's no place other than a stained ottoman for her to stack her 
multicolored canisters.

It's a Sunday night - a gorgeous, warm Sunday night in spring. Yet 
Vachon, who has been out of work for 19 months now, had to leave her 
home on a lake in Westford to hawk plastic in Dracut. In Ann Taylor silk 
and pressed black slacks, she makes small talk with her host, a hotel 
housekeeper wearing a USA T-shirt and pink slippers.

"This is my favorite line," Vachon chirps as she tries to stack four 
FridgeSmart produce containers on the uneven cushion. It's a half-hour 
after the party was supposed to begin, and almost no one is there yet. 
But she's a professional. She keeps her cool. Finally, five women show, 
and over the course of the evening they order about $80 worth of 
Tupperware each.

Later, as Vachon loads her bags of sample kits and freebies into her 
car, she stops to calculate. Not just the $400 in orders, but the 
psychological toll her reluctant career as a top-selling Tupperware 
agent is taking. The air is still warm, but someone is hollering in the 
distance, perhaps in the next apartment complex, and it gives the night 
an unsettled edge. "A year of this?" she asks no one in particular, 
standing under a flickering light that makes everything an unnatural 
peach color.

For Vachon, a 35-year-old MBA-packing professional, this is life in a 
faltering economy. In Massachusetts alone, nearly 6 percent of the work 
force, or 195,000 people, are looking for jobs. And while everyone from 
young dot-commers to aging CEOs have taken a hit, one in three of the 
casualties in this recession are middle-class professionals - the 
high-achieving, well-educated, and well-kempt set whose comfy homes and 
roomy cars are at stake if they don't soon get a job.

"This is probably the first time many of them have ever seen 
unemployment," says Northeastern University economist Barry Bluestone. 
So they're in shock, he says, not to mention in debt with hefty 
mortgages, and kids in school, their roots dug in. They don't want to 
pick up and move; they never thought this would happen to them.

Sure, many of these white-collar unemployed still have 401(k)s to borrow 
on, even college funds they can dip into as a last resort. Even so, the 
pressure is building. Their husbands or wives are breathing down their 
necks to find work, their kids don't want to hear that a C-note is too 
much for a pair of new party shoes. And what will the neighbors think?

So they search for leads at their gyms, on the Little League field, in 
churches, coffee shops, and while they work stopgap jobs. They live a 
twisted version of 9-to-5, a working life defined by their relentless 
search for a regular paycheck.

Vachon was making six figures as a manager of products for global 
markets for Lucent Technologies when she got cut. Now, she sells about 
$4,000 worth of glorified plastic a month, because she and her husband, 
a print technician in Haverhill, need the cash to buy food. Beyond the 
money, she sees the work as another way to make connections. Maybe the 
next Tupperware host might know someone who is hiring in her field.

A few weeks earlier, at her house on a snowy Saturday morning, Vachon 
gets up from the kitchen table, goes to a cabinet, and pulls out some of 
the Tupperware she's won as a perk for selling so much in such a short 
time. It amuses her that she's so good at it. "It's something I never 
thought I would be doing. But so what?" she says. "It's working."

Still, it's just a bridge job, a way to stay afloat. She spends 15 hours 
a week selling, more than 35 hours a week looking for a job. "Here I am 
with all this education," she says, "and it doesn't seem to be helping."

full: http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2003/0615/coverstory.htm
--
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

Middle-Class & Armed in Venezuela

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

The Economist
June 29, 2002 U.S. Edition
SECTION: THE AMERICAS
HEADLINE: Middle-class and armed

BODY: IT WAS about an hour into the condominium association meeting, 
in a middle-class Caracas neighbourhood, before anyone broached the 
subject that was on everyone's mind. "What happens if there are acts 
of vandalism, like in April," an elegantly dressed young woman asked 
the police officer who was addressing the meeting. "You tell us to 
stay calm, but do you have any other advice?" Ever since the coup 
attempt in mid-April that briefly ousted President Hugo Chavez, the 
better-off inhabitants of the Venezuelan capital have been growing 
increasingly nervous. An e-mail campaign is warning them that, if 
another military rebellion occurs, they can expect concerted, armed 
attacks on their homes by pro-Chavez mobs. In response, residents of 
many apartment buildings, and some whole neighbourhoods, have drawn 
up defence plans and taken stock of their weapons. "Where I live," 
says a retired general, "we've met several times to make plans. To 
decide where to place the rifles, where to place the small arms, 
who's going to use which weapon and what the angle of fire should be."

The middle-class districts of Caracas are sandwiched between slums at 
the eastern and western ends of the valley. In some cases, posh 
residential areas rub shoulders with barrios in which the rule of law 
is a joke, and where the police go in--if at all--in flak jackets and 
with guns drawn. These areas are among the chief bastions of 
government support. Before Mr Chavez was restored to power, in the 
early hours of April 14th, widespread looting took place, much of it 
seemingly organised by groups loyal to the president. Although their 
main targets were shops and supermarkets, some gun-toting Chavez 
supporters roared into the nicer streets on motorbikes, sparking 
panic.

Whatever the true nature of the threat, gun shops in wealthier 
districts are selling many more weapons and bullets these days. Most 
popular are shotguns, which are more practical for the non-expert and 
for which it is easier to get a firearms licence. One shop in the 
east of the city says June sales were up by 35%, although a good 
shotgun can cost up to $1,000.

A lawyer who acts as legal counsel to several neighbourhood 
associations says he has spoken to active-service generals who say 
they would send troops, "even a tank", to defend their own and their 
neighbours' homes in an emergency. "The police and the army will be 
too busy fighting among themselves," he says.

In the slums, too, people assume that armed conflict is coming and 
that the enemy is better prepared. "I have a 24-inch TV," says the 
leader of one pro-Chavez community organisation in western Caracas, 
"and if I can sell it to buy a pistol, I will." Both sides argue that 
the other has "nothing to lose". The middle class is risking nothing, 
the community leader says. "They hire people to fight and die for 
them."

Rumours of a coup, very loud in mid-June, have died down somewhat in 
recent days. But plans among military rebels to overthrow the 
government seem merely to be on hold. According to the retired 
general, the threat of armed conflict among civilians is one factor 
that might cause the armed forces to intervene. No one would question 
their right and duty to restore order; and "restoring order" might go 
as far as the presidential palace.

GRAPHIC: Watch out for granny, she's got you covered; Chavez may have 
the slums, but the nicer streets have their guns.
--
Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
* Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>

Why Venezuela's Middle Class (for the most part) Opposes Chavez

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

ZNet | Venezuela
Why Venezuela's Middle Class (for the most part) Opposes Chavez
by Gregory Wilpert; October 27, 2002

"Chavez' greatest error was to screw the middle class," says Carlos 
Escarrá, a prominent constitutional lawyer and former Venezuelan 
supreme court judge, who describes himself as being with the 
"proceso," but not a Chavista. The "proceso" is the process of social 
transformation that was initiated by the movement which brought 
President Chavez to power.

When Chavez first got elected, nearly four years ago, it looked like 
a vast majority was with the "proceso," but now, large sectors of 
society that at first supported Chavez, particularly the middle 
class, appear to have joined the opposition. A clear indication of 
this opposition was the October 10 demonstration against the 
government, which attracted anywhere between 400,000 (government 
estimate) and 1,000,000 (opposition estimate) mostly middle class 
participants. No matter what the precise number, there is little 
doubt that this was probably one of the largest demonstrations in 
Venezuelan history, which was matched two days later by a 
pro-government demonstration of at least equal size, representing 
mostly the lower class of Venezuelan society. Why is the middle class 
so opposed to Chavez and the lower class not? The reasons are 
numerous and have to do with economics, government policies, the 
media, and racism.

The Economy

2002 was and still is a difficult year for Venezuela. The currency 
devalued 50% in the first six months, inflation skyrocketed from 12% 
in 2001 to 35% or more in 2002, and unemployment jumped from 13% to 
17%. Contrary to what many people in Venezuela seem to believe, these 
economic trends have affected the middle class much more than they 
affected the poor. That is, the currency devaluation has a greater 
negative economic impact on the middle class because the middle class 
tends to purchase more products that are denominated in dollars, 
whether it is cars, computers, real estate, or vacations to the U.S. 
Suddenly they can no longer afford these purchases because their 
income is worth half as much as it was before the devaluation.

Also, while the devaluation causes a general inflation of prices, 
since Venezuela imports over 70% of its consumer goods, inflation is 
more acute among the products that the middle class consumes because 
they tend to purchase more imported goods than the poor do. Another 
reason why inflation affects the middle class more than the poor is 
that the middle class depends on a salary that is fixed at the 
beginning of the year. The poor, who are by and large employed in the 
informal economy, however, can more easily adjust their income to 
match inflation, simply by immediately charging more for their 
products and services -- they do not need to wait for the annual 
salary increase. Finally, the poor tend to have more of a social net 
that softens the impact of inflation, in the form of larger extended 
families and communities that help each other out and in the form of 
free public services, such as health care and education. The middle 
class, however, tends to rely on private education, and private 
health care, which is of a better quality, but which have to be 
discontinued as soon as the prices for these service rise too much 
for their income.

Venezuela's government has a large role in the economy, which means 
that a fluctuation in public spending has nearly immediate 
repercussions for economic activity in general. In other words, 
government spending cut-backs tend to push the economy into 
recession. Since about a third of government income comes from oil 
revenues, any fluctuation in the price of oil is rapidly felt in the 
rest of the economy. For example, in late 2001 the price of 
Venezuelan oil dropped from $18 to $16 per barrel. This caused a 
tremendous shortfall in revenues, so that public sector income 
declined by 13% in the first quarter of 2002, compared to the same 
period in the previous year. Most of this loss was attributable to 
declining oil revenues, which dropped by 46% in the first quarter, 
compared to the previous year's first quarter. As a result, the state 
budget for 2002 had to be reduced by 7% relative to what had been 
planned. At the same time, in late 2001, the opposition decided to 
intensify its campaign against the government, by calling a general 
strike and organizing large demonstrations. This economic and 
political crisis contributed to massive capital flight, which, in 
turn, made the political and economic crisis worse. The central bank 
could no longer defend the currency against the devaluation pressure 
that the capital flight was causing and when it abandoned its efforts 
to defend the currency, the currency devalued and inflation shot up.

The combination of inflation and reduced government spending proved 
to be a double blow to th

Re: Impoverished middle-class in Mexico

[Louis Proyect]

> NY Times, Sept. 4, 2002
>
> Free-Market Upheaval Grinds Mexico's Middle Class
> By GINGER THOMPSON
>
> MEXICO CITY, Sept. 3 -- By Mexican standards, Álvaro Álvarez and Alma 
> Amarillas are a solid middle-class couple. But in the 20 years they 
> have worked to build a stable life for themselves and their children, 
> the economic ground beneath them has never stopped shaking.
>
I left off the URL for the full article: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/04/international/americas/04MEXI.html

-- 

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org

Impoverished middle-class in Mexico

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, Sept. 4, 2002

Free-Market Upheaval Grinds Mexico's Middle Class
By GINGER THOMPSON

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 3 -- By Mexican standards, Álvaro Álvarez and Alma 
Amarillas are a solid middle-class couple. But in the 20 years they have 
worked to build a stable life for themselves and their children, the 
economic ground beneath them has never stopped shaking.

She works double shifts as a public school teacher and administrator. He 
has quit teaching to work as a personnel manager for the government. 
Together they make about $24,000 a year. But they have little more to 
show for their life's labor than the roof over their heads.

They have not been able to save a penny. They spend more than half their 
monthly income on their mortgage. Their safety net is a credit card with 
a $300 limit. And they have diminishing hope that their two daughters 
will live better than they do.

"We live day to day," Ms. Amarillas said. "We never know when there will 
be a new crisis. I panic when the girls get a fever or the car sounds 
funny.

"I don't think much anymore about how our situation will improve," she 
added. "I worry more about how it could get worse."

It has been two decades since Mexico committed itself to free-market 
reforms aimed at propelling this country into the developed world. The 
North American Free Trade Agreement, considered the centerpiece of the 
new Mexican philosophy, has generated a quarter trillion dollars in 
cross-border trade with the United States. The treaty helped turn a 
closed, inefficient economy dominated by state-owned companies into one 
that was flooded by foreign investment and driven by foreign competition.

But government statistics show that economic liberalization has done 
little to close the huge divide between the privileged few and the poor, 
and left the middle class worse off than before. Battered by a series of 
severe recessions, teachers and engineers, nurses and small-business 
men, all find themselves swinging above and below the poverty line with 
the rise and fall of the peso, interest rates and the unemployment rate.

According to a recent government report, in the year 2000 half the 
Mexican population lived on about $4 a day, with scarcity shifting along 
with the population from rural regions to cities. Some 10 percent of 
Mexicans at the top of the income pyramid controlled close to 40 percent 
of the nation's wealth.

Meanwhile, the 35 percent of Mexico's population that lives in the 
middle -- with average earnings of about $1,000 a month -- spirals 
slowly downward.

The economist Rogelio Ramírez de la O said that in the 1970's, when 
Mexico's population was 50 million people and the country had begun to 
enjoy the benefits of an oil boom, some 60 percent of Mexicans were 
middle and working class. Their numbers and buying power have declined 
"dramatically" since then, Mr. Ramírez said.

"The promises of economic modernization have not been fulfilled," he 
added, and Mexico's middle class "now has less buying power than a 
generation ago."

-- 

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org

China's middle class

[Ulhas Joglekar]

Economist.com

China's middle class

To get rich is glorious

Jan 17th 2002 | BEIJING

China's middle class is expanding rapidly. But what does it want?

HAS China taken in a Trojan horse? The country's accession last month to the
World Trade Organisation (WTO), optimists in the West often argue, will make
China more prosperous and thereby boost the development of the middle class.
This in turn will lead to demands for democratic reform because middle
classes naturally want a say in government. Many Chinese scholars argue,
however, that if substantial political change does occur in the next few
years, the middle class will have little hand in bringing it about.
The growing affluence of urban China would appear to be striking enough
evidence that a middle class is already fast emerging. Cities that 15 years
ago were grim, Stalinist backwaters are today aglow with the trappings of
middle class life. The cities that have benefited most from the flood of
foreign investment into China over the past decade-Beijing, Shanghai and
Shenzhen-now boast more white collar workers than blue collar ones. The
working class, which according to Communist rhetoric still leads the
country, is shrinking. The state sector is crumbling. Private enterprise is
booming.
The party itself, meanwhile, remains way behind the times. It still will not
use the term "middle class" in its official documents, preferring instead
such phrases as "those with high incomes". To recognise such people as a
class would turn the ideology of the last 50 years on its head. Mao Zedong
sought to eliminate the capitalist-roaders and, despite the more tolerant
economic climate of the past 20 years, it was only less than three years ago
that the legitimacy of private enterprise was fully recognised in the
constitution. President Jiang Zemin caused a furore within the party last
July when he suggested that entrepreneurs be officially allowed to join.
In a study of China's social classes published this month, the state-run
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) also shied away from the term
"middle class", explaining in a footnote that the word "class" has negative
connotations. The survey says that this "middle stratum" is still very
small, amounting to about 15% of the working population compared with 60% in
America. Still, this would amount to about 110m people, or about half of the
urban population in employment.

China's chief negotiator at the WTO accession talks, Long Yongtu, boasted
last November that within ten years, some 400m-500m Chinese would enjoy a
"middle income", making China's market "much bigger" than that of the United
States. An official from the State Information Centre estimated recently
that by 2005 China would have 200m middle-income consumers. The official was
quoted by a state-run news agency as saying this class could afford to buy
cars and housing and spend money on leisure travel. No wonder the foreign
business community is salivating over the promises made by China to open up
its markets after entering the WTO.
But while no one doubts that there is a burgeoning group of relatively
affluent Chinese, the size and political significance of this class is more
questionable. Zhang Wanli, another participant in the CASS study, says there
is a lot of "journalistic hype" in China about the size of the country's
middle class. She says the middle class will still be much closer to 100m in
five years' time, its growth constrained by growing urban unemployment as
well as depressed incomes and widespread under-employment in the
countryside.


Not by bread alone
Some Chinese officials clearly do believe that the middle class could pose a
political threat. A study by the party's powerful Central Organisation
Department published last May noted that "as the economic standing of the
affluent stratum has increased, so too has its desire for greater political
standing." The report said that this would inevitably have a "profound
impact on social and political life" in China. President Jiang's gesture to
businessmen last July was presumably aimed at ensuring their loyalty and
deterring them from using their economic power in ways that might threaten
the party.
But so far, at least, there is scant evidence that the middle class is
seeking anything more than political security. Some Chinese researchers say
that entrepreneurs who have applied to join the party or sought election to
legislative bodies want to gain social status and security rather than
change the system from within. The CASS study says the government has failed
to give "full political recognition to the interests of their social
 stratum" as well as adequate legal protection for their property.
But private businesspeople do not look likely to push for such guarantees,
at least not collectively. According to Shen Mingming, d

India's new middle class

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times Magazine, April 15, 2001 

Keeping Up With the Shidhayes: India's New Middle Class

By JAMES TRAUB

There is an expression you hear nowadays in Aurangabad, a city of about a
million souls located 150 miles northeast of Bombay, that would have made
absolutely no sense when I lived there 25 years ago. People will say, "The
traffic is too-too bad in old Aurangabad," or "The shopping is still
cheaper in old Aurangabad." Back in 1976, when I served as a junior
lecturer on the English faculty of the Maulana Azad College and its
affiliated Ladies' Section, everything in Aurangabad was old. The city had
decayed, but otherwise not much else had changed since the glorious moment
in the late 17th century when Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mogul
emperors, moved the capital from Delhi to this little outpost at the top of
the Deccan Plateau. And in fact, the city that I knew, with its dusty lanes
filled with the insane honking of scooters and motorbikes and three-wheeled
auto-rickshaws and its sleepy sweet shops and its ancient wooden houses,
hasn't changed a bit. . .

What most Americans know about India is simply that it is very, very poor.
And that's true. Perhaps 40 percent of the country's one billion people are
still locked in mind-numbing poverty. But it is also true that even
perfectly ordinary places like Aurangabad have a large and growing middle
class, with the aspirations and the orientation toward change and growth
that come with middle-class status. In his book "India Unbound," an
unabashed celebration of the new culture of capitalism, Gurcharan Das, a
former C.E.O. of Procter & Gamble India as well as a playwright and
novelist, writes, "The most striking feature of contemporary India is the
rise of a confident new middle class." India is slowly shedding its fabled
otherness; perhaps we're too mesmerized by the otherness to recognize the
reality. . .

I would have described almost everyone I knew as poor, though they all
lived innumerable grades above Aurangabad's truly poor, who lived piled on
top of one another in the squalid warren of the city. The teachers earned
about $100 a month on average, and most lived in tiny houses with a few
sticks of furniture and nothing more than a calendar or a clock on the
wall. Nobody I knew owned a telephone, and refrigeration was so unheard of
that when I invited the girls from my Ladies Section class to lunch at my
home, I heard them all excitedly murmuring, "Thanda pani"- cold water. It
was a novel idea to them. The only cars I ever saw were the white
Ambassadors driven by government officials. Virtually the only form of
entertainment was conversation, and in this one regard, Aurangabad was
rich. We would sit over endless cups of tea, talking about politics and
literature and what little we could glean about the affairs of the world.
Aurangabad was an Islamic version of R.K. Narayan's Malgudi, the mythical
town where nothing ever happens and everyone is a commentator. . .

Educated Indians are deeply divided about the merits, even the
authenticity, of the new middle class. Modern India was born, in 1947, not
simply as a nation among nations but also as a great experiment -- in
democracy, in autonomy from the world powers, in forging unity from
bewildering diversity, in fidelity to ancient spiritual ideals. The parents
of free India, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, had very different,
and ultimately incompatible, visions of the new nation, but both understood
India in moral terms. Nehru's modern values, especially, provided a
self-definition and a sense of high purpose to the old middle class. And so
there is, to many of them, something repellent about a new class that
defines itself by consumer habits. In "Mistaken Modernity," Dipankar Gupta,
a scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, accuses the new
middle class of "Westoxication," by which he means consuming Western goods
while ignoring the core Western values of respect for the individual,
acceptance of impersonal norms, meritocracy and public accountability. The
new middle class, he writes, is not the engine of modernity but its chief
adversary. 

But these consumers are also producers. Gurcharan Das argues in "India
Unbound" that the new middle class will liberate India from the morally
irreproachable stranglehold of the Nehruvian servitors. "The older
bourgeoisie," Das writes, "was tolerant, secular and ambiguous. The new
class is street-smart. It has had to fight to rise from the bottom, and it
has learnt to maneuver the system. It is easy to despair over its
vulgarity, its new-rich mentality. But whether India can deliver the goods
depends a great deal on it." 

Farooqui is a child of old Aurangabad: his mother's family is said to have
served in Aurangzeb's army. I thought he might be an eccentric devotee of
the anci

Argentina's ruined middle class

[Louis Proyect]

The Washington Post, April 03, 2001, Tuesday, Final Edition 

Argentina's Economic Woes Devastate Its Middle Class 

Anthony Faiola, Washington Post Foreign Service 

DATELINE: BUENOS AIRES 

In a dusty colonial quarter of south Buenos Aires, Eduardo Medina takes a
deep breath before lifting the receiver of a public phone for a weekly call
to his elderly parents in the countryside. Then the 38-year-old unemployed
law clerk starts to lie. 

He lies about the new job he never found, the one in a posh downtown law
office that does not exist. About the apartment he no longer has. He says
anything but the truth: that he has found himself reduced to living in a
dingy, overcrowded homeless shelter. 

"The truth would kill them," said Medina, still dressed impeccably in a
woolen sweater and preppy pinstriped shirt five months after moving to the
municipal shelter filled with the economic refugees of the world's
10th-largest metropolis. 

The truth is that Medina lost his $ 2,500-a-month job at the Justice
Ministry during government layoffs in 1999. And that six months ago he lost
a part-time job as a waiter. And that he faced eviction from his apartment
across town before resorting to the shelter to keep a roof over his head. 

"If I tell my parents, it would force me to accept it as well," he said.
"I've told myself this is just a brief setback. But then I look at the
other guys here, and I wonder if I'm not lying to myself, too." 

Medina's story is emblematic of a tide of homelessness sweeping Latin
America's showcase city. Massive unemployment from a 33-month recession and
large-scale downsizings during a decade of U.S.-backed free market reforms
have wreaked havoc on the lives of residents here, especially as the once
large middle class tumbles down the ladder of prosperity. 

Although its grand boulevards and belle epoque neighborhoods have long
given Buenos Aires pretensions as "the Paris of Latin America," the city
today recalls New York during the Great Depression. The number of indigents
in greater Buenos Aires -- the poorest of the poor who live on less than a
$ 1.60 a day in a metropolitan area of 12 million people -- rose to 921,000
people in 2000 from 324,810 in 1991, the year then-President Carlos Menem
embraced the free market reforms that swept across much of Latin America in
the 1990s. 

"We have never had to cope with a homeless population this large and
diverse before," said Silvia Coralini, head of the city's Program for
Families in Crisis, begun in 1997 to deal with the swelling tide. "And it's
not like you can just go tell these people to get up and find a job. There
are no jobs." 

Two government surveys on the homeless -- taken in 1997 and 2000 -- show
the population living in city shelters or on the streets has almost doubled
in three years, to 5,718 from 3,172 within city boundaries, where 3 million
live. Aid groups place the actual figure far higher, arguing that the
government does not count people living in shantytowns called "misery
villages." 

At the same time, thousands of "afternoon homeless" pour into the city each
day on boxcars attached to commuter trains from poor suburbs and the
Argentine interior. Most stay on the streets for a few nights, some
standing in employment lines that snake for blocks. Others come to scour
trash cans in search of aluminum cans and discarded morsels. 

The genteel middle-class neighborhoods that were the city's heart and soul
-- and which long separated Buenos Aires from most other Latin American
capitals, where islands of wealth sit among seas of poverty -- are rapidly
being transformed into pockets of dilapidated buildings, empty storefronts,
rising crime and beggars. Meanwhile, the very rich have retreated to gated
communities, exiting for work in high-rise office buildings and shopping in
designer boutiques in upscale parts of town. 

In other words, Buenos Aires is starting to look like the rest of Latin
America. This is taking a toll on the psyche of a city that has always
fancied itself a First World enclave in the developing world. 

"We are facing a social breakdown in Argentina, and though we are trying to
cope with the problem, Buenos Aires is reflecting the national crisis,"
said Daniel Figueroa, the city's secretary of social services. "The middle
class is slipping badly, sometimes slipping straight to the bottom. Buenos
Aires has become like a boat taking on water. We are helping as many
homeless as we can, but there are more and more. We keep on bailing, but
the boat is sinking." 

Argentina, a nation of 36 million, has suddenly become the new focus of
Wall Street jitters following the financial meltdown in Turkey. As a
result, President Fernando de la Rua is being pressured to cut the deficit
by slashing expenses. At the same time, foreign creditors are encouraging
Argentina

Re: Middle class fragility

[Carrol Cox]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> In response to Michael's plea for more economics ...
>
> There was an article in Todays Winnipeg Free Press by John Cunniff attributed to 
>Associated Press entitled "U.S. middle class fragile." He starts of by noting the 
>popular assumption that America's middle class is secure and comfortable. [snip]
>
> "The middle class is not so secure as it once semed."
> [SNIP]
> Anyone got any thoughts on this or on the the book or the authors?

Yes -- they are not talking about the middle class. They are talking
about that part of the working class that bourgeois sociologists,
sloppy marxists, and Time-Life-Fortune have bolloxed into thinking
they belonged to that mythical beast, "The Middle Class."

Carrol

RE: Middle class fragility

[Max Sawicky]

. . . Anyone got any thoughts on this or on the the book or the authors?
Paul Phillips,
>>


All documented at length in State of Working America, 1998-99.
Mishel, Bernstein & Schmitt.

mbs

Middle class fragility

[phillp2]

In response to Michael's plea for more economics ...

There was an article in Todays Winnipeg Free Press by John  Cunniff attributed to Associated Press entitled "U.S. middle class  fragile."  He starts of by noting the popular assumption that  America's middle class is secure and comfortable.  He then goes  on to describe a study published by Yale U press by Teresa  Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren and Benno Schmidt (The Fragile Middle  Class) in which the central theme is:

"The middle class is not so secure as it once semed."
The causes are seemingly well-known: employment volatility 	 and income loss, sickness and injury and divorce.  To this, 	 the study adds two more: home ownership, and too much 	 credit.
. . .
... too ofter [homeowners] are serious debtors as well.  In  recent years, the authors point out, mortgage debt has climed  much faster than the value of homes securing that debt, and  about half the debtors in bankruptcies are identified as  homewoners.
   	"Many homeowners are struggling harder than ever to hang  on to their chief symbol of particpation in the middle classe,"  the authors say. "And the bakruptcy courts are often their last  stop to try to stabilize economically before they face  foreclosure."
.. .
   The credit card may be the final straw.
   Credit card debt is extended long after the initial application,  at a time when the lender knows little about the borrower's  current finances. 

Anyone got any thoughts on this or on the the book or the  authors?

Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba

Re: Re: More "Middle Class" nonsense,was Re: egressivity of FI

[Joel Blau]

I agree completely with this. One point I would add is that we cannot
predict in advance which sectors/strata/elements/whatever of the
working class will be in motion (or mobilizable) at any given time. This
is one reason not to arbitrarily exclude from the working class some
sector of it (e.g. social workers, teachers, housewives [as Gramsci
did], working supervisors, old people, welfare recipients).

 I think we have reached a rough consensus on this. I've always liked
the Wright model and his concept of intermediate strata with it. What 
I was responding to initially was collapsing everything into a two class
model without adequate recognition of the fuzzy boundaries and complications.

Joel Blau

Carrol Cox wrote:
Jim Devine wrote:

> Further, a theory of class structure (a la Wright) is only about the
> objective conditions faced by people (classes in themselves). It's
a big
> step to go from there to talking about classes that are organized
and
> conscious (classes for themselves). Of course, taking that step in
practice
> for the working class is a central goal of Marxists (a goal we have
failed
> to attain, most of the time).

I agree completely with this. One point I would add is that we cannot
predict in advance which sectors/strata/elements/whatever of the
working class will be in motion (or mobilizable) at any given time.
This
is one reason not to arbitrarily exclude from the working class some
sector of it (e.g. social workers, teachers, housewives [as Gramsci
did], working supervisors, old people, welfare recipients).

Jim also wrote:

>  After all, the cops at the Rampart station in L.A.
> are proletarians, but they clearly lack unity with the workers they
> torture, frame, kill, etc.

I have on several lists in several posts lately indicated the importance
of remembering that hard cases make bad law. Any attempt at
classification is sloppy at the edges, and to feature those edges
is counter-productive. That said, I don't think this is a borderline
case but quite clear cut. Cops *come* from the working class,
but they are best seen as scabs, pawns, class-traitors, etc. I think
the Chinese cliche of "lackeys and running dogs" is appropriate.

I assume that the only good reason for trying to predict the future
is to aid in understanding the present. I would suggest that under
a minimally decent socialism (not to speak of a highly successful
socialist revolution) there would still be social workers,
teachers, working supervisors  whose work would doubtless be
different in many ways but still a recognizable continuation of the
sort of work that those occupations perform now. But within such
a society the "work" of police, prison guards, etc would be radically
transformed. Under capitalism, participation in the repression/
control of workers is the defining feature of police work, but not
of a social worker, however much of a jerk and a willing cop
a specific social worker may be in practice.

Carrol
 

Re: More "Middle Class" nonsense,was Re: egressivity of FI

[Carrol Cox]

Jim Devine wrote:

> Further, a theory of class structure (a la Wright) is only about the
> objective conditions faced by people (classes in themselves). It's a big
> step to go from there to talking about classes that are organized and
> conscious (classes for themselves). Of course, taking that step in practice
> for the working class is a central goal of Marxists (a goal we have failed
> to attain, most of the time).

I agree completely with this. One point I would add is that we cannot
predict in advance which sectors/strata/elements/whatever of the
working class will be in motion (or mobilizable) at any given time. This
is one reason not to arbitrarily exclude from the working class some
sector of it (e.g. social workers, teachers, housewives [as Gramsci
did], working supervisors, old people, welfare recipients).



Jim also wrote:

>  After all, the cops at the Rampart station in L.A.
> are proletarians, but they clearly lack unity with the workers they
> torture, frame, kill, etc.

I have on several lists in several posts lately indicated the importance
of remembering that hard cases make bad law. Any attempt at
classification is sloppy at the edges, and to feature those edges
is counter-productive. That said, I don't think this is a borderline
case but quite clear cut. Cops *come* from the working class,
but they are best seen as scabs, pawns, class-traitors, etc. I think
the Chinese cliche of "lackeys and running dogs" is appropriate.

I assume that the only good reason for trying to predict the future
is to aid in understanding the present. I would suggest that under
a minimally decent socialism (not to speak of a highly successful
socialist revolution) there would still be social workers,
teachers, working supervisors  whose work would doubtless be
different in many ways but still a recognizable continuation of the
sort of work that those occupations perform now. But within such
a society the "work" of police, prison guards, etc would be radically
transformed. Under capitalism, participation in the repression/
control of workers is the defining feature of police work, but not
of a social worker, however much of a jerk and a willing cop
a specific social worker may be in practice.

Carrol

Re: More "Middle Class" nonsense, was Re: egressivity of FI

[Jim Devine]

>In an analytic context the damage is already done by misidentifying the groups
>involved as "middle strata" (a meaningless concept) and by labelling the 
>alliance
>in question as "cross-class."

Harry Braverman used the concept of the "middle strata" well, while I like 
the (old) Erik O. Wright theory about intermediate positions between class 
positions (sharing characteristics of both).

The key thing is that the two-class model is an abstraction (an extremely 
revealing one) whereas there are other factors that make the empirical 
world more complicated. After all, the cops at the Rampart station in L.A. 
are proletarians, but they clearly lack unity with the workers they 
torture, frame, kill, etc.

Further, a theory of class structure (a la Wright) is only about the 
objective conditions faced by people (classes in themselves). It's a big 
step to go from there to talking about classes that are organized and 
conscious (classes for themselves). Of course, taking that step in practice 
for the working class is a central goal of Marxists (a goal we have failed 
to attain, most of the time).

Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &  http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine

Re: Re: Re: More "Middle Class" nonsense,was Re: egressivity of FI

[Joel Blau]

Carrol:

There are 2 primary problems with what you wrote:

1. Most social workers and teachers do not have the autonomy you ascribe to them: if 
you are a child protective worker, you have to remove a child from a home; if you are 
a school teacher, you may have to deny a student an automatic promotion. These kinds 
of jobs both involve wieldiing a
particular kind of state authority and expertise against other working class people. 
As a result, it does not matter what your consciousness is: whatever militance you 
display outside work may be insufficient to remedy your treatment of other working 
class people on the job. The larger point
is that it is not enough to consider relations between just workers and owners, when a 
new class structure allows some members of the "working class" to exercise such power 
over the lives of others.

2) Collapsing everyone into such a undifferentiated model of the working class is a 
recipe for permanent powerlessness. Indeed, you admit this, when you say that the 
"working class" does not necessarily even mean "50%+1." If the working class as you 
define it is an economic minority, then
how can it ever justify its right to become a political majority? The answer is that 
like the Swedish Social Democrats making alliances with the Agrarian Party, we must 
acknowledge the existence of, and address politically, other groups in the society. 
Whatever the economic truth--they are
all employees, they either create surplus value or reproduce capitalist social  
relations--the complications of all their collateral relationships with other members 
of the working class means that  I just don't think that referring to these groups as  
"the working class" cuts it
politically.

Joel Blau

Carrol Cox wrote:

> Joel Blau wrote:
>
> > Carroll:
> >
> > R.N.s, social workers, high school teachers, Boeing engineers, computer 
>programmers, nutritionists,  paralegals, and other members of the white-collar 
>professions:  if your definition of working class is broad enough to include these 
>occupational categories, that's fine, as long as you
> > recognize that 1) though all of these workers are employees, some are much better 
>paid than others, and salaries do help to shape consciousness and the possibilities 
>for political alliances and 2) some of these "workers" have significant control over 
>other workers (if you had your son
> > taken away from you in child protective case, you might not think of social 
>workers as a fellow member of the working class)
>
> I think this is an important discussion, and I'll have more to say on another
> occasion, but just a few remarks here.
>
> Yes, I see all these as working class. Some obvious qualifications &
> clarifications. Both my daughters and my older daughter's husband
> are computer programmers. My younger daughter, fairly high paid,
> is clearly a member of the working class. My older  daugher and her
> husband are petty producers. He has incorporated himself, and
> contracts out his services as a consultant. My daughter is salaried,
> but I would assume that all members of a household belong to the
> same class -- and the household is clearly a petty producer household.
> (I prefer "petty producer" to "petty bourgeois" because the latter is
> so often used to name consciousness rather than place in the
> relations of production.)
>
> There are always border-line cases. Clearly CEOs, though drawing
> a salary, are members of the big bourgeoisie. Probably there are
> other instances where one could argue that a salary is so huge
> that it no longer represents variable capital but a share in
> surplus value. But those cases are demographically small -- and
> I think very relevant here is the legal saw about hard cases amke
> bad law.
>
> Finally, your specific social worker. Social workers, firefighters,
> teachers, are members of the working class, but they can *choose*
> to act like cops (or be bullied into acting like cops) -- and cops
> are declassed. Here I like the Chinese jargon: lackeys and running
> dogs. Scabs is a good word too.
>
> Finally, I'm not sure just how to define "working-class unity" in
> numerical terms -- but it certainly doesn't mean 100% unity -- and
> perhaps does not even mean 50%+1 and above.
>
> Carrol

Re: Re: More "Middle Class" nonsense,was Re: egressivity of FI

[Carrol Cox]

Joel Blau wrote:

> Carroll:
>
> R.N.s, social workers, high school teachers, Boeing engineers, computer programmers, 
>nutritionists,  paralegals, and other members of the white-collar professions:  if 
>your definition of working class is broad enough to include these occupational 
>categories, that's fine, as long as you
> recognize that 1) though all of these workers are employees, some are much better 
>paid than others, and salaries do help to shape consciousness and the possibilities 
>for political alliances and 2) some of these "workers" have significant control over 
>other workers (if you had your son
> taken away from you in child protective case, you might not think of social workers 
>as a fellow member of the working class)

I think this is an important discussion, and I'll have more to say on another
occasion, but just a few remarks here.

Yes, I see all these as working class. Some obvious qualifications &
clarifications. Both my daughters and my older daughter's husband
are computer programmers. My younger daughter, fairly high paid,
is clearly a member of the working class. My older  daugher and her
husband are petty producers. He has incorporated himself, and
contracts out his services as a consultant. My daughter is salaried,
but I would assume that all members of a household belong to the
same class -- and the household is clearly a petty producer household.
(I prefer "petty producer" to "petty bourgeois" because the latter is
so often used to name consciousness rather than place in the
relations of production.)

There are always border-line cases. Clearly CEOs, though drawing
a salary, are members of the big bourgeoisie. Probably there are
other instances where one could argue that a salary is so huge
that it no longer represents variable capital but a share in
surplus value. But those cases are demographically small -- and
I think very relevant here is the legal saw about hard cases amke
bad law.

Finally, your specific social worker. Social workers, firefighters,
teachers, are members of the working class, but they can *choose*
to act like cops (or be bullied into acting like cops) -- and cops
are declassed. Here I like the Chinese jargon: lackeys and running
dogs. Scabs is a good word too.

Finally, I'm not sure just how to define "working-class unity" in
numerical terms -- but it certainly doesn't mean 100% unity -- and
perhaps does not even mean 50%+1 and above.

Carrol

Re: More "Middle Class" nonsense, was Re: egressivity of FI

[Joel Blau]

Carroll:

R.N.s, social workers, high school teachers, Boeing engineers, computer programmers, 
nutritionists,  paralegals, and other members of the white-collar professions:  if 
your definition of working class is broad enough to include these occupational 
categories, that's fine, as long as you
recognize that 1) though all of these workers are employees, some are much better paid 
than others, and salaries do help to shape consciousness and the possibilities for 
political alliances and 2) some of these "workers" have significant control over other 
workers (if you had your son
taken away from you in child protective case, you might not think of social workers as 
a fellow member of the working class). If you disagree with these stipulations, you 
risk trying to shoehorn a new class structure into an old class taxonomy. Ultimately, 
however, even this distinction
may well be besides the point:   it is far more important to me to reach groups like 
these than have an argument about whether they fall inside or outside the "working 
class."

Joel Blau

Carrol Cox wrote:

> Joel Blau wrote:
>
> > split the middle strata from the poor in classic Esping-Andersen fashion. From 
>Sweden at one of the spectrum to the United States at the other, such alliances 
>propelled the welfare state to the peak of its power in the early 1970s. The 
>challenge now is to recreate that cross-class
> > alliance under different economic circumstances.  Universalism in social policy 
>should be one crucial ingredient  in that effort.
>
> In an analytic context the damage is already done by misidentifying the groups
> involved as "middle strata" (a meaningless concept) and by labelling the alliance
> in question as "cross-class." The assumption always seems to be that it is
> a harmless verbal convenience to use Weberian categories (strata, middle
> class, etc.) It isn't harmless. It's poisnonous. What we confront here is not
> building a cross-class alliance but working towards working-class unity.
>
> Carrol

More "Middle Class" nonsense, was Re: egressivity of FI

[Carrol Cox]

Joel Blau wrote:

> split the middle strata from the poor in classic Esping-Andersen fashion. From 
>Sweden at one of the spectrum to the United States at the other, such alliances 
>propelled the welfare state to the peak of its power in the early 1970s. The 
>challenge now is to recreate that cross-class
> alliance under different economic circumstances.  Universalism in social policy 
>should be one crucial ingredient  in that effort.

In an analytic context the damage is already done by misidentifying the groups
involved as "middle strata" (a meaningless concept) and by labelling the alliance
in question as "cross-class." The assumption always seems to be that it is
a harmless verbal convenience to use Weberian categories (strata, middle
class, etc.) It isn't harmless. It's poisnonous. What we confront here is not
building a cross-class alliance but working towards working-class unity.

Carrol

[PEN-L:1237] Re: the "middle class"

[Macario Schettino]

On Wed, 1 Nov 1995, James Devine wrote:

> Peter Burns quotes one of our wise solons as saying:
> "When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000
> to $750,000 a year, that's middle-class. When I see
> anyone above that, that's upper-middle class."
> Rep Fred Heinaman 

You may not be interested, but 90% of mexicans earn less than US$ 5,000 a 
year...

Macario

[PEN-L:1231] Re: The "middle class"

[Doug Henwood]

At 11:28 AM 11/2/95, Gilbert Skillman wrote:

>Jim Devine quoted Robert Peter Burns quoting Rep. Fred Heinaman
>(Republican from North Carolina) thusly:
>
>"When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000 to $750,000
>a year, that's middle-class.  When I see anyone above that, that's
>upper-middle class."
>
>Perhaps no other single quote from the current crop of jackals in Congress
>better illustrates their incredibly truncated view of American
>society.  According to 1993 CBO data, a pre-tax income for a family
>of four of $330,000 was needed to place in the top *1%* of the US income
>distribution; the *average* income of 4-person families in the top 1%
>was $800,000.  So according to the wise Rep. Fred Heinaman, "upper
>middle class" refers to the top (roughly) 1/2 percentile of US
>society, while "middle class" roughly refers to the second-highest 1/2
>percentile. It follows that the bottom 99% of the US population in
>terms of income is "lower class."

Actually, Heineman also said that incomes of $100,000-300,000 were "lower
middle class." So it's only about 96% of us who live in penury, not 99%.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217
USA
+1-212-874-4020 voice
+1-212-874-3137 fax
email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>

[PEN-L:1223] Re: the "middle class"

[DOUG ORR]

Can someone give an estimate of what percentage of US households 
or families earns within this range? above this range? below this 
range? 

Jim Devine   [EMAIL PROTECTED]

__
I don't have data on the $300K to $500K range, but according to the 
1994 Stat. Abstract, in 1992, the break between the 4th and 5th quintile,
the number usually associated with the top of the "middle class" and the
bottom of the wealth, was $64,300.  The top five percent of the income
distribution starts at $106,509.  So $300K probably puts someone in the 
top 1 percent or less.  Definitely not the middle of anything!

Doug Orr
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:1222] The "middle class"

[Gilbert Skillman]

Jim Devine quoted Robert Peter Burns quoting Rep. Fred Heinaman 
(Republican from North Carolina) thusly:

"When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000 to $750,000 
a year, that's middle-class.  When I see anyone above that, that's 
upper-middle class."

Perhaps no other single quote from the current crop of jackals in Congress 
better illustrates their incredibly truncated view of American 
society.  According to 1993 CBO data, a pre-tax income for a family 
of four of $330,000 was needed to place in the top *1%* of the US income 
distribution; the *average* income of 4-person families in the top 1% 
was $800,000.  So according to the wise Rep. Fred Heinaman, "upper 
middle class" refers to the top (roughly) 1/2 percentile of US 
society, while "middle class" roughly refers to the second-highest 1/2 
percentile. It follows that the bottom 99% of the US population in 
terms of income is "lower class."  

Breathtaking.

Gil Skillman

Median US family income in 1993, by the way, was about $37,000, down 
about $1300 in 1993 dollars from 1979.  So Representative Heinaman's 
picture of the "middle" only diverges from reality by a factor of 10.

[PEN-L:1220] Re: the "middle class"

[Doug Henwood]

At 11:28 AM 11/1/95, James Devine wrote:

>Peter Burns quotes one of our wise solons as saying:
>"When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000
>to $750,000 a year, that's middle-class. When I see
>anyone above that, that's upper-middle class."
>Rep Fred Heinaman 
>
>Can someone give an estimate of what percentage of US households
>or families earns within this range? above this range? below this
>range?

I think it's in the 1/2% range, probably just below the richest 1/4%,
though I don't think anyone knows for sure. It's definitely <1%.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217
USA
+1-212-874-4020 voice
+1-212-874-3137 fax
email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>

[PEN-L:1210] the "middle class"

[James Devine]

Peter Burns quotes one of our wise solons as saying:
"When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000
to $750,000 a year, that's middle-class. When I see
anyone above that, that's upper-middle class."
Rep Fred Heinaman 

Can someone give an estimate of what percentage of US households 
or families earns within this range? above this range? below this 
range? 

It used to be "inside the beltway" cant that "middle class" meant 
people who earned less than congressional represenatives. That 
plus the above quote shows the bankruptcy of income-based 
definitions of "middle class." 

It's interesting, BTW, that establishment people in the US no 
longer see this country as being classless.

sincerely,

Jim Devine   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles, CA 90045-2699 USA
310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950
"A society is rich when material goods, including capital,
are cheap, and human beings dear."  -- R.H. Tawney.

[PEN-L:3735] Re: Middle Class

[Paul Cockshott]

This discussion of the economic boundaries between
classes fails to grasp that class alignment is essentially
determined by the way economic interests interact with
political struggles.

If we base ourselves on what has actually happened in advanced capitalist 
countries, there is little evidence that they have a 'revolutionary 
class' in the sense implied by the question. As far as I am aware, there 
has not yet been a single revolutionary insurrection in an advanced 
capitaist country. A revolutionary class that never engages in revolution 
does not exist.
The whole idea of a revolutionary class is misleading. Classes are 
semi-permanent features of an economic system, whereas revolutions are 
transitory events. So revolutionaryness can't be an inherent attribute of 
a class. 
It is only in the special conditions of a revolutionary crisis that one 
can say that the majority of a class is for or against revolution. When a 
revolution breaks out, you still don't have a revolutionary class, you 
have a revolutionary movement. Who supports the movement, depends upon 
what is at stake, and how this relates to classes' economic interests. 
The same economic class can take different sides according to the 
circumstances. For instance, small farmers in Greece provided the bedrock 
support of the CP during the attempted revolution in the '40s, whereas 
tha classs had lent towards Fascism and counter revolution in other 
European countries during the '30s.
You can't say who will be revolutionary except in terms of a real 
revolutionary movement. You need to know the aims of the movement, how it 
attempts to redress the grievances of different sections of society. A 
lot depends too, on what is being offered by reactionary and reformist 
political movements at the same time. Revolutionary movements, like all 
political groups, must compete for the loyalty of their supporters. 
Whether a class becomes revolutionary, depends upon which side wins the 
support of a majority of its members. Politics, not economics, must be in 
command. 
Any successfull political movement must adapt to real economic conflicts 
of interest. Politics may command, but some of the levers it uses are 
economic. You don't need marxism to know this - ask any Tory. It is here 
that discussion of the economic position of different classes becomes 
relevant. You can't read a class's politics off from its economic 
interests, but unless politics takes interests into account it will fail. 
So instead of trying to define a revolutionary class in the abstract we 
should ask what objectives, and what circumstances, could make classes 
adding up to a majority of the population revolutionary.
It is obvious, that whilst wage and salary earners form the majority of 
the economically active population in advanced capitalist countries, self 
consciously working-class parties rarely win the support of this 
majority. Whilst Sweden may be an exception, the general rule is that 
explicitly pro-capitalist parties win the support of a large proportion 
of those who sell their labour power. One might say that this is because 
they are duped, but as Kautsky pointed out, if you attempt to explain 
history in terms of people being fooled, it is you thats the fool. The 
success of the Tories in winning so many votes among the working classes 
can only be understood in terms of the conflicts of interest that exist 
among these classes. Right wing politics proposes solutions that divide 
the working classes, winning over sections to the side of big business. 
Fracture planes
The working classes can be fractured along a number of different planes. 
Which way the pieces fall depends upon how the blow is struck. 
Conflict between state and private sector employees. In general, state 
empoyees are unproductive. That is their labour exchanges against state 
revenue rather than against capital. Since that revenue comes from taxes, 
which in large part fall upon workers in the private sector, the right 
can exploit this division by proposing tax cuts financed by reducing the 
wages and conditions of work of state employees. This strategy works very 
well. This conflict can only be overcome politically. Only the prospect 
of a new political system that enables the population at large to 
determine the level of public expenditure on social services can overcome 
this.
Conflict between the unemployed and the employed. To the extent that 
sectins of the unemployed are supported out of state revenue, drawn from 
workers taxes, this can be exploited by the right. Only the prospect of a 
socialist economy run on Lenin's stern maxim, he who does not work 
neither shall he eat, can eliminate this source of conflict.
Conflict between private unproductive sector employees and other workers. 
 Those employed by banks, marketing firms, insurance companies etc, are 
also unproductive. Unlike state employees however, their salaries are 
paid out of the revenues of capital. As such they tend

[PEN-L:3542] Re: Middle Class

[Louis N Proyect]

This discussion about how to "categorize" workers versus the middle-class 
reminds me of a discussion that took place 25 years ago in the Trotskyist 
SWP. While most of the party supported work with students, women and 
other "peripheral" layers, a number of "workerist" dissidents argued that the 
SWP should return to its proletarian roots. They also had a strict definition 
of the working class. According to their definition, workers alone 
produce surplus value. Steel workers, auto workers, etc. fall into this 
category. Truck drivers who transport commodities from the factory to 
the warehouse are also workers. But bank tellers, computer programmers, 
circus clowns, nurses et al are not workers since they don't produce 
surplus value. While workers are "exploited", non-workers are simply 
"oppressed".

I have no idea where the workerists picked up these curious notions. I 
wouldn't even call it vulgar Marxism. I think it could be better described as 
vulgar Aristotelianism. This attempt to categorize human beings in a 
narrow, economic sense is at odds with Marx's dialectical method.

It will also cause you to miss the boat politically. The SWP used this 
definition to colonize its membership into basic industry and basically 
wrecked itself in the process.

Radicals and revolutionaries must avoid narrow economic schemas. If Lenin 
had adopted this approach, he never would have paid as much attention to 
the Russian peasantry, a "petty-bourgeois" strata. The Bolsheviks actually 
adopted the SR program for the peasantry and won power as a result. The 
more "orthodox" Menshiviks missed the boat by ignoring peasant demands.

Rather than focusing obsessively on how people relate to the means of 
production, the left should pay closer attention to the concrete reality of 
people in struggle. In Argentina in the 70's, to cite one example, the two 
most important unions in the revolutionary movement were auto workers 
AND bank workers.

Many types of "middle layer" employees are becoming proletarianized. A 
computer programmer in the 1960's was a part of highly professional elite. 
Today, computer programmers function in highly disciplined and routinized 
project teams with very little job security and chance for advancement. I 
have witnessed the dislocations in this industry for over a decade now and 
have reported on the impact it had on workers at Goldman-Sachs a few 
years ago, when a number of them were fired summarily.

Another dramatic example of the wrenching changes in these "middle 
layers" is the NY "mad bomber", Edward Leary. This individual was 
thrown into economic disaster by simply losing his computer job. 
On the surface, he seemed completely integrated with the life-style and 
values of the American ruling class, but his membership in this group 
was illusory. He really had nothing to sell but his labor power.

Tremendous changes are taking places in the United States today. 
Economists should pay close attention to the entire population and not just 
the traditional "blue collar" job categories. I think its entirely 
possible that many millions of people who gravitate to the Perot movement 
can be won over to a progressive program. They should not be ignored.

Louis Proyect

[PEN-L:3540] Re: Middle Class

[Ajit Sinha]

Can't get away from it! I think this time I'm in general agreement with Bill
Mitchel. But let me briefly state what I think is Marx's position on "services"
. This may clearify some of the issues and the various confusions we always get
into regarding this issue.

One of the fundamental aspects of Marx's Materialist thesis is that the object
of knowledge is REPRODUCTION-- reproduction of LIFE. This has two aspects. One
is the sexual reproduction of the species, and the other is the sustenance or
the daly reproduction of life. The first aspect is bracketed by Marx and the
second is his focus of inquiry. In a commodity producing economy, the daly
sustenance is produced within a social division of labor, i.e the
interdependence of life activity is MEDIATED through exchange of PRODUCTS. So
commodities are products-- they are products of labor that can be reproduced.

Services for Marx means something different then a commodity-- they are not
products. Only those laboring activities are "services" when the relation of
the final consumer is directly related to the producer of the laboring service
without the mediation of any product. In other words, the consumer HIRES the
laborer directly, e.g. hiring domestic servants, etc. In this case it is always
REVENUE and not capital that stands opposed to labor. In Marx's time there was
no such thing as the service "sector". The few example he gives of are opera
singers, buffoons, teacher, etc. are all remenents or survivors of the feudal
system. He actually suggests that with the development of capitalism "a
material difference between productive and unproductive labour will more and
more develop, in as much as the former, with minor exceptions, will exclusively
produce commodities, while the later, with minor exceptions, will perform only
personal services."

The "service sector" today is of course producing PRODUCTS. For example, when
you order a pizza or chinese food, etc. delivered home, you are not buying the
service of the delivery person or the cook etc., you are buying a product from
a capitalist, it's just that capital has further taken over the laboring
activity that was usually self done. Here the difference in the relation is
that you are not hiring the workers-- so not buying a "service" Marx's sense.
So I agree that most of what we call "service sector" today is producing
products and commodities, and the laborers in these sectors are producing
surplus. However, labor involved in banking, book keeping, and general buying
and selling are clearly unproductive. Note that all exploited labor is not
productive of surplus-- as the domestic servant or the bank worker or book
keeper can be as much exploited as any productive worker. However, exploitation
is essential for "surplus" to arise.

As far as selling of a smile and a style etc. is concerned, I'm not sure to
what extent marx could handle it. This is Baudrillard's terrin. I think he is
quite interesting, but one should note that his thesis attacks the very idea of
PRODUCTION as the fundamental prolematic. May be I should stop here until the
year. Happy new year everybody!
   cheere, ajit sinha

[PEN-L:3539] Re: middle class

[Michael Lichter]

On Dec 21,  8:09am, Jim Devine wrote:
> BTW, Marx had a critique of human capital theory in vol. III of
> CAPITAL (International Publ ed, p. 466): he argued that
> the "interest" one earns on one's "human capital" is completely
> different from that earned on real capital, either means of
> production or financial instruments. A worker's human capital
> is embodied in his or her person, while interest can only be
> earned by selling labor-power to a real capitalist.

How is that a critique?  Do HC theorists think that "human capital" is
*really* "real" capital?  Like Bourdieu's social, cultural, and
symbolic capitals, human capital is only metaphorically (economic)
capital; like them, HC is only "convertible" into economic capital.

Interestingly, an article that has gotten a lot of attention as
representative of the New Economic Sociology is James Coleman's "Social
Capital in the Creation of Human Capital" (1988, AJS 94:S95-120).  I
think that's interesting because Bourdieu's forms of capital were
conceptualized more or less directly in opposition to HC theory -- what
really matters is not how much schooling or "experience" you have, but
who you know, how you present yourself, etc.  Regarding the "how is
that different?" question, this suggests that while Bourdieu meant to
counterpose the two, what really distinguishes them (at least in terms
of the economist's interests) is their relative emphasis on
education/skill aqcuisition vs. social/cultural factors in the
generation of economic outcomes.

Michael

-- 
Michael Lichter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -+
Department of Sociology  |
University of California, Los Angeles ---+

[PEN-L:3537] Re: Middle Class

[Francis Thompson]

On Thu, 22 Dec 1994, Cotter_Cindy wrote:

> "To caricature Bourdieu, the revolution hasn't happened 
> because although lots of intellectuals take great 
> pleasure in declaring themselves Marxists (and holding
> long, arcane discussions about the precise nature of 
> the middle class...), these same intellectuals 
> thoroughly despise the real, live proletarians around 
> them."
> 
> And, of course, the poor proles couldn't pull off a
> revolution on their own; )
> 
> Cindy Cotter
> 
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 

Uggh, that would be so unaesthetic. : )) All kidding aside, your comment 
does sum up Bourdieu fairly well -- as the first poster on Bourdieu 
mentioned (I think), Bourdieu denies the existence of any even 
semi-autonomous working-class culture. To be more precise, he more or 
less defines the border between real proles and those with petty-bourgeois 
aspirations (my vocabulary, not necessarily his) as the border between 
those who accept that they _have_ no "culture" (= cultural capital) and 
those who desperately try to pretend they do have "culture", for example 
by cluttering up their house with kitschy knick-knacks.

Somebody told me a couple years ago that Bourdieu has since moved off 
some of his more extreme positions in _La Distinction_, but by then I was 
pretty much out of university life and I've never checked.

Francis Thompson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Montreal, Quebec
Canada

[PEN-L:3536] Re: Middle Class

[Cotter_Cindy]

"To caricature Bourdieu, the revolution hasn't happened 
because although lots of intellectuals take great 
pleasure in declaring themselves Marxists (and holding
long, arcane discussions about the precise nature of 
the middle class...), these same intellectuals 
thoroughly despise the real, live proletarians around 
them."

And, of course, the poor proles couldn't pull off a
revolution on their own; )

Cindy Cotter

[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Middle Class

[kevin quinn]

On Thu, 22 Dec 1994, Jim Devine wrote:

> I agree that Marxism is not enough. If we had a seance, Marx
> would probably agree.

> Happy Secular-Humanist Winter Festival!

Could someone look into the possibility Jim broaches here!  At the 
next URPE meeting, couldn't there be a session titled: "Contacting the 
Spirit of Marx and Engels: the Medium and the Message" or "Ouija, ouija on 
the wall, who's the most revolutionary class or class-fraction of all?"

Just kidding--I don't mean to derail the discussion! Happy 
Secular-Humanist Winter Festival to you too! Yes, Virginia, there is a 
Sanity Clause-- which we'll invoke if--G__ forbid-- Newt or Dan takes the 
Highest Office two winter festivals hence! (Apologies to Chico Marx for 
stealing his bad Xmas pun.)

Middle class/Pierre Bourdieu

[Francis Thompson]

Jonathan P. Beasley-Murray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Just a quick note (and I know this is my bugbear), but what does anyone 
> think of Pierre Bourdieu's reformulation of class, most clearly effected 
> in his _Distinction_?

> Essentially, he turns class into a two-dimensional field rather than a 
> one-dimensional "ladder" progressing from working to upper (or whatever 
> the appropriate formulation may be--he is working from a sociological 
> tradition).  This move in itself seems essential, and begins to avoid the 
> dichotomizing seen in some of the contributions to the pen-l list 
> (working or not? as if these were the only possibilities)

> This he attempts to accomplish through introducing the notion of 
> "cultural capital" as a variant of financial capital: this then explains 
> different class factions within the middle class, in that (for example) 
> artists and professors etc. generally have high cultural but relatively 
> little financial capital, while the situation is reversed with 
> industrialists etc.  Cultural capital is itself a contested term, in that 
> within certain specific and bounded fields some items would be 
> well-valued, and in others less so.  Cultural capital can, however, be 
> converted into financial capital (though not through any simple process): 
> the high price paid for Harvard or Shaq's salary could both be read in 
> this way.

> His effort is astonishing (and _Distinction_ a must to read), but still 
> only a start, it seems to me.  Here are some problems:

[snip-snip]

Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> responds:

> Bourdieu's theory sure seems like a variant of the human capital
> theory. What are the differences?"


The big difference is that the cultural capital Bourdieu talks about is the
wherewithal that allows the proper snob to know "instinctively" that only
uneducated morons like Pachabel's Canon, put plastic reproductions of the Eiffel
Tower on their mantelpiece and so on. Bourdieu's cultural capital isn't, 
in fact, capital in any way an economist would recognise -- the link to 
production, surplus value, exploitation is tenuous.

Having said that, I agree with the first post: _La Distinction_ is a must read,
highly amusing and insightful, and very relevant to the present discussion on
middle class/shmiddle class. The book purports to be a sociology of taste. Taste
-- as opposed, say, to income -- is almost unanimously perceived to be something
inherent to individuals. Therefore it's perfectly okay to put somebody down for
being gauche, to choose your sexual partners on the basis of similar tastes etc.
But, as Bourdieu notes, taste is of course socially determined, depending on a
person's wealth and education, and how he or she person obtained their 
wealth and education. (Old money and new money act very differently.) 
Taste is thus a crucial, more or less covert tool for establishing the 
social pecking order.

After you read a few chapters, you begin to realize that Bourdieu has a very
different agenda: he wants to answer the basic question of Marxist sociology,
i.e. why hasn't the revolution happened yet, particularly in France? His answer
to that is profoundly depressing (and also thoroughly non-Marxist).

To caricature Bourdieu, the revolution hasn't happened because although lots of
intellectuals take great pleasure in declaring themselves Marxists (and holding
long, arcane discussions about the precise nature of the middle class...), these
same intellectuals thoroughly despise the real, live proletarians around them.
The proles drink plonk, have no taste in music, eat fatty, disgusting food etc.
etc. Indeed, Bourdieu seems to suggest, left-wing intellectuals use their blue-
collar brethren as cannon fodder in their cultural war with the financial elite.
What the intellectuals want isn't actually socialism, but a system that 
gives all power to intellectuals who love long, arcane discussions about 
Marxism.

Bourdieu's research does supply some interesting insights into other phenomena,
such as why blue-collar workers, even CP members, tend to be very conservative
on "social" issues (gay rights etc.) With respect to the US debate (witch hunt?)
on political correctness, I think Bourdieu would argue that the anti-PC 
crowd are not so much out to "get" the Left as they are out to get the 
"cultural capitalists."

With respect to the "middle class," the advantage of Bourdieu's approach is that
he doesn't have to go through elaborate contorsions with respect to relations of
production to explain obvious differences in political and social attitudes
between blue-collar and white-collar workers. On the other hand, he also avoids
the arbitrary, income stratum approach to sociology.

Anyway, when I studied Bourdie

Re: Middle Class

[Jim Devine]

On Wed, 21 Dec 1994 19:53:30 -0800 Pete Bratsis said:
>That so many economists find discussions about economics boring or
>arcane is somewhat puzzeling...

Maybe we should have a debate about whether this stuff is boring
or not. :-)  Seriously, for me it's only the topic of productive
vs. unproductive labor that's not very interesting, because I
don't find it to be very useful. It seems most useful at the
highest level of abstraction, in clarifying some obscurities in
Marx's law of value. It doesn't seem useful in understanding
politics or class.

>. . .  The references to Wright and
>Poulantzas where meant to illustrate the two major Marxist attempts at
>theorizing the position of the 'middle class' as well as to show
>that both differentiate class not by reference to domination but by
>virtue of exploitation - privledging the economic over other spheres
>of life.

One problem I have here is that I don't see "domination" as non-economic.
Without capitalist domination -- supervision backed by the power to
fire, the existence of the reserve army of the unemployed -- there
would be precious little surplus-value produced, even by productive
workers. As I said before, exploitation and domination are intertwined.

What distinguishes "economic" from "non-economic," anyway? Is economic
defined as dealing with the allocation of scarce goods among competing
ends?  I doubt it.  Bowles and Gintis's book CAPITALISM & DEMOCRACY
(ch. 4) has a good discussion of this: they distinguish between
sites and practices. There is an "economic" site (the economy) and
a "political" site (the state), plus the household. In each of
these three spheres, "economic" practice (what they term
appropriation and distribution) occurs.  Also, in each of these
three sites, political and cultural practice occur.

Given this, is it the economic _sphere_ that is most important?
or is it economic _practice_?

>Moreover, is seems that only one side of the economic is
>privledged - production over consumption (granted, they are not
>mutually exclusive etc.).  What should have been more explicit in
>that first post is how this is related to the attempt to reformulate
>our definitions of class...
>the implication intended was that shifting
>to some definition of class that is based on domination instead of
>economic catagories also entails moving from the problematic of
>class as it has developed within Marxism, shifting to some post- or
>non- Marxist position.  This is not unimportant or arcane.

I don't understand why it has to be _either_ domination _or_
exploitation that is at the center of the Marxian definition of
class.

> Furthermore
>I support such a shift - especially regarding class.  This shift
>has very severe strategic implications.  Let us take Lefebvre as
>a case in point. Do not forget that May 68 can be traced back to
>March of the same year when a group of his students protested the
>university policy of having sexually segregaded dorms.  This political
>position is directly related to a shift from the primacy of the economic to
>the 'everyday life'.  This shift is akin to moving away from 'scientific'
>socialism to a more 'utopian' socialism.  The arguments for the historical
>role of the proletariet, the inevatability and desirability of socialism,
>etc. collapse.  Moral catagories now replace the 'scientific' catagories
>of Marxism.  Struggle does not become one of 'unfettering' productive
>forces or realizing some historic duty.  Enjoyment and pleasure
>take center stage.  Antagonistic relations now take all sorts of
>forms not readily reducible to class or exploitation.  A change
>in political strategy and discourse becomes necessary.  Marxism
>is not enough - either to understand contempory society or to create
>messages and discources that actually resonate and have political efficacy.

I generally agree with this, except that I see so-called "scientific
socialism" (what Colletti termed the "Marxism of the Second Inter-
national" and was even worse under the Third International) as
a step backward from Marx's own work.  In many ways, the rebellion
against "scientific socialism" opens up the path back to Marx,
though of course there's no point in setting up a new orthodoxy
or unreasonably glorifying Marx.

BTW, my reading of the Marx & Engels vs. the utopians literature
indicates that this conflict has been exagerrated (by the "scientific
socialists"). According to Ruth Levitas, THE CONCEPT OF UTOPIA
(Syracuse University Press, 1990: p. 35), "The real dispute
between Marx and Engels and the utopian socialists is not about
the merit of goals or of images of the future but about the process
of transf

Re: Middle Class

[bill mitchell]

Ajit said:

 I think Bill M is simply wrong when he says all service
>workers produce surplus since they are paid less in terms of labor than the
>amount of time they work. 

and jim said:

There are two issues here:
(1) can "service" labor be productive, where services are defined as
activities (as opposed to material goods) that provide use-value?
I say, and I believe Marx said, yes to this question, though that is
not to say that _all_ services are productive.

(2) is exchange labor, i.e., the transfer of ownership titles from one
entity (e.g., the McDonalds' corporation) to another (the grease-loving
customer) productive?
As Ajit points out, Marx said no. I agree.

As Ajit also points out, this subject is not very interesting.

well i actually must be boring type b/c i find and have found this subject
quite interesting.

my point is that a service worker clearly can add surplus value. it depends
a bit on what you define as the product. i would say the product we might
call a shirt which we buy in the department store is not the one which left
the sewing machine. capitalism has made a big deal of packaging for example.
and in some "products" which rely on (alleged) "qualitative" differentiation
the product would include the look of the salesperson, the wrapping, the
talk at the point of sale. 

this is much more than merely transferring title deeds. that worker is (as a
seller of labour power) adding to surplus value in global terms.

so ajit, what is a commodity? i seem to define it much more broadly than
perhaps you might.

anyway - if i don't send in more from down south to pen-l this year - i wish
all my mates a happy new year. i avoid any reference to x..s b/c i am
neither a christian nor a believer in routine social customs that are
designed to improve the realisation of the surplus for capitalists and
further entrench the wage (and salary) earners in the morass of consumer debt.

kind regards
bill
**   
 William F. MitchellTelephone: +61-49-215027  .-_|\   
 Department of Economics   +61-49-705133 / \
 The University of NewcastleFax:   +61-49-216919 \.--._/*<-- 
 Callaghan   NSW  2308v  
 Australia  Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED]

 WWW Home Page: http://econ-www.newcastle.edu.au/~bill/billyhp.html 
**

Re: Middle Class

[Pete Bratsis]

That so many economists find discussions about economics boring or 
arcane is somewhat puzzeling.  I admit that I find many aspects of 
economis boring and arcane and, thus, I am in political science and not
economics.  Perhaps someone can explain this apperent disliking.
At any rate, a discussion of class and labor value does not exactly seem 
boring compared to a discussion of econometrics etc.

Much progress has been made in the last few days towards reaching 
some understanding and identifing relevant issues to pursue. None the
less, I think that central point I was attempting to make in the
first post I sent has been overshadowed by the subsequent debate on 
productive and unproductive labor.  The references to Wright and 
Poulantzas where meant to illustrate the two major Marxist attempts at 
theorizing the position of the 'middle class' as well as to show 
that both differentiate class not by reference to domination but by 
virtue of exploitation - privledging the economic over other spheres
of life.  Moreover, is seems that only one side of the economic is 
privledged - production over consumption (granted, they are not 
mutually exclusive etc.).  What should have been more explicit in 
that first post is how this is related to the attempt to reformulate 
our definitions of class.  Rather than acting as some guard of 
Marxist orthodoxy - the implication intended was that shifting
to some definition of class that is based on domination instead of 
economic catagories also entails moving from the problematic of 
class as it has developed within Marxism, shifting to some post- or 
non- Marxist position.  This is not unimportant or arcane.  Furthermore
I support such a shift - especially regarding class.  This shift 
has very severe strategic implications.  Let us take Lefebvre as 
a case in point. Do not forget that May 68 can be traced back to 
March of the same year when a group of his students protested the
university policy of having sexually segregaded dorms.  This political
position is directly related to a shift from the primacy of the economic to 
the 'everyday life'.  This shift is akin to moving away from 'scientific'
socialism to a more 'utopian' socialism.  The arguments for the historical
role of the proletariet, the inevatability and desirability of socialism, 
etc. collapse.  Moral catagories now replace the 'scientific' catagories
of Marxism.  Struggle does not become one of 'unfettering' productive
forces or realizing some historic duty.  Enjoyment and pleasure
take center stage.  Antagonistic relations now take all sorts of 
forms not readily reducible to class or exploitation.  A change
in political strategy and discourse becomes necessary.  Marxism 
is not enough - either to understand contempory society or to create
messages and discources that actually resonate and have political efficacy.

I have some more to say about class consciousness and the ontological status
of class - but will stop here for now.  Its late, and it is probably better
to limit the discussion to a few points at a time.


Peter Bratsis

Re: Middle Class

[Cotter_Cindy]

One small quibble with Doug Orr and the definition of
middle class -- wasn't that $120,000 per household
rather than per individual?  I haven't saved the old
posts.

Cindy Cotter
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: middle class

[DOUG ORR]

I have found the discussion of the precise definitions of class to be
very informative, and it IS very important to have a precise understanding
to guide theoretical work.  However, this discussion started in response
to someone's question about the various proposals being floated by the
republicrats for a middle class tax cut.  So far the discussion has done
almost nothing to address this issue.  And while theory is very important,
I think the progressive economists have to start playing a role in defining
alternatives in policy debates.  The right-wing proposals will be coming
fast and furious and if the left does not do something in response, the
Right will be free to define the agenda.  On another list, there is an
ongoing discussion of an alternative plan for welfare reform.  While that
plan reeks of caving into the Right, it is still slightly better than
what Newt is proposing.  

On the issue of a middle class tax cut, I think it is fairly straight 
forward to argue that individuals making $200,000 or $120,000 are not
middle class, and that this proposal, along with its companion capital
gains tax cut, are simply another effort to redistribute income from the
real middle class to the wealthy.  If we as progressives start pushing
this idea, I am certain we will be making a few "theoretical" errrors, 
i.e., just maybe, someone making $120,000 has a relationship in the
productive sphere that places them "objectively" in the working class.
However, I am equally as certain that this person does not have, nor is
likely ever to have a "working class consciousness."

I think that on the tax cut issue, the ranges suggested by Doug Henwood
make a very good working approximation of "middle class."  In addition, 
they allow a ready (if theoretically fuzzy) mechanism to make international
comparisons.

Enough already, I will stop here.
Doug Orr
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Middle Class

[Rudy Fichtenbaum]

In discussing the definition of the middle class I think it is
instructive to consider Lenin's definition of class:

"Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the 
place they occupy in a historically determined system of social
production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated
by law) to the means of production, by their role in the social 
organization of labour, and , consequently, by the dimensions of the
share of social wealth of which the dispose and the mode of 
acquiring it.  Classes are groups of people one of which can
appropriate the labor of another owing to the different places they
occupy in a definete ystem of social economy."  Collected Works
vol 29 p. 421.

My interpretation of this is that one's relationship to the means
of production is the starting point but the starting point does
not reflect the totality.  Thus, Lenin includes in his definition
not only one's relationship to the means of production by
also one's role in the social organization of production and
share of income (social wealth).

In this context, I think that the definition Jim D. cited
containing an "old middle class" consisting of people who are
self employed and a "new middle class" consisting largely of
managers and people who receive salaries but who function as
agents for capitalists and derive their income from unproductive
labor.

Happy Holiday's to everyone on Pen-l

Rudy


  =
  + Rudy Fichtenbaum+  Internet [EMAIL PROTECTED] +
  + Department of Economics +  Internet [EMAIL PROTECTED]   +
  + Rike Hall   +  Bitnet   [EMAIL PROTECTED]+
  + Wright State University +  Telephone 513-873-3085 +
  + Dayton, OH 45435+  FAX 513-873-3545   +
  +

Re: middle class

[Jim Devine]

Bourdieu's theory sure seems like a variant of the human capital
theory. What are the differences?

BTW, Marx had a critique of human capital theory in vol. III of
CAPITAL (International Publ ed, p. 466): he argued that
the "interest" one earns on one's "human capital" is completely
different from that earned on real capital, either means of
production or financial instruments. A worker's human capital
is embodied in his or her person, while interest can only be
earned by selling labor-power to a real capitalist.

in pen-l solidarity,

Jim Devine
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles, CA 90045-2699 USA
310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950

Sacrifice a Christian for Saturnalia! :-)

Re: Middle Class

[Jim Devine]

On Tue, 20 Dec 1994 22:20:01 -0800 Ajit Sinha said:
>My
>question is: is the activity of exchanging a productive activity or not? The
>general position taken by Jim and Bill would consider it productive or say
>that there is no distinction between productive and exchanging activity.

There are two issues here:
(1) can "service" labor be productive, where services are defined as
activities (as opposed to material goods) that provide use-value?
I say, and I believe Marx said, yes to this question, though that is
not to say that _all_ services are productive.

(2) is exchange labor, i.e., the transfer of ownership titles from one
entity (e.g., the McDonalds' corporation) to another (the grease-loving
customer) productive?
As Ajit points out, Marx said no. I agree.

As Ajit also points out, this subject is not very interesting.

in pen-l solidarity,

Jim Devine
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles, CA 90045-2699 USA
310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950

Have a Happy Hanukah (a bit late, but what the heck),
a Cheerful Christmas, a Creative Kwanzaa, and a Splendid
Saturnalia (also late, but...)!

Re: middle class and autonomia

[Jonathan P. Beasley-Murray]

On Mon, 19 Dec 1994 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> --
> Date: Mon, 19 Dec 1994 15:21:03 EST
> From: Pete Bratsis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Middle Class

[snip]

> Frankly, I prefer a move to emphasising
> domination over exploitation as well as, in the Fordist era, showing 
> the importance of consumption in differientiating society.  Toni Negri
> has, I think, made a solid attempt to move away this productivist 
> position through his concept of the mass worker where it is no longer
> exploitation that is key (I do not know Negri enough to talk about his
> idea's without the books in front of me, perhaps some one who is more
> familar with this stuff can elaborate) cf. 'Archaeology and Project:
> The Mass Worker and the Social Worker' in REVOLUTIOM RETRIEVED, 
> Toni Negri (1988, Red Notes).  

I don't think anyone else on pen-l has picked up on Pete's suggestion 
here... but I'll have a go (and in cross-posting to marxism might pick up 
a few responses from others who know still more than I).

The general trajectory of autonomist marxism has been to return left 
thought to looking "from the working class point of view."  After all, 
talk of exploitation, productive or non-productive labour etc. etc. is 
still looking at society from the point of view of capital (even if the 
working class must also be able to comprehend that point of view).  
However, labour-power is defined by its exceeding such bounds imposed by 
the command of capital, both in so far as capital is an antagonistic 
(rather than a merely functional) relationship and in so far as the 
working class defines its own needs and (in later Negri, eg. _The Savage 
Anomaly_) indeed its own *being*--this is "constituent power."

As such, autonomist marxism resists analyses premised on the "dignity of 
labour" or union exchanges of productivity for salary raises etc.--in 
this sense "workerism" was defined by the "strategy of refusal," the 
premier part of which was the refusal to work (as evidenced in wildcat 
strikes, sabotage etc.) but which also implied the refusal to be defined 
through work.

While some of these moves have been attacked as smacking of idealism and 
intellectual abstraction--from Tronti's formulations that the working 
class has always been in command of capitalist production to Negri's 
later vision of the new working class community--certainly they bring at 
the very least a corrective to some of the more interminable debates 
about class, especially, in my view, those revolving around the old 
productive/non-productive labour (apparent) dichotomy.  They also could 
offer (I think) a coalitionist concept of working class, in that the 
working class's process of self-definition may include women, minorities 
and other social movement in so far as they are in struggle together 
(this is more or less the concern of Guattari and Negri's _Communists 
Like Us_ as I remember).

I'd recommend Michael Hardt and Negri's _Labor of Dionysus_ as an
accessible and practical dive into *autonomia* for a contemporary US
audience, and Steve Wright's PhD thesis "Forcing the Lock?" for a
comprehensive survey of workerism, somewhat alleviating the stress that
has been laid on Negri alone (a stress that is in part a result of
contingent notoriety and the accidents of translation history). 

But I hope Michael and Steve might also wish to jump in here.

> Peter Bratsis
> Grad. Center, CUNY

Take care

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Literature Program
Duke University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: middle class

[Jonathan P. Beasley-Murray]

Just a quick note (and I know this is my bugbear), but what does anyone 
think of Pierre Bourdieu's reformulation of class, most clearly effected 
in his _Distinction_?

Essentially, he turns class into a two-dimensional field rather than a 
one-dimensional "ladder" progressing from working to upper (or whatever 
the appropriate formulation may be--he is working from a sociological 
tradition).  This move in itself seems essential, and begins to avoid the 
dichotomizing seen in some of the contributions to the pen-l list 
(working or not? as if these were the only possibilities)

This he attempts to accomplish through introducing the notion of 
"cultural capital" as a variant of financial capital: this then explains 
different class factions within the middle class, in that (for example) 
artists and professors etc. generally have high cultural but relatively 
little financial capital, while the situation is reversed with 
industrialists etc.  Cultural capital is itself a contested term, in that 
within certain specific and bounded fields some items would be 
well-valued, and in others less so.  Cultural capital can, however, be 
converted into financial capital (though not through any simple process): 
the high price paid for Harvard or Shaq's salary could both be read in 
this way.

His effort is astonishing (and _Distinction_ a must to read), but still 
only a start, it seems to me.  Here are some problems:

i.   His treatment of working class culture is as reductive and monolithic 
as his treatment of middle class culture is rich.
ii.  He alludes to exploitation of wage-labour as the basis of value, but 
generally is content to avoid economics, asserting however that cultural 
"capital" is not a metaphor: who knows what happens to the LTV or similar 
traditional bases for the left-critique of (cultural) capitalism.
iii. While he is good as explicating the operations of certain fields 
(especially the dominant fields of taste authorizing the acquisition of 
cultural capital through the educational system), generally a systematic 
anaylsis eludes him.

Any thoughts?

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Literature Program
Duke University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Middle Class

[Ajit Sinha]

I think Peter Bratsis has raised some serious theoretical
issue of productive/unproductive labor distinction in Marx's analysis. I'm not
satisfied with either Bill Mitchel or Jim Devine's answers. As a matter of fact
I think their general position is quite mileading and incorrect. Bill Mitchel
thinks that "services provide surplus by definition", because the service
worker gets less in labor-terms as wages than s/he actually works. Jim concurs
with it and goes on to argue that "productive/unproductive labor distinction is
very fuzzy", since it is the "collective" workers that produce surplus. My
question is: is the activity of exchanging a productive activity or not? The
general position taken by Jim and Bill would consider it productive or say
that there is no distinction between productive and exchanging activity. This
position is consistently denied by Marx, and for good reason. Before the advent
of classical economics, the utilitarians had argued that the utility of
commodities increase because of exchange, and so exchange explained the
surplus. The general Mercantilist position was also that the surplus was
generated in circulation ("profit upon alienation"). The foundation of
classical value theory and Marx's value theory in particular is to deny this
proposition any validity. The distinction between the sphere of production and
the sphere of circulation is fundamental to surplus theories in general and
Marxist theory in particular. This distinction is essentially a distinction of
productive and unproductive activity. If the activity in the sphere of
circulation canot produce value or surplus value, it by definition is
unproductive even if the activity is done by the wage worker. So the
distinction between productive and unproductive labor has significant
theoretical meaning. I think Bill M is simply wrong when he says all service
workers produce surplus since they are paid less in terms of labor than the
amount of time they work. In that case somebody hiring some one to clean the
house for eight hours on the market wage would call it productive labor,
whereas this is clearly a case of worker being hired out of revenue rather
than capital and therefore cannot be productive of surplus.

Believe me, I have no interest in a debate over productive/unproductive labor,
at least at this point in time, i.e. just before ASSA. But then I thought I
should put down some of these points for the record.

   Cheers, ajit sinha

Re: Middle Class

[Jim Devine]

 one
part of the equation.

Bratsis: Furthermore, I do not consider everything that is not
'Marxist' wrong ...

Me: good, we agree.

Bratsis: On the issue of commodities.  I do not see the significance
of the auto worker example.  It is true that no one worker is
responsible for the production of a car as a commodity.  But, this
does not mean that these workers are not involved in the process of
commodity production.

Me: you asked about an individual.

Bratsis: The labor power of all these auto workers ...  are embodied
into a material thing that is EXTERNAL from themselfs and, if the
circit of capital is completed, whose exchange value becomes
realized by the actual sale of this commodity ...

Me: agreed.

Bratsis: Furthermore, while any given practice is material...
everything that is material is not a commodity In what ways are
these material practices 'external' 'an object outside us'?

Me: a service worker can create an object outside of him or her. For
example, he or she can contribute indirectly to the production of a
material object. The quality inspector, for example, helps create
the car as part of the collective worker.

Given the interdependency of capitalist production (or what Marx and
Engels termed its socialized nature), it is hard to reject what Jim
O'Connor calls "indirectly productive labor."  This makes the
productive/unproductive distinction very fuzzy. All sorts of
wage-earning people can be seen as part of the collective worker.
I agree with Justin Schwartz and E.K. Hunt here. Justin, do you have
an article somewhere? (probably in a pile of paper on my desk :-))

Further, as Bill Mitchell adds: "services provide surplus value by
definition. a service worker works longer for the boss than they
would have to if they were paid their share of product produced per
hour. they thus provide unpaid labour."

Bratsis: On productive/unproductive labor.  My second message was a
bit misleading in that I did not intend to imply that necessary we
must rely on the productive/unproductive distinction.  I intended to
point out that the privledging of the point of production in
defining class is common to Marxism as such...

Me: I'm all in favor of looking at the point of production.
Alienation and domination relations occur at the point of
production, no? Also, the clerk at McDonald's is pretty damn close
to the point of production even if he or she is simply tranferring
ownership titles of burgers and is therefore "unproductive."

Bill Mitchell writes: a marxist has only two classes - capitalist
and workers. it is a simple matter of who owns the material means of
prodcution and who _only_ owns labour power (both being
commodities). the worker is a person who has to sell her/his labour
power for survival.

Me: I think that's there are only two classes on a high level of
abstraction, a level of abstraction at which people do not live. But
if we move toward the empirical world, we find all sorts of mixed
cases (contradictory class positions). For example, there are people
in the middle layers who are totally dependent on capital for their
survival (and thus share a major characteristic of the proletariat)
but also dominate workers in the production hierarchy (and thus
share a characteristic of the capitalists). They may also have
relatively unalienated jobs, being to an extent self-supervising.

The concept of contradictory class positions helps answer Michael
Lichter's question: "... what DO Marxists say about workers who are
also rentiers?  Many workers are also very small scale capitalists,
in the sense that they own a piece of capital in a stock portfolio.
And then there are (some workers) at United Airlines, who "own"
their employer."

Me: I would say that owning some stock is far from making one even a
part-capitalist.  As a _minimum_ condition for being a capitalist, I
would say that it is necessary to be independently wealthy. That is,
one must own sufficient wealth that one need not work for anyone
else in order to earn the average income in society.  Of course,
many of the independently wealthy do have jobs, but they don't need
them and can pick and choose among them.

Mitchell continues: i use middle class in a disparaging fashion to
refer to this amorphous lump of people who have more or less secure
jobs, who have a mortgage, and who are more or less conservative in
their thinking accepting society as it is b/c it delivers to them an
adequate material level of smugness...

Me: having a mortgage is a damn good definition of "middle
class" as we in the US use that term. Among other things, it's very
operational for empirical work (though sometimes capitalists take
out mortgages not because they need them but as part of a
speculative strategy). I'll bet a month's worth of my mortgage
payments that it's a secularly shrinking percentage of the US
populat

Re: Middle class-shmiddle class

[shecker]

>This is true, but what DO Marxists say about workers who are also
>rentiers?  Many workers are also very small scale capitalists, in the
>sense that they own a piece of capital in a stock portfolio.  And then
>there are the flight attendants at United Airlines, who "own" their
>employer.  Wallerstein calls peasants who are also wage laborers
>"sub-proletarians".  Are these "super-proletarians"?
>
>Michael
>
>--
>Michael Lichter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -+
>Department of Sociology  |
>University of California, Los Angeles ---+

Careful- I got an earful on a recent flight from a United flight attendant.
The Pilots and Machinists own a piece of United; the flight attendants
were not part of the deal.  One could probably start an entire sub-debate
on the relative positions of these groups within United, not to mention the
unrepresented employees, but I'm not going to be the one to do it.

Steve


Steven Hecker
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Labor Education and Research Center
1289 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR  97403-1289
telephone: 503-346-2788
fax: 503-346-2790

Hunt's take on LVT : who's middle class

[Robert Naiman]

I like the line that Hunt takes in his book on the history of
economic thought: the labor theory of value works in the aggregate as an
explanation of who produces the surplus, and that's what's important. I
take this to be along the lines of what Justin Schwartz is saying.
A focus on the production of surplus value at the local level
(factory or whatever) tends to encourage the view that the "unfairness"
of capitalist production could be addressed if each worker received his
or her "full value" whereas presumably the goal of the left is the
redistriution of the surplus at the societal level "from each according
to his or her ability..."
The question of fairness between different groups of workers
should therefore be considered separately from their value-contribution
"abolition of the wages system".
If you agree with the above then it makes sense, politically and
theoretically (not that I care about the latter), to define the working
class as everyone who does not participate meaningfully in the ownership
and control of the means of production, and whose primary participation
in the economy is the selling of labor power. "Truth is whatever serves
the interest of the proletariat" (That is, we want the working class to
be a super-majority because we're trying to speak "in the general
interest".)

Bob Naiman
"Marxism not as it was, but as it should have been."

Re: Middle Class

[Michael Perelman]

Highly paid professional athletes rarely see themselves as working class.
Tom Macmillan (I think that was his name) was a middle of the road democrat.
Most of the rest in Congress are very conservative.  Vinegar Bend Mizel, Jim
Bunning, and now Steve Largent.  Next Charles Barkley will win the governorship
of Alabama as a Quayle clone.

Or does Bill Bradley see himself as a representative of the workers?

..


-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 916-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Middle Class

[Thomas Schumacher]

 We shouldn't complain when someone treats "marxism" as a
whole and then go on to treat the working or middle classes as
a unitary whole.  As Stuart Hall has noted, the working class (and 
by implication, the middle classes as well) is not a unitary whole
but is fractured along ideological (i.e., socially determined)
lines, including the lines of race and gender.  By treating class
as solely the function of a relationship to the means of
production, these contradictions within the working class are
lost.  Moreover, to assert (as does Lukacs) that the
contradiction between labor and capital makes the working class
the only revolutionary class raises the specter of false
consciousness for those workers who are not revolutionary. 
Instead, Hall suggests that capitalism gives us economic classes
"constituted in the economic relations of production," but that
between this relationship and political action are a set of
articulating forms (practices of the class struggle) which obey a
logic of their own in addition to the (over) determinations of
the economic base.  There thus exists a "complex unity" of
contending forces which are drawn together in their articulation
in everyday practices.  
 Hunt has argued that it is these political and ideological
practices which affect the relation of people to classes.  This
is similar to E. P. Thompson's argument that 
 class happens when some men [sic], as a result of common
 experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the
 identity of their interests as between themselves, and as
 against other men whose interests are different from (and
 usually opposed to) theirs.
These practices and experiences are not static or given but are
rather historical relationships.  Therefore, class itself becomes
an historical process rather than a set of predetermined
categories.  If as many have argued class has both subjective and
objective components, both must be seen as processual (i.e.,
historical) rather than as static.  Wacquant argues that class
exists as a social space between the categories of class
structure and lived experience (that is, specific class
practices).  It exists in the relationship "as it is historically
produced, reproduced, and transformed."  The categories of
Weberian class analysis like status and authority can be thought
of as experiences and class practices which are important in the
formation of classes rather than as constituting their
"structure."  But in criticizing both marxist and Weberian
models of understanding the middle class, Wacquant argues that
 the epistemic ambition of defining, once and for all, the
 correct classification, of discovering the "real" boundaries
 of the middle class, is doomed to failure because it rests
 on a fundamentally mistaken conception of the ontological
 status of classes:  The middle class, like any other social
 group, does not exist ready-made in reality.  It must be
 constituted through material and symbolic struggles waged
 simultaneously over class and between classes; it is a
 historically variable and reversible effect of these
 struggles.
Class experiences may be "largely determined" by productive
relationships but are not pre-formed categories.  Therefore, an
understanding of class structure and formation comes only through
investigation of specific historical moments and articulations
and not in the construction of sociological categories on an a
priori basis.
 In this sense, I think that Pete's mentioning of Lefebvre
and the problem of consuption as the site of class formation is
an interesting one.  Thus for example, as a graduate student
with a part-time job and a stipend, my class position might be
different than that of someone who makes the same amount of money
flipping burgers all week.  Income-based and static categories of
class miss out on this.  Within the university, graduate students
might be seen as some of the most exploited workers on the payroll;
but our "class position" has to be understood as different from,
say, the sub-contracted workers who clean the buildings at night
who may or may not make more money than us because of the very
different class practices, for example patterns of consumption.
 This may all be a bit over-stated in a culturalist direction,
but it seems to be a useful corrective to the will to know of
more social scientific perspectives.

Tom Schumacher
Dept. of Communication
Ohio State University

Re: Middle class-shmiddle class

[Ellen Dannin ([EMAIL PROTECTED])]

I am sorry if my message suggested I took the discussion lightly.  I was 
trying to suggest that there is another and more insidious event taking 
place in the reordering of our society and its thinking.  I suppose 
rather than looking at this as if we had suddenly re-entered the middle 
ages with all of us toiling in a rigid hierarchy whose structure was 
created by god and thus unassailable, I could turn to another analogy a 
la the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Whatever is in fact happening in 
people's lives right now, they all seem to have bought into a very new 
value system, as if their very thoughts were controlled by aliens who do 
not have the survival of people and community within their values.

Now this is certainly something that has been and is being disucssed in 
the attempt to formulate who is in adn out of the middle class - or if 
there is even a middle class.  I have nothing against making fine 
distinctions. Teaching folks to make those distinctions is what I do.  
However, there is an intensity to what is happening right now that 
suggests to me the importance of focussing there to help tear down the 
illusion which has been erected and has obscured the reality of our lives 
now.

Ellen J. Dannin
California Western School of Law

Re: Middle Class

[Justin Schwartz]

On Mon, 19 Dec 1994, Pete Bratsis wrote:
> 
> Why are clerks more like industrial workers than 'productive' members
> of the middle strata?  What are these productive members of the middle
> strata?  I don't think that the emphasis on productive labor is exclusive
> to Poulantzas.  Marxism as a whole shares this position.  Can one be a 
> proleterian if one is not involved in the production of commodities?
> Can there be surpluss labor value if there is no material object produced
> that contains exchange value?
> 

A good many Marxists have questioned the productive/unproductive labor
distinction, for several excellent reasons:

1. It requires a hard and fast distinction be made between "production"
of surplus value and its "mere" circulation. But the distinction is
elusive. Marx counts transport workers as productive since "use value is
materialized only in consumption [which] may necessitate a change in
location of these things" (Capital II, p. 153, International edn.--I quote
from memory). But if any labor is productive which is necessary for a
commodity to be consumed, the labor of state bureaucrats who administer,
e.g., the transport system or private bank clerks and tellers who run the
banking system is productive; so is that of advertising copy writers who
inform the public about commodities and the media workers who create the
TV, etc. which sustains advertising; arguably too so is that od workers in
the welfare system whose activities ensure that the commodities consumed
by welfare recipients are consumed. In TSV--I forget just where, Marx says
that all who "contribute" to the production of a commodity are productive
laborers (capitalists of course do note contribute, according to Marx).
But that draws the net far wider than Marx himself is willing to allow.
"Contribution" is a vague and elastic criterion.

2. More deeply, the productive-unproductive distinction turns on a
fundamental confusion, shared by Marx, about his own theory of value. If
productive labor is essentially that which produces s-value, the idea that
we have to be able to point to a particular commodity embodying s-value
which a worker produces or to the production of which a worker
"contributes" for that worker to be productive presupposes what Marx's
theory of value denies, that value can be disaggregated into particular
commodities and thus kinds of labor. This was Ricardo's view, and Marx
criticizes it. For Marx, value is an aggregate category: all the workers
in a society produce a mass of value which is defined only at the
aggregate level because only at that level is the idea of abstract labor
and necessary labor time coherent. In making the productive-unproductive
distinction Marx seems to have reverted to Ricardo.

What he ought to have said what that any work done for wages is
productive. Someone remarked that this is a market-based notion, but in
the context of Marx's total theory it is not. That is because in that
context work is done for wages mainly when workers own their labor power
but no means of production. Wage labor is a function of the relations of
production. And it produces, in and only in aggregate, s-value, which is
appropriated by capitalists collectively.

As to the definition of the working class vs the middle class: it seems
pretty straightforward that the working class is indeed just the group that
works for wages because of its relation to the means of production,
owning all of its own labor power and no means of production. Income
doesn't matter here. The "middle class" is not a Marxist category, which
doesn't mean that it's not a useful one, depending on how it is defined
and whether middle class status, defined, e.g., in terms of SES or income
or culture or social status or what have you is a variable which
correlates interestingly with some social behavior we wish to explain.

--Justin Schwartz

Re: Middle Class

[Doug Henwood]

Certainly income is different from class, but it serves as a pretty 
decent proxy. A basketball star like Shaq is no ordinary laborer; teams 
would happily enter a bidding war for his services. I suppose you could 
call it human capital, but I never liked that phrase. But as they say in 
the legal trade, hard cases make bad law; 7-figure athletes are not of 
fruitful theoretical interest.

Still, income serves as a pretty good proxy for class position. Don't 
incomes above a certain level represent a return to capital (see Eisner, 
Michael)? And don't gradations of income within the working class 
represent a social judgment on the kind of lifestyle appropriate to the 
reproduction of that subclass of laborer?

Doug

Doug Henwood [[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Left Business Observer
212-874-4020 (voice)
212-874-3137 (fax)

Re: Middle class-shmiddle class

[Michael Lichter]

On Dec 20,  2:54am, BILL MITCHELL wrote:
> we must be careful to distinguish the ability to extract rentier returns from
> that of being able to extract surplus value. property in marx is a very
> specific thing. the sort of classification system that talks about middle
> classes does not really distinguish different forms of wealth - a marxian
> classification crucially does.

This is true, but what DO Marxists say about workers who are also
rentiers?  Many workers are also very small scale capitalists, in the
sense that they own a piece of capital in a stock portfolio.  And then
there are the flight attendants at United Airlines, who "own" their
employer.  Wallerstein calls peasants who are also wage laborers
"sub-proletarians".  Are these "super-proletarians"?

Michael

-- 
Michael Lichter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -+
Department of Sociology  |
University of California, Los Angeles ---+

Re: Middle class-shmiddle class

[BILL MITCHELL]

John Case argued:


>an important section of industrial workers. Many of these workers own
>property, have skills that have been parleyed into part-time businesses.
>The percentage of workers in basic industry (steel, auto, machine tools,
>etc., in this category, I donot know, exactly. But my experience in the
N>ew England machine tool industry was that the number in this category
>exceeded 30%. Very responsible trade unionists (meaning persons who honestly a
>and competently sought to repreesnt the workers' interests in the shop) often
>voted Republican. The reasons given for this were more often than not related
>to the fact that their political vote was a reflection of their "property"
>intrests: they owned a duplex, or a small apt bldg., and wanted lower 
>taxes on it; racismoften fed these prejudices.

we must be careful to distinguish the ability to extract rentier returns from
that of being able to extract surplus value. property in marx is a very
specific thing. the sort of classification system that talks about middle
classes does not really distinguish different forms of wealth - a marxian
classification crucially does.

kind regards
bill
***

 William F. MitchellTelephone: +61-49-215027  .-_|\   
 Department of Economics   +61-49-705133 / \about 
 The University of NewcastleFax:   +61-49-216919 \.--._/*<-- here   
 Callaghan   NSW  2308v  
 Australia  Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED] 

 World Wide Web Home Page: http://econ-www.newcastle.edu.au/~bill/billyhp.html
***

Re: Middle class-shmiddle class

[JDCASE]

   It seems unfair for Ellen to treat discussions of distinctions within
oppressed classes QUITE so lightly. Unity and the lack of it is related to
some of these distinctions and the ability of political strategy and tactics
to find common ground can depend upon an accurate understanding of the poten-
tial conflicts that may arise between allies.
   The problems of people making 50,000 a year and under 20,000 a year can be
significantly different, even if their solution requires a common effort
directed at a common cause. The same can be said, it seems to me, of many
other potential divisions within the working class.
   The debate over whether non-industrial workers are proletarian, has relevance
to questions of strategy and tactics in revolutionary theory, but mainly in
the organization of revolutionary workers parties, and the base such parties
seek to establish in the trade unions. The sphere of material production
historically delivered the lion's share of extracted surplus value, and
concentrated the workers in the kind of work environment that was conducive
to advancing class consciousness. Of course an important aspect of 
proletarian was that he/she is "propertyless." Trade unionism and perhaps
a conscious policy by bosses (a response to the early successes of indus-
trial unionism) of corruption has changed this "propertyless" aspect of
an important section of industrial workers. Many of these workers own
property, have skills that have been parleyed into part-time businesses.
The percentage of workers in basic industry (steel, auto, machine tools,
etc., in this category, I donot know, exactly. But my experience in the
New England machine tool industry was that the number in this category
exceeded 30%. Very responsible trade unionists (meaning persons who honestly a
and competently sought to repreesnt the workers' interests in the shop) often
voted Republican. The reasons given for this were more often than not related
to the fact that their political vote was a reflection of their "property"
intrests: they owned a duplex, or a small apt bldg., and wanted lower 
taxes on it; racismoften fed these prejudices.

 Anyway, I find some sympathy with Ellen's dislike of nitpicking
distinctions; but I feel that much of the lack of unity of left theory and
politics stems from not understanding well enough the many components that
go into building class consciousness. So I support the continued discussion
even if it does often get petty.

John CAse
Philadelphia, PA
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Middle Class

[bill mitchell]

Jim said:
> It isn't indi-
>viduals who produce commodities, but the collective worker.
>Anyway, a "proletarian" is someone who sells labor-power for wages.
>
My feeling is that there is a confusion of paradigms (and related
terminology) in this debate.

a marxist has only two classes - capitalist and workers. it is a simple
matter of who owns the material means of prodcution and who _only_ owns
labour power (both being commodities). the worker is a person who has to
sell her/his labour power for survival.

sociologists have a variety of class classifications which economists
sometimes use. lower class, middle class, upper-middle, upper etc. C. Wright
Mills wrote extensively about this classification scheme. it bears no
relation in essence to the marxian categories. however often we hear people
confuse the ideas of a worker being in the lower class (blue collar class)
and a middle class (white collar !) being somehow different.

i use middle class in a disparaging fashion to refer to this amorphous lump
of people who have more or less secure jobs, who have a mortgage, and who
are more or less conservative in their thinking accepting society as it is
b/c it delivers to them an adequate material level of smugness. they tend to
articulate ideas about environmental and other matters of so-called social
concern but send their kids to private schools (selfishly ignoring the
plight of other peoples' kids in the state school system) and drive their
cars everywhere and do not protest at supermarkets about all the wasteful
packaging surrounding the refined food they buy.


>>Can there be surpluss labor value if there is no material object produced
>>that contains exchange value?
>>
>Good question. But can't an activity (a service) involve surplus-value?
>An activity is just as "material" as an object; it just is more
>temporary.  The auto worker who inspects the car to make sure that
>the final product is up to quality standards performs a service.
>That service is just as important as the service of the worker
>who puts the steering wheel on, etc.

services provide surplus value by definition. a service worker works longer
for the boss than they would have to if they were paid their share of
product produced per hour. they thus provide unpaid labour. whether the rate
of surplus value per service worker is less or more than the direct labourer
is irrelevant to the existence of surplus value. 

>
Whether i am a member of the proletariat as a university academic is an
interesting question. but it is easy to answer. of-course i am. my wage is
required by me to survive. i have no independent means of subsistence. i own
no capital. i exploit no workers. i create surplus value.

the question is really in what form the SV is created and realised. i have
this view that services like education are part of the capitalist
infrastructure which supports the direct production process. so my surplus
value might appear in a number of production sites over time, in the sense
that i help provide the capitalist "mills" with compliant workers who can
remain motivated over extended periods in search of rewards (material ?).

so i am a member of the proletariat like any other worker and alienated from
my product. the system goes to lengths to develop the sociological
categories as a divide and conquer strategy. they can then set up tiered
carrots to encourage workers to be compliant. they can then disguise
themselves. the term middle class or whatever is used as much as race and
gender to segment workers into small groups so that they do not all realise
that we can do without the capitalists.

kind regards
bill
**   
 William F. MitchellTelephone: +61-49-215027  .-_|\   
 Department of Economics   +61-49-705133 / \
 The University of NewcastleFax:   +61-49-216919 \.--._/*<-- 
 Callaghan   NSW  2308v  
 Australia  Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED]

 WWW Home Page: http://econ-www.newcastle.edu.au/~bill/billyhp.html 
**

Re: Middle Class

[Ajit Sinha]

I would like to interject a note in the on-going debate between Jim Devine and
Peter Bratsis on Productive/unproductive labor. I think the distinction
between productive and unproductive labor is important for all "surplus
approach" theories. One important aspect of all surplus-approach theories is
that the "surplus" is an objective thing, and so its determination is
completely independent of all "subjective" valuation of what is produced. Most
of the surplus theories start with the notion of classes and class income
categories. All class incomes that are independent of laboring activities are
declared "surplus". Once "surplus" is so defined--that is on the basis of class
incomes, then the question arises of identifying the type of activities that
produces that surplus. The Physiocrats identified rent as the only category of
non-labor or surplus-income, and argued that manufacturing was "sterile" labor
since it consumed as much during the process of production as it produced (of
course, this statement carries the problem of valuation within itself).
Agricultural labor or agriculture as such was productive because nature
produced a surplus in this sector. Note that the distinction between productive
and unproductive labor runs on the grid of "the kind of activity that produces
surplus", whereas class distinction is based on the sourse of income category.
The reason manufacturing is "sterile" is because "profit" yet does not exist as
an income category independent of laboring activity, i.e. independent of cost
of production. Smith in the Wealth of Nations identifies "profit" as an
independent non-laboring income category, and so declares manufacturing
activity as productive, since in general they produce "surplus", i.e. profit.
In this process Smith, at times, slips into claiming that manufacturing
activity as such is productive irrespective of whether it produces profit or
not. I think this is the slip that Marx criticizes Smith so whehementally for,
rather than the generally accepted "vendible commodity" aspect. Marx wants to
make sure that the general idea of surplus production must not be lost in
identifying the "productive activity". However, given the framework of class
relations and class incomes that determines the surplus, Marx too ventures into
identifying the laboring activities that would be productive of surplus as
opposed to laboring activities that are not productive of surplus. His basic
distinction is that the laboring activity that is involved in "realizing"
surplus as opposed to "producing" it is unproductive. I would stop here.

Cheers, ajit sinha

Re: Middle Class

[Pete Bratsis]

If we define the proletariet as all those who sell their labor 
power, then it follows that not only is O'Neal a member of the working
class, but so are company exectutives, police officers, docters, 
college profesors, etc.  Is this the Marxist meaning of class?  
I did not mean to imply that there is a Marxism that is written in stone, 
and that various interpretations are not possible.  This is not to 
say that any and all positions are equally 'Marxist' - i.e. at a 
minimum there are some basic presuppositions and demarcations that
distinguish 'Marxism' from other 'isms'.  My first assertion was that



Marxism distinguishes class acording to positions within the relations
of production.  I further asserted that market relations are not exaustive
of all productive relations and that to define class according to market
relations is to define class in an aMarxist way.  The reference to 
Poulantzas and Wright were meant to show this point.  Both rely on 
the relations of production to produce their definitions of class, 
and the postion of the new middle class within the overall class
structure of contemporary capitalism.  The importance of the concept 
of exploitation was also noted.  The proletariet is that class which is 
exploited.  Thus, if (for Poulantzas) it is only productive labor which is
exploited then unproductive labor cannot be a part of the working class.
Wright also maintains the centrality of the concept of exploitation, 
not the following quote - "The previous chapter told of the development of 
the concept of contradictory locations within class relations.  The account
ended with a discussion of a number of important weaknesses within that 
concept and a general diagnosis of the source of the problem - the shift from
exploitation to domination as the basis for class relations.  ... 
It was only after an extended engagement with the work of John Roemer,
particularly his work on the concept of exploitation, that I began to 
see a coherent solution to these problems" (p64 Classes).  Poulantzas
and Wright differ in their definitions of exploitation thus in their 
treatment of the middle class - but both maintain the centrality of 
rel. of production/exploitation.  Furthermore, I do not consider
everything that is not 'Marxist' wrong - as I noted I doubt the
utility of such definitions of class in the current context and prefer
a shift to domination instead of exploitation and a more proment place
for the differentating role of consumption.

On the issue of commodities.  I do not see the significance of the 
auto worker example.  It is true that no one worker is responsible 
for the production of a car as a commodity.  But, this does not 
mean that these workers are not involved in the process of commodity 
production.  The labor power of all these auto workers, divided as they 
are through the technical division of labor (including those who perform
functions of quality controll), are embodied into a material thing that
is EXTERNAL from themselfs and, if the circit of capital is completed, 
whose exchange value becomes realized by the actual sale of this commodity 
in the market M-C-M'.  Furthermore, while any given 
practice is material - say, the practice of aruging a case before a 
court; everything that is material is not a commodity.  "A commodity is, 
in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties
satisfies human wants of some sort or another."  In what ways are these 
material practices 'external' 'an object outside us'?

On productive/unproductive labor.  My second message was a bit misleading
in that I did not intend to imply that necessary we must rely on the 
productive/unproductive distinction.  I intended to point out that the
privledging of the point of production in defining class is common to 
Marxism as such - not simply to Poulantzas.  I had already 
shown how the prod./unprod distinction is not relavent for Wright.
I quick look at the entery in the Dictionary of Marxist Thought on 
the issue states that it is in the begining of the second volume of 
Capital and in Theories of Surpluss Value that Marx discusses the 
issue.  As with everything, one can find more than one usage of the
terms.  The problem though, if we still desire to define classes 
according to productive relations, of showing how this middle class
is exploited or exploits remains.  For those who do not like
the productive/unproductive distinction, it is not enough to say 
that workers all over are dominated - it must be shown how wage laborers
in these disperate positions occupy a common position within the relations
of production -i.e. how they are both exploited.

Finally, we did not need Poulantzas to 'make' the proletariet into a 
minority.  Adam Przeworski, in CAPITALSIM AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, shows that
in the entire history of the industrial west, the proleta

Middle class-shmiddle class

[Ellen Dannin ([EMAIL PROTECTED])]

Why don't we just throw in the towel and join in the chorus of "Serfin' 
USA?"  How much difference is there between the lot of a serf and the 
situation of lots and lots of us who are wholly dependent on the wishes 
of the seigneur, who render to this seize-er our time, our energy, our 
beliefs? When the ends of education are measured only by how well they 
serve these ends, when unions are counted as of worth only as they serve 
these ends, when your worth is measured only as you rank in this futile 
hierarchy, then how different are things?

The only difference is that the holy-days were more frequent and more fun 
than those enjoyed under the current religion of economics and profit.

We now return you from this bitter diatribe to our regularly sponsored 
listserv.

Ellen J. Dannin
California Western School of Law

Re: Middle Class

[JNINE]

un-subscribe.

Re: Middle Class

[Cotter_Cindy]

I guess the workers of the world won't be uniting any time in the near
future.  They (we?) are in the midst of an identity crisis right now.

Cindy Cotter
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Middle Class

[Jim Devine]

>Why are clerks more like industrial workers than 'productive' members
>of the middle strata?

For example, clerks often do manual labor that is paced by machines and
are subject to all sorts of supervisory control. They are not given
"responsible autonomy," unlike many members of the middle strata.

>What are these productive members of the middlestrata?

Not me! But what about inventors of new machinery or new products?

>I don't think that the emphasis on productive labor is exclusive
>to Poulantzas.  Marxism as a whole shares this position.

Is there a "Marxism as a whole"? How do you know that "Marxism as
a whole" shares the position that non-productive workers are not
really proletatians?  Was there an international convention at which
all the Marxists decided that this was the correct position? Was there
a seance in which Marx decreed that unproductive laborers were not
proletarians?  My impression is that there is a long-standing debate
among Marxists on this question. I also got the impression that most
Marxists were not impressed by the idea that non-productive wage-
workers were non-proletarian.

Marxism is not some dogma with
a large number of positions written in concrete that cannot be
questioned.  If it is, it should be criticized.

Is there any evidence, by the way, that Marx himself saw the
productive/unproductive labor distinction as crucial for defining
the proletariat as opposed to other classes?  He could have been
of course, but his views are always relevant.

>Can one be a
>proletarian if one is not involved in the production of commodities?

Yes -- individual blue-collar workers often do not produce commodities.
For example, an auto worker produces a car that is slightly more car-like
than it was at an earlier stage of the assembly line. That slightly
more car-like object is not saleable, not a commodity. It isn't indi-
viduals who produce commodities, but the collective worker.
Anyway, a "proletarian" is someone who sells labor-power for wages.

It should be noted that Marx was not one to use the same word
exactly the same way in different contexts. As Bertell Ollman
explains in his ALIENATION, the meaning of Marx's words (such
as "unproductive") varies according to the level of abstraction
at which he is working.

>Can there be surpluss labor value if there is no material object produced
>that contains exchange value?
>
Good question. But can't an activity (a service) involve surplus-value?
An activity is just as "material" as an object; it just is more
temporary.  The auto worker who inspects the car to make sure that
the final product is up to quality standards performs a service.
That service is just as important as the service of the worker
who puts the steering wheel on, etc.

I know Adam Smith saw all services as unproductive, but my reading of
Marx indicates that he did not do so. Service workers hired for
profit-making purposes were productive (except for those simply
involved in buying and selling or the supervisors), whereas
personal servants were not. (Cf. Ian Gough, in NEW LEFT REVIEW
many years ago.)

However, I don't think this
debate is very useful or interesting. More important is Poulantzas'
vision that unproductive wage-workers are somehow non-proletarian.
It seems a good way of limiting the working class to a minority of
society.

in pen-l solidarity,

Jim Devine
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles, CA 90045-2699 USA
310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950

Re: Middle Class

[jtreacy]

Treacy: A well to do Lady! [EMAIL PROTECTED] COPYRIGHTED 

On Mon, 19 Dec 1994, Cotter_Cindy wrote:

> My husband and I have a combined income of $120,000.  I feel like a fool
> calling myself working class.  But my husband's a marine clerk, my brother
> drives a concrete mixer, my father a taxi, my mother's hostess.  So what the
> hell AM I?
> 
> Cindy Cotter
> 

Re: Middle Class

[Pete Bratsis]

Jim Devine,

Why are clerks more like industrial workers than 'productive' members
of the middle strata?  What are these productive members of the middle
strata?  I don't think that the emphasis on productive labor is exclusive
to Poulantzas.  Marxism as a whole shares this position.  Can one be a 
proleterian if one is not involved in the production of commodities?
Can there be surpluss labor value if there is no material object produced
that contains exchange value?


Peter Bratsis
Grad. Center, CUNY

Re: Middle Class

[Jim Devine]

I'm not sure why doing *productive* labor is part of being in the
proletariat, despite Poulantzas.  Clerks who simply transfer ownership
rights to customers are "unproductive laborers," but in terms of class
relationships, they share much
more with blue-collar "productive" laborers than with "productive"
members of the middle layers.

I'm afraid Poulantzas' emphasis on productive labor is linked to the
old CP of France's overemphasis on blue-collar workers.

in pen-l solidarity,

Jim Devine
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles, CA 90045-2699 USA
310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950

Re: Middle Class

[Pete Bratsis]

Why is O'Neal a member of the working class?  Unless we define class 
only according to market relations, where everybody who sells their 
labor power is a proleterian, it is hard to see how O'Neal occupies 
a working class position.  If we define class according to productive
relations, we would have to show how O'Neal is performing productive 
labor and being exploited. Exploitation and productive relations are
the key.  Thus, in CLASSES IN CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM Poulantzas 
defines this new middle class as petit bourgeois in character because
it does not perform productive labor and is dependent upon the exploitation
of productive labor for their salaries to be paid, etc.  E. O. Wright, in 
CLASSES, shifts to Roemer's definition of exploitation in order to 
go beyond this productive/unproductive dicotomy but, still, it is 
exploitation that is the key.  Frankly, I prefer a move to emphasising
domination over exploitation as well as, in the Fordist era, showing 
the importance of consumption in differientiating society.  Toni Negri
has, I think, made a solid attempt to move away this productivist 
position through his concept of the mass worker where it is no longer
exploitation that is key (I do not know Negri enough to talk about his
idea's without the books in front of me, perhaps some one who is more
familar with this stuff can elaborate) cf. 'Archaeology and Project:
The Mass Worker and the Social Worker' in REVOLUTIOM RETRIEVED, 
Toni Negri (1988, Red Notes).  Similarly, Henri Lefebvre is usefull in 
showing domination in everyday life and consumption, again going beyond
productivism.  'The Bureacratic Society of Controlled Consumption' in 
EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE MODERN WORLD shows how domination and class difference
are part of the consumerism of, what we can call, the Fordist era.


Peter Bratsis
Grad. Center, CUNY

Re: Middle Class

[Jim Devine]

Rick Edwards, in his book CONTESTED TERRAIN, has a useful way of
defining "middle class" that gets away from fuzzy income-related
definitions ("not rich, not poor").  He defines the middle class as
consisting of the old middle class (the petty bourgeoisie) and the
new middle class or the "middle layers" (a term also used by Harry
Braverman). This consists of the "workers who stand between all lower-
level administrative and production workers, on the one side,
and the echelons of high management, on the other."  To Edwards,
"the middle-layer workers today find employment within large
institutions, experiencing risk-taking as a corporate (not individual
phenomenon."  Crucial is the fact that "[w]here the old middle
class had command over its immediate conditions of work . . .
today's [middle layers are] organized and governed by the highly
structured apparatus of bureaucratic control."  (pp. 191-3)
Crucial is that the new middle class does not own the means of
production but often orders others around, being in the line of
command or part of the staff of the corporate bureaucracies
(and the government and the not-for-profit sector).

Edwards unfortunately throws craft workers (plumbers, etc.) in
the same bunch. E.O. Wright, back when he was an Althusserian,
was much clearer: the new middle class sits in a "contra-
dictory class position," sharing characteristics of being
proletarians *and* characteristics of being capitalists
(ordering people around, etc.)  Craft workers (construction
subcontractors, etc.) are semi-proletarian and semi-petty
bourgeois, being in a "contradictory class position"
between those two classes.

Class positions do not always correspond to income, as the
example of Shaquille O'Neill illustrates. He's got a working-
class position but could easily join the petty bourgeoisie or
(if he's lucky) the big bourgeoisie. This is balanced by
the large number of people from those classes who are moving
down these days.

The theory of class positions is exactly that, a theory, i.e.,
abstract and doesn't always correspond exactly to real-world
experience and data. There are all sorts of mixed cases in the
real world. Marx predicted that the development of capitalism
would lead to a greater correspondence of people's actual
experiences with their theoretical class positions, a greater
homogeneity within classes (and a greater heteogeneity between
classes, with the middle classes mostly becoming working
class).  This prediction worked very well for a long time
and seems to be working again.  Part of all of this brouhaha
about the "middle class" is that a lot of that class is
being dragged down into the working class.

in middle-layer* solidarity,

Jim Devine
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles, CA 90045-2699 USA
310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950
* sounds like I'm a hen, no?

Re: Middle Class

[Doug Henwood]

Upwardly mobile?

Doug

Doug Henwood [[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Left Business Observer
212-874-4020 (voice)
212-874-3137 (fax)


On Mon, 19 Dec 1994, Cotter_Cindy wrote:

> My husband and I have a combined income of $120,000.  I feel like a fool
> calling myself working class.  But my husband's a marine clerk, my brother
> drives a concrete mixer, my father a taxi, my mother's hostess.  So what the
> hell AM I?
> 
> Cindy Cotter
> 

Re: Middle Class

[Mark Laffey]

I always thought that middle class had less to do with income -- unless we are
back to liberal categories -- than with one's position in the relations of
production.  Income is surely irrelevant.  Shaquille O'Neill is (or at least
was, prior to investing his first huge check in stocks and bonds) working class
-- in the classical sense that he sells his labor power.  I, making my measly
part-time salary at a university, am not working class, if only because my
position in the overall relations of production is significantly different than
his.  If Mr O'Neill were to spend all of his money each year rather than invest
-ing it, wouldn't he then remain working class?

Mark Laffey

Middle Class

[Cotter_Cindy]

My husband and I have a combined income of $120,000.  I feel like a fool
calling myself working class.  But my husband's a marine clerk, my brother
drives a concrete mixer, my father a taxi, my mother's hostess.  So what the
hell AM I?

Cindy Cotter

Middle class

[Doug Henwood]

Some of the researchers in the Luxembourg Income Study define the middle 
class as those with size-adjusted household incomes (post-tax, 
post-transfer) between 62.5% and 150% of the median. The poor are those 
<50%; the near poor, between 50% and 62.5%; and the "well-to-do" as 
>150%. By these definitions, the US has the smallest middle class and 
highest share of poor and near-poor of any of the dozen or so countries 
covered by the LIS.

Needless to say, $120k is a lot more than 150% of the median.

Doug

Doug Henwood [[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Left Business Observer
212-874-4020 (voice)
212-874-3137 (fax)