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self-criticism: bourgeois socialism
(First, let me just mention that I have moved my personal blog to adswithoutproducts.com. If you link to me, or ever visit, or haven't visited but would like to, there's the new address. The old typepad site will close shortly...)
I've been reading The Communist Manifesto, as well as the truly excellent (and book-length, really) introduction in the new Penguin edition by Gareth Stedman Jones. A few passages toward the end have provoked my interest tonight. First from the section on Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism:
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.
And another, related passage from the section on Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism:
The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?
The second one is a bit tougher than the first, but I must admit that I feel some half-guilty self-recognition here. I am not sure that I do not, in my heart of hearts, dream of a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.
The thing is, I also do not think I am alone on this point, even in contemporary leftist circles. Is it possible to believe in a proletariat anymore? In the developed world? If you were to say that it exists in the US, you would have to stretch the definition to enormous, distorted dimensions. In short, while Marx and Engels were in 1848 trying to argue the nascent-proletariat into existence in the first place, we who remain invested in Marx wonder if the revolutionary class has not already come and gone, at least here, where we live and think and write.
(This is of course not at all to deny the very, very tangible examples of poverty and degradation and alienation both economic and psychological that exist all around us in the US and other developed nations. It is, rather, to doubt the existence of the very specific configuration that Marx and others labeled the proletariat - and to doubt whether, if change were to come, change would come from even the remnants or the afterlife of this class...)
Isn't the Bourgeois Socialism that Marx describes something all too familiar to us American leftists? Isn't it something close to the US fantasy of welfare-state Europe: government by an enlightened, socialized bourgeoisie that, yes, has eliminated (upward!) the proletariat altogether. Of course it is a dream, a falsehood - it is the dream that we Americans often call "Sweden." And it is a dream that surely has something very much to do with race, the old secrets-in-plain-sight of the American experiment.
There are no easy answers, it seems to me, to this problem. One might be tempted to claim that my problem is simply one of misunderstanding (or choosing not to acknowledge) the global division of labor. One might respond that the proletariat exists, it simply lives elsewhere, and due to the construction of global society, the US must be completely written off as a locale for revolution or reform.
I do not accept this answer. I will perhaps go into the question more deeply, but I cannot help but believe that a socialized United States would be - if done properly* - a gift to the world. There is great suffering here in the US - definitely not on the scale of so many other places - and here is exactly where I tilt toward the second passage from Marx above - there is suffering spread across the economic strata of society.
Dangerous thoughts, I know. They likely will provoke angry responses from some - which I welcome. Just do ask yourselves first whether the policies that you support are truly aimed exclusively or even primarily at the lowest quadrants of society. There are quite a few things that we all like to discuss that are perhaps selected - unconsciously or not - because of their dual applicability to the poor and the relatively well-off at once. I can think, for instance, of reforms that would do more immediate good for the working classes than socialized medicine, which we never stop discussing.
In short, I am left with the same question that I am almost always left with - and the primary question that mobilizes my work on the blogs. I cannot tell whether my self-recognition as what Marx calls bourgeois socialist is:
1) simply an effect of my own class-standing, one that (completely naturally) naturalizes my own classed perspective at universal, as the "truth."
or
2) a moment of recognition that work needs to be done to reconfigure the terms of Marx's (of the socialist) argument to present day conditions and in terms more distinct and workable than, say, Hardt and Negri's turn to the amorphous (and amorphously useless) "Multitude."
In concluding with this question, you will see that I remain, perhaps, methodologically dogmatic if not programmatically or ideologically so. But - whether or not my questions are the right ones - we do not listen to Marx if we fail to adapt his claims to the current socio-economic conditions, which are distinctly different from those of 1848. I am beginning to feel that resting on the wrong side of some of these questions is stunting out growth as a movement. I am beginning to believe, in other words, that failing to define exactly what it is that we mean, today, by the words socialism and communism, will lock us into a permanent cage of obsolescence, nostalgic hubris, and doctrinal impossibility.
* Of course there is always the possibility of what has been labeled (by Hobson I believe and others) "welfare imperialism." Which may in fact be one way to label exactly the thing that the US glides toward now. And the extreme form of "welfare imperialism" we usually know as "national socialism."
By CR | September 10, 2007 in Communism | Permalink
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Comments
What's your definition of proletariat? Are you thinking manual workers, or what? The definition in the Manifesto (at least in Engels footnote to the 1888 edition) is: "the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live."
That would still describe the vast majority of people even in the developed world wouldn't it?
This question has been so intensely debated among marxists and others over the last few decades. I think the above minimalist definition of proletariat (or should that be maximalist) is still useful, though of course it doesn't prevent us from making other analytical distinctions within classes, or acknowledging that it is not always possible to pigeonhole individuals into the structural categories. Clearly the picture is complicated by the fact of wide differences in labour income, and by the fact that the accumulation of property now makes up some part of the social reproduction of the working class (housing, retirement savings, etc.).
But the fact that property incomes don't generate themselves, but require labour, means that a bourgeois socialism, in which everyone would be bourgeois, is an oxymoron.
I have the old Penguin Manifesto with the intro by A J P Taylor, so I haven't read Stedman Jones's. But you might be interested in Ellen Meiksins Wood's book "The Retreat From Class", which has a chapter criticising his 1980s writing on class.
Posted by: Mike Beggs | Sep 11, 2007 10:02:37 PM
Incidentally, note the end of the last chapter of the fragmentary Vol 3 of Capital, where Marx finally sets out to define class and discuss the complications:
"The question to be answered next is: 'What makes a class?', and this arises automatically from answering another question: 'What makes wage-labourers, capitalists and landowners the formative elements of the three great social classes?'
"At first sight, the identity of revenues and revenue sources. For these are the three great social groups whose components, the individuals forming them, live respectively from wages, profit and ground-rent, from the valorization of their labour-power, capital and landed property.
"From this point of view, however, doctors and government officials would also form two classes, as they belong to two distinct social groups, the revenue of each group's members flowing from its own source. The same would hold true for the infinite fragmentation of interests and positions into which the division of social labour splits not only workers but also capitalists and landowners - the latter, for instance, into vineyard-owners, field-owners, forest-owners, mine-owners, fishery-owners, etc.
"(At this point the manuscript breaks off. - F. E.")
Posted by: Mike Beggs | Sep 11, 2007 10:10:44 PM
First of all, thanks for the comments, Mike. Really helpful. But I think it is that at once maximalist / minimalist notion of the proletariat that throws me. Oh course, we're all proletarians now, but when we reach that point, the term (especially in light of its historical specificity, which Marx and Engels seem to have taken great pains to preserve) blurs into meaninglessness. Everyone from the Shenzhen factory worker to the third-in-command at the mid-cap company, from the street sweeper in Calcutta to the English professor in America falls into the same boat.
Which might be the point. But isn't Marx's point here to resist universalizing claims as well - doesn't this define utopian socialism in the Manifesto?
There more to it than all this. There's also a wider point about the way that "theory" or "continental philosophy" or "leftist philosophy" conducts itself in relation to its major figures and their key terms. It seems increasingly strange to use such terms as "proletariat" and "bourgeoisie" in a changed world, just as it seems the height of performative perversity to label oneself a "Marxist" rather than, say, a socialist who reads Marx. I start to wonder if reading against the grain of these masterworks, and trying to start anew, isn't the order of the day that might well begin to clarify the conditions that have left us static and unable to compete in the war of ideas.
After all, even M&E call the Manifesto a "historical document."
I will definitely look into the recommended reads...
Posted by: CR | Sep 11, 2007 11:17:57 PM
CR, This is exactly the kind of post that makes me a long sunday affecianado. The self-critical (and white leftist critical) heart of your post is about as well put as possible. I do have some questions about the directions you finally push things. You still hold onto the possibility that a socialized US would make the world a better place while suggesting that Hardt and Negri's project is untenable. I am a thoroughgoing anti-statist who has never once considered myself an anarchist, and I don't understand this holding on to the possibility of the US while immediately dismissing Negri and Hardt's project. I can understand where you see the possibility that H&N are wanting to eliminate the proletariat through universal upward mobility. However, there is this other moment in their thought, especially Negri's, where I think we might say that the lumpen proletariat should and are channelling their resistance to finally destroy the state. "The greatest weapon of the poor is their poverty." (And I should say that I've been taught, at least in part, to read Negri against Negri or H&N by Discard whose recent paper on Poverty with APS is linked to over at An und fur sich right now).
Briefly, to get back to your post, I think perhaps, those of us for whom Marx is still a going concern are going to have to consider the possibility that the continuing disappearance of the proletariat may mean something like the need to move one class lower and agitate for a revolution of the lumpenproletariat.
Posted by: old | Sep 12, 2007 6:11:36 AM
'A revolution of the lumpenproletariat'...well, the last time that was attempted in the USA - as an explicit aim of the Black Panthers - it had some success, bar racial divisions and COINTELPRO...
I must say that, although I agree to an extent that this 'maximal' conception of class has its flaws - I do tend to blanch when leftwing journalists describe themselves as 'working class' - surely the Marxian proletariat, that is not only those with nothing to sell other than their labour-power, etc, but also an urbanised, factory-working class, is now more widespread than it has ever been, and certainly more than it ever was in 1848...? Perhaps not in the USA, but nevertheless. Also, though I too would love to see a 'Swedish' USA, but this strikes me as about as likely as Fourier's proverbial lemonade rivers, not least because (unlike 1930s Sweden, and New Deal America) there is no constituency of the ruling class that would ever contemplate it. Even violent revolution seems more probable over there...
(aside: David Harvey at a conference last year remarked that in China what actually is the proletariat - the construction workers, factory employees, those who have recently migrated from the country to the cities etc - is never described as such, as the term denotes those who have been urban for generations, a very interesting sleight of hand in a country which is still ruled by a 'Communist' Party...)
Posted by: Owen | Sep 12, 2007 10:16:13 AM
True, the last half-century has certainly seen some engaged efforts to identify, name and theorize a "new class"—from a range of positions, cf. Daniel Bell, Alan Liu, and Hardt & Negri, to name only a few of the interesting approaches. And true, the current state of capitalist evolution benefits from the interlocks and imbrications which it has now so diligently called into being. From generalities like an apparently burgeoning organizational class demanded by the new service/information economy, to the specifics of managed pension funds and payment in stock options, the worker we see—"we" bearing the weight of the LongSun demographic, to be sure—have no well-demarcated market-being. She appears now as a a wage laborer, now as a salaried manager, now as an owner with vested interest in the firm's profitability, depending on the aspect of our glance. And the fluidity of economic roles is exact analog—is holographic, even—for the structure of the Western post-Fordist economy of "flexible accumulation." All of these things, one concedes, underpin CR's point.
And yet, to reverse Heidegger's turn regarding Van Gogh. It remains uncertain whether these changes mean to abolish the clarities of proletariat/bourgeoisie, or mean to mystify the same. Perhaps the former—and I am bottomlessly sympathetic with CR's wish to understand the shifting sands of his or her own uncertain role as historically determined, rather than as an aporia of class identification haunting all lefty academics (in which I cheerlessly include myself). And yet, there still are a pair of simple peasant shoes in the picture. Even if a meaningful body of Western workers have been allowed the access to, and thus the entrapments of, certain material exigencies of bourgeois existence, the fundamental source of value hasn't miraculously changed; it can't be done without working bodies who get paid at a given rate. The levers of extraction and redistribution may have shifted in some regards (for example, the role of asymmetrical information within an increasingly extensive economic sphere seems profoundly greater), but value must still come from somewhere, and it still seems to concern work (even if it's future work that speculative capital is wagering against). On this rock the "new class" analysts tend to founder, when they aren't pretending it isn't there.
It may well be that the language of bourgeoisie/proletariat needs to be abandoned, the terms having become encrusted with too many competing meanings to retain any stability (indeed, that would be the linguistic response to this debate: that when someone says that there's no longer any clear division of historical being into "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat," what they mean is that the words have lost their capacity to point at specific conditions, whether or not they actually exist). But if we were to turn to other Marxian terms, the situation might be seen to retain for itself a greater clarity—in this case, the distinction between fixed and variable capital. Using those terms, it remains dubious that the struggle between the two has come to an end; if they confront each other amidst a great uncertainty as to who belongs on which side, this confusion might be understood as one of the qualities of the conflict (or even a gambit of one side or the other), rather than as some indication that the conflict doesn't exist.
This is not to say one ought prefer a single rigid belief, or insist that we stand before each other and ourselves each with a single identifying label; the challenge to see the shifting and multiple economic roles many individuals are thrust into as all real, all constitutive, is a vital one. The truth of this historical moment lies, perhaps, in being able to hold the flexible, multiple, even rhizomatic, and the confrontationally dialectical, both at once—both existing within the unfolding logic of capital, both needing to be thought at once.
Posted by: jane | Sep 12, 2007 2:31:48 PM
Thanks you, old, Owen, and jane for your excellent comments. In response, let me try to reframe this a bit:
Beyond (or parellel to) the issue of attaching the right names to the right things, keeping clear what it means to be proletarian or working class or bourgeois, what I was initially responding to was Marx and Engels's emphasis in the 4th section of the Manifesto, particular toward the end of the section, on the distinction between universalist models of socialism (what we propose is applicable and good across the social spectrum) and models grounded in strict alignment with a single class, the proletariat. Marx and Engels, obviously, go with the latter.
There seems to me to be something a bit too safe and easy about the move "we're all proletarian now" - and there especially seems to be something about this move that's out of sync with the oppositional emphasis of this section. If we're all proletarians - only differing by degrees of intensity of destitution, how little we possess beyond our own labor power - it seems to me to be unclear just who it is that's left to oppose. Capital in the abstract? The secret cabal at the Montana retreat? If the enemy is capital in the abstract and the structures that maintain its ability to work upon us, then haven't we perhaps ended up, despite the emphases of this section, with a universalist socialism, a socialism without a proletariat because there's no human element left to oppose?
(Or is this wrong? Is the antagonist the plutocratic class? The Bush family and the Saudi princes? Is it everyone who invests in mutual funds? Is it the California public school teachers whose money is currently working to divest GM retirees of their pensions?)
Do you see what I'm getting at? I know I emphasized the issue of correct names above, I think what really caught me up on this section of the Manifesto is the problem of conflictual vs. universal socialism given the problem of the names, the complexification of knowing who is who when we live in a world divided far more subtlely than it was when the guys in smocks were the working men and the guys in suits owned the factory.
It is totally still possible to respond, "No, there is a proletariat, and it is not you. We should not, if we are to be socialists, concern ourselves with struggling office-workers and the like. The Chinese proletariat, the third world semi-employed, the modern lumpen, whatever. It just seems to me like a wasted opportunity as well as an unlikely course to bear fruit. But, again, there are reasons that I feel this way that may well be suspect.
I feel myself to be by inclination a universalist - this makes sense as a position for a educator (convincing everyone of the universal truths is far easier than getting them to depose their betters...) But there's where the bad faith flag goes up: socialist universalism is more likely to win me socialized medicine than to have my house carved up and granted to the undersheltered.
And overall, I think I was trying to capture via my own confession the strange place of the relatively-far-left today. I think, down deep, I am not alone. I think, down deep, most of us are really universalists rather than conflictualists. The proof is in the pudding - we only talk to each other when, if we were truly in alignment with the model of the Manifesto, there would be absolutely no point to winning points in the court of public opinion, to, in M&E's terms, "society at large," which would not be our proper constituency. The words that would come out of our mouths would sound entirely different than they do, that much is clear.
Posted by: CR | Sep 12, 2007 9:00:14 PM
CR, actually I think "capital in the abstract" really is the opponent.
I'm not so sure things were all that much less complicated class-wise in the 19th century. The urban industrial working class was a minority in Marx's Britain, and even more so in the rest of Europe. The bourgeoisie proper - people living from profits - must have been tiny, though there was a substantial petty-bourgeoisie. There were all kinds of social groups that did not fit neatly into the picture - lawyers, doctors, clerks, etc. And major divisions of income, culture and identity among the working class.
Of course a strict division into worker and capitalist based on relations to the means of production leaves a lot of social stratification unexplained. Often a more cultural or identity-based view of class will be more useful.
But much of the point of the marxian class division has always been structural and abstract rather than about pigeonholing people. Because capitalist society really is centred around the process of capital accumulation, this process determines (or at least limits) how people live and work and how society is organised. No programme for radical social change can be successful without challenging the dominance of this abstraction we call capital.
The political programme following from this has always been the need to create a self-identified working class, not to assume that a politically or culturally united working class already exists. In a sense, it's about winning people over from a political identification with capital, from the hegemonic idea that what is good for the economy is good for us.
I don't see what the problem is in taking a maximal view of who is working class in this sense. At least seeing the enemy as an abstract social force still leads to a positive political programme - maybe you could be more specific about what you think the alternative is in terms of practical politics.
Posted by: Mike Beggs | Sep 12, 2007 9:38:43 PM
Owen, you think journalists are not working class? I would have thought that under even a restrictive definition they would be. At least, the journalists I know are poorly paid for hard work over which they have little control. Also they are relatively well-organised industrially. It's true the job is becoming professionalised, but there's a lot of mystification in that.
Posted by: Mike Beggs | Sep 12, 2007 9:48:39 PM
Your follow up comments here, CR, are even more probing and simultaneously clear in laying out options. Your scepticism of the possibility of revolution along with Owen's black panther comment means that I need to insist that I am also a pacifist. I don't have hope that the lumpen proletariat can be organized or organize themselves in such a way as to overthrow the capitalist state violently.
Rather, I am hopeful that learning to live communally with those who don't, can't, or even refuse to work does and will offer the possibility of new forms of life that, over the long haul, could swamp the protestant ethic at the heart of capitalism. True companionship with the "undeserving" poor, aboriginals, undocumented immigrants, etc. provides the prospect of a multitudinous universality. It is a universality that is conflictual secondarily, conflictual only insofar as such forms of life eventually threaten and thus attract reactionary violence from those from whom it has liberated itself.
But such a vision is demanding. It does quitely and persistently insist that our very houses become shelters for poor people.
Posted by: old | Sep 12, 2007 11:04:36 PM
Perhaps one more note before I leave this be; it's certainly an imperative discussion. I guess my main impulse is to resist some of the choices that seem to be on offer here; for example, I'm not sure "the issue of correct names" is as easily distinguishable from the question of "who the enemy is now"—particularly when the opponent might in part be understood as descriptions that make the struggle seem either hopeless or finished, descriptions which constitute the core of current struggle, rather than "a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration."
The issue of whether "capital in the abstract really is the opponent" is well-bruited; I take it to be the heart of what is most compelling in Moishe Postone's Time, Labor and Social Domination, though I also think his argument (not so distant from the "capitalogicians" of the 70s) depends from a misreading of Lukacs. A very short summary to which I think CR's arguments here are simpatico would recognize the essentializing of the bourgeoisie and proletariat as the two historical combatants would mean that only one could be overcome, and that even a victory of the proletariat would still leave the structure of labor itself as a historical presence; there would merely be a different administration of labor. For Postone, the overcoming of labor relations requires capital itself, as self-valorizing value, to be seen as the subject of history. This is indeed a seductive proposition, and allows for a clear and directional analysis without evident fixity of two simple social classes. It remains unclear, within his argument, why conceiving of history from the perspective of the proletariat—a historical phenomenon in the form of a category of social activity—would intrinsically make that class not only calcified but insoluble.
But the final distinction about which I'm reticent is CR's proposed choice between "conflictual vs. universal socialism." It's not clear to me, either in Marx or in my own understandings, that considering this as a matter of inclination, of choice, is anything but idealism. The conditions from which the conflict arises are material conditions, of course, though of course much effort has gone into mystifying those conditions. And as long as those material conditions are in place, the circumstance is conflictual, no matter which mode of political rhetoric or action we might choose. It is hard to believe that the conflictual mode, for many Western and privileged actors (in which we include ourselves), eludes the risks of adventurism, and of superficial identifications reeking of false consciousness. At the same time, it's increasingly implausible to refute the suggestion at this juncture that pacifism is functionally a defense of the corporate-state alliance's franchise on violence. Meanwhile, as a form of optimism, I would proffer that even if one does identify meaningful class division, one is not thereby remanded into the psychic custody of one's own class. One indeed might form universalist or conflictual alliances across class lines.
So this ain't a settled debate, by any means, and I don't mean to suggest it is. I mean largely to note that optative universalism, while logically bypassing the problem of what I'll call the class cloud of late modernity,—now itself the bearer of "dialectics at a standstill" that Benjamin found in the dialectical images of commodity culture—can't as easily bypass the material logic which has learned to make such good use of the cloudiness, but which continues apace in its conflictual churn.
Posted by: jane | Sep 13, 2007 11:13:43 AM
Or: A bunch of intellectuals get together, and decide that, for all of their guilt, and precisely their guilt, they are on the right side of history.
In other words: total junk.
Posted by: x | Sep 17, 2007 7:56:40 PM
Or: A bunch of intellectuals get together, and decide that, for all of their guilt, and precisely their guilt, they are on the right side of history.
In other words: total junk.
Posted by: x | Sep 17, 2007 7:57:33 PM
Or: A bunch of intellectuals get together, and decide that, for all of their guilt, and precisely their guilt, they are on the right side of history.
In other words: total junk.
Posted by: x | Sep 17, 2007 7:57:41 PM
Or: A bunch of intellectuals get together, and decide that, for all of their guilt, and precisely their guilt, they are on the right side of history.
In other words: total junk.
Posted by: x | Sep 17, 2007 7:57:48 PM
Mike, the traditional Marxian proletariat is not simply those who sell off their lives by the hour, but rather those who do so without even a special skill that would increase the value of their labor. A white-collar worker that owns no productive means is not a proletarian because s/he is (often highly) skilled and therefore, quite comfortable. That said, the USA is home to many millions of unskilled laborers that stock shelves in Wal-mart, and change bedding at Hilton hotels. It is true that this question of the contemporary proletariat has been explored to an absurd degree. My question is rather: What is the point--what could possibly be the political goal--of adequately redefining the proletariat to accurately reflect its present make-up in the “developed” world? If, as Marx argued, the proletariat is destined by material circumstances to lead (or even be part of in some way) a socialist revolution AS the proletariat, what does it matter if intellectuals can or cannot adequately describe the exact make-up of this group? What will be gained by doing this? How will it increase the exigency of a revolution? Is it supposed that the proletariat will somehow come across this bourgeois imposition of class-identity and see its own reflection, prompting it to act? And further (and more frighteningly), isn’t the desire to keep tabs on the re-formations of the working-classes by the well-meaning bourgeois left a sort of unconscious Orientalism? Regardless of the intellectual left’s intentions, wouldn’t an adequately described proletariat be of more use to the counterrevolutionary right’s attempts to thwart revolutionary possibilities with more systematic rigor than is today possible?
Its interesting that what I took to be the central (and excellently honest) point of CR’s post-- the radical academic left’s adherence to universalist rather than conflictualist principles of social change and the realization that such a position may reflect a desire to leave everything (most of all the left intellectual‘s material privilege) intact as it is--isn’t addressed in the comments. Instead, we get the yawn inducing and impotent discussion about whether “the LANGUAGE of bourgeoisie/proletariat needs to be abandoned.” When exactly did radical politics get reduced to the impotent status of raw material for the wealthy aesthete’s poetic games?
Posted by: doug | Sep 18, 2007 9:08:30 PM
x,
you seem upset. maybe you should talk to someone about the experiences that lead you to the position that blogging was structurally irrelevant. such a tragic individual.
Posted by: the unicorn | Sep 18, 2007 9:18:03 PM
Hey Doug,
It's not true that "the traditional Marxian proletariat" was unskilled labour. Where do you get this idea from? The 19th century working class was far from homogeneous - in income, skill, or identification. Most of Marx's own comrades in the International were skilled labourers. Until (at least) the 1880s in Britain the the skilled working class _was_ the organised working class.
I agree with you that debates over defining classes don't have much material impact, though I don't know about anybody being 'destined' for revolution. And I also see where you're coming from about universalist principles whitewashing conflictual social change. I don't doubt that many better-off people who would fall under my definition of 'working class' could be materially worse off under different circumstances - but I think political blocs are different (and more mutable) than class defined with regard to ownership of the means of production.
The rest of your comment seems to be a weird moralism. You assume that anyone who talks about class is a wealthy and bourgeois aesthete? Even if you accept a distinction between those who talk about class and the class itself (which I don't), your argument seems to be a recipe for either paralytic guilt or quietist withdrawal on the part of the academic left.
Posted by: Mike Beggs | Sep 19, 2007 6:50:13 PM
Perhaps I’m blinded by my own righteousness or something but I don’t see how any of what I said can be read as moralizing of any sort. My point was simply, that CR’s original post actually addresses class from a position with material and psychological ramifications, and yet these comments attempt to turn the discussion of class back into the same old boring and endless blah-blahing about precise (and imposing) definitions. I certainly don’t assume that “anyone who talks about class is a wealthy and bourgeois aesthete” and therefore, “evil” (obviously, as I’ve already complimented CR for bringing the issue up in the first place and am myself talking about class). The problem is the way it is talked about by most of the writers on this comment thread: AS IF class were merely the raw material for some gentleman formalist’s poetic investigation.
Posted by: doug | Sep 19, 2007 11:19:29 PM
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