"Working Class" is not an IDENTITY; it is a relationship to the means of production

[alcibiades_mystery]

The worst thing to come out of the identity politics of the 60's and 70's is a complete confusion about class analysis. I am not saying that class analysis should be primary, or that it trumps other sorts of social analysis. I am saying, merely, that we have lost an adequate definition of class.

"Working class" is not an identity that inheres in a person. It is, rather, a very specific sort of relationship to the means and mode of production. It is not about "characteristics" of people (college educated, or not/ pick-up truck, or not/ etc., etc.), nor is it even really about INCOME level, although it correlates with income, for reasons that will become clear. It is about a relationship to the means of production. The definition is simple:

You are forced to sell your labor power in order to ensure basic survival, and you have limited, if any, access to the capital that drives production in your work.

It's not a characteristic that inheres. If at one time you were forced to sell your labor power to assure basic survival, but now you don't, you're NOT working class. Tim Russert's buffoonery about his "working class roots" is just silly. He may sell his labor, but he is not FORCED to sell his labor to assure basic survival (he could quit tomorrow).

If you are a business owner, even a small business owner, you are not working class. You have full access to the capital that drives production. On the other hand, if you are a teacher, or even a college professor, you likely ARE working class, since you are forced to sell your labor (even though it is intellectual or affective labor) to survive. This may lead to a seeming paradox: an independent "blue collar" truck driver (who owns his own rig) is NOT working class, while a "pink collar" software developer in a shiny office building might be. A beer guzzling contractor with the tool belts and the work boots is NOT working class (if he owns his own small contracting company), while a maid for the Hilton is. That's exactly correct. It's about a relationship to production, not about personal characteristics.

We've gone on too long identifying surface features that once "signified" a relationship to the means of production with the actual relationship to production itself. It is an incorrect form of analysis, and it leads only to false problems.

[Taverner]

1. K&R

[watrwefitinfor]

2. ..

[RadiationTherapy]

3. Then what does "working poor" mean?

[nashville_brook]

5. total wage slave -- "working poor" doesn't own the means of production.

[RadiationTherapy]

10. doesn't own; doesn't have a say; doesn't have a net;

doesn't have a chance.

[Jed Dilligan]

8. Living an extremely modest lifestyle and still

one paycheck away from the streets.

[NashVegas]

15. People *Stuck* in Low-Paying Jobs That Insure the Laborer Will *Always* Be Working Class

Because they'll never make enough money to have savings, and they're (kept?) ignorant of the steps they need to take to move up the ladder.

[rucky]

18. Works 30+ hours/week and still qualifies for social services.

:shrug:

[nashville_brook]

4. absolutely right. this is why people who toil as labor sellers work so damn hard to

become "their own boss." to go freelance. or to have their own crew. there's a tangible difference between being the means of production and being a wage slave.

generally, i believe that the hope is that the "same labor" (producing graphics or building houses) won't be as alienated because you've got control over it. you've got more control over you life as someone owning the "means of production."

my thesis chair was engaged in a project to identify the deadwood from the "live" in marx's body of work. i'd say this is a likely candidate for the "live wood." marx, to me, makes the most sense when he's talking about "how we live" and "how should we live." thanks for the reminder.

[DavidDvorkin]

6. It reflects our habit of defining people by their income level

The rich are assumed to be intelligent and refined. The poor are assumed to be ignorant louts.

It's the American substitute for inherited titles.

[MedleyMisty]

50. I've noticed that in the literature on giftedness

Like Deborah Ruf in Losing Our Minds basically comes right out and says, "Hi, I'm a racist classist elitist asshole." And then they wonder why education for gifted kids is called elitist and racist.

God, it sucked working at Arby's and having to read the menu to illiterate morans who treated me like I was shit and less intelligent than your average amoeba when I knew that my 7th grade SAT score blew their high school score out of the water.

And then when I posted on a forum for gifted adults and told my story, I got a PM that said, "I can't believe that someone like you came from such poor people."

Fuck humans and their prejudices and their stereotypes and their hatreds and their selfishness and their belief that the world revolves around them and their utter and complete irrationality. You're killing yourselves and I'm going to sit here and watch and laugh. Might as well, since you won't let me help and force me to sell my soul to someone else to survive because I lost the birth lottery where it mattered - sure, maybe I won it when it came to genes and nurturing but all the profound intellectual gifts in the world won't do anything when you don't have the freedom to use your gifts. I don't work at Arby's anymore, but I'm still a slave. I'm just a house slave now instead of a field hand.

By the way - read My Bondage and My Freedom, by Frederick Douglass. The difference is in degree, not kind. Believe me, I would much much rather be the wage slave that I am than an African American plantation slave in the 1800s, but I am still a slave and I identified with him so much. And everything that he says is still true today.

[malaise]

7. Tell Hillary

I heard yesterday that she was a working class lady. Even Tweety nearly choked. :rofl:

[bdamomma]

14. yea sure she is. (sarcasm)

trying to be regular girl she is, who is she kidding?

[Jed Dilligan]

9. K and R

People have their Marx all twisted up with Hitler these days.

[madrchsod]

11. you sound like one of them commies

:rofl:

of course you are right...

[Romulox]

12. I couldn't disagree more

Working class is both an economic and a cultural identifier. However expedient it may be, the definition simply does not reach college professors and software developers.

[alcibiades_mystery]

13. Well, I think you're wrong

It's about the form of labor.

[Romulox]

16. I think attempting to argue that a college professor making $120k/year shares the same

"relationship to production" as the maid who cleans his toilets for $20k/year is an attempt to muddy the waters and prevent organization on the basis of economic self-interest. In other words, it's pseudo-Marxism brought to bear in service of the well-to-do, like a Che Guevara T-shirt on sale at Hot Topix.



That's what *I* think.

[alcibiades_mystery]

21. They share the same relationship to production

That doesn't mean that they share the same conditions. Indeed, we must rigorously distinguish their conditions while finding their commonalities in relations to production. That's how you build coalitions.

[coalition_unwilling]

31. Actually a prof earning $120K/year is neither a member of the

proletariat ("working class"), nor a member of the petit bourgeoisie (small business owners), unless said prof owns his or her own business. The professoriat are probably best thought of as 'intelligentsia" and, thus, outside the categories of traditional Marxist analsyis. Another way to think about it: if Profs earning $120K/year are bourgeois, then Teaching Assistants are part of the academic proletariat, since they do most of the grunt work.

[alcibiades_mystery]

32. Traditional Marxist analysis has a blind spot for intellectual labor

because it based its analysis on the prevalent conditions of the time: industrial capitalism. If the conditions of capital have changed (and even a fairly doctrinaire Marxist like Ernst Mandel would say they have), then the traditional categories built on the material conditions of industrial cpaitalism would be insufficient for analysis. The whole point of Marxism is that it is historical: it begins with the material conditions, not with ideal categories. While I agree that a professor making $120,000 a year (which is somewhat a high range) is probably well-established enough to have a different relationship towards the means of production (i.e., to have left the working class in the same way as Tim Russert has), I would argue that MOST professors are not in this position, and must sell their labor (intellectual or otherwise) to survive.

[Runcible Spoon]

60. that's why we need some Bourdieu and Giddens and Foucault and Gramsci!

RAWR!

[Bill McBlueState]

35. Who are these profs who make $120K?

Tenured full professors at elite universities might make $120K, but that's certainly not typical.

[alcibiades_mystery]

37. That's what I'd like to know

:-)

[lumberjack_jeff]

54. I wish I could recommend this.

VERY well said.

[nadinbrzezinski]

63. 120K \year wow! That must be the dean... in which case you'd be right

he or she is management

An assistant professor is dong well if he\she makes 30K to 40K a year.

[stimbox]

17. An independent owner operator truck driver still sells her labor.

A trucker owns her own rig, the tools of her trade, but still must sell her labor to the comapny that she hauls for.
How about a carpenter who owns his own hand and power tools?
Or a contract computer programmer who owns his own computer?
I would add that if you employ other people you are not working class.

[Fumesucker]

51. I would add that if you employ other people you are not working class.

I disagree, I have a family member who owns his own business.. He employs two others on at least a part time basis and yet works every bit as hard at doing the exact same work as his employees.

[stimbox]

70. Good for him. Bosses that work along with their employees are better than bosses that don't.

That doesn't change the fact that he is an employer.
He doesn't have to sell his labor to survive, he can hire people and use their labor to survive.
He's crossed that labor/management line.

"Preamble to the IWW Constitution

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth."

[Runcible Spoon]

59. well I would expand your classical Marxist def. to address access to different FORMS of capital

wherein a professor or software engineer has a certain special relationship to the product in that it can shape the social institutions within which the product is created, distributed, utilized, and consumed. Therefore they have access to cultural/intellectual capital, which is just as influential if not moreso than tangible currency/money. Also, stock options a software engineer might have or boards influencing policy decisions at the University upon which a professor may sit also argue that they have access to influencing the means of their own production.

However, I agree with you RE: "working class" is often conflated with some idea of essential cultural identity; that definition can be very dangerously and disengenuosly manipulated for the benefit of the status quo.

Sorry, had to read waaaaay too much Giddens and Boudieu in grad school!

:wave:

[nadinbrzezinski]

62. By classic marxist analysis, you'd be wrong

Class is purely economic in Marxists terms

Now in more recent years neo marxists have moved this a tad, but a college professor who sells his or her work to the man is still working class.. and since I own my company (even if we don't make much) I am management

[formercia]

19. Billy makes all that loot from China

and Hill says that she's for the working stiff?

Gimme a break11!!11!!!1

[blindpig]

20. Mr Marx disagrees,

While the relationship between workers and capitalists, or between labour and capital may appear to be no more than an economic relationship of equals meeting equals in the labour market, Marx shows how it is an exploitative social relationship. Not only is it exploitative, it is contradictory, with the interests of the two partners in the relationship being directly opposed to each other. Although at the same time, the two opposed interests are also partners in the sense that both capital and labour are required in production and an exploitative relationship means an exploiter and someone being exploited.

snip

d. Petty Bourgeoisie and Middle Class. The lower middle class or the petty (petite) bourgeoisie (the bourgeoisie was sometimes called the middle class in this era), constitutes "the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant" (Giddens and Held, p. 24). The characteristic of this class is that it does own some property, but not sufficient to have all work done by employees or workers. Members of this class must also work in order to survive, so they have a dual existence – as (small scale) property owners and as workers. Because of this dual role, members of this class have divided interests, usually wishing to preserve private property and property rights, but with interests often opposed to those of the capitalist class. This class is split internally as well, being geographically, industrially, and politically dispersed, so that it is difficult for it to act as a class. Marx expected that this class would disappear as capitalism developed, with members moving into the bourgeoisie or into the working class, depending on whether or not they were successful. Many in this class have done this, but at the same time, this class seems to keep recreating itself in different forms.

http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/s28f99.htm

Gotta say, given the current situation it looks as though the arthor of this piece was wrong about the fate of the middle class and old Karl was right.

[alcibiades_mystery]

24. "They have a dual existence"

That's absolutely correct. That is to say, they have a different relation to production than the proletariat. That doesn't mean that they don't share some features with the proletariat; they clearly do. But Marx developed the category precisely for the purpose of drawing a distinction, whether or not he thought the distinction would disappear over time. It clearly has not. If you don't see the difference between a trucker who owns (even at great debt) his own rig and one who does not, then you misunderstand the first post entirely.

[blindpig]

28. Technically, you are correct

But in these times when there is significant movement from the middle to the proles and from proles to lumpen the distinctions do blur. While a person's relation to production is a cast iron reality that owner/operator or mom/pop shopkeeper might nonetheless behave even economically like a worker. And their access to capital is damn near equivalent to that of the worker.

I'm curious, why did you feel the need to highlight this distinction between reality and perception?

[alcibiades_mystery]

30. Why did I feel the need?

I don't like: The rampant distinctions between forms of labor that identical from the point of view of the relationships of production, and the romanticized view of the industrial (era) working class as a (symbolic) stand-in for the WHOLE working class. These views have been especially prevalent over the last few weeks as the media and this board has turned to class issues, just as ignorantly as they previously turned to race issues.

I think symbolic identifications of class are largely damaging to real class struggle, because they are ahistorical and resentful. Moreover, I think they cause us to exclude allies that from "natural" (which is to say, historical) coalitions, while developing conservative, retrograde, and self-defeating definitions.

We have to think differently. Lord knows the capitalists do.

[blindpig]

34. If I take your meaning correctly

your concern is about well paid workers, say in the legal and medical professions, who identify more with the Man than with their fellow, less paid workers. This is indeed frustrating and there's always been a lot of that going on around here.

The decline of industrial workers has been a problem for effecting change, the largest body of people with the greatest motivation and agency has been eviscerated in this country. Been thinking about this a lot recently as have people a lot smarter than me and best I know no one's got an answer yet.

Do I understand you or am I out to lunch?

[alcibiades_mystery]

36. That's certainly part of it

I'm concerned about the kind of split that has emerged in the Obama-Hillary contest, where Obama is identified with "snooty, urban hipsters" and Hillary is identified with "salt-of-the-earth working class folks." It's bullshit. The definition of working class based on relationships to the means of production rather than "cultural signifiers" would show it to be utter bullshit as well. Put another way, the factory worker in Ohio has much more in common with the San Francisco programmer than most people will admit to. Their differences are not based on their relationships to production, which are largely identical, but on other cultural factors. Now, I don't want to draw a firm distinction between economic and cultural (one no longer really exists), nor do i want to say that their commonalities outweigh their differences. What we need to do is find a way to express those commonalities while maintaining the differences. What we do now - and it's to the detriment of class critique and class analysis - is read their cultural differences AS IF THEY WERE REAL differences in class, when they are largely not. The result is that the groups seem to be "in opposition," rather than forming coalitions around what they have in common.

Put more simply: the discussion of class on DU and in the media over the last few weeks has been bone-stupid and counterproductive. We have to start thinking both rigorously and creatively about class in order come together.

[blindpig]

38. No disagreement here

This deplorable state is the result of the actions of the leadership of both the left and right. The liberal elite began abandoning all pretense of supporting the working class to the preference of cultural issues at about the same time that Nixon initiated his Southern Strategy, though class was eliminated from public discourse by the end of WWII, probably before. There's a synergy there, as the Dems repeatedly present themselves as primo targets and the Repubs happily shoot. And the capitalist is the only winner.

These foolish cultural liberals, is there any difference between them and libertarians?

[doublep]

22. Then your CEO and CFO are working stiffs as well

sorry but your definitions make no sense.

[alcibiades_mystery]

25. No, since by that level they are not FORCED

to work for basic survival, and they have significant control over the capital that drives their labor, even if it is technically controlled by shareholders. Try again.

[doublep]

27. a college proffessor is not forced to work

most people aren't forced to, but when they are I agree it's a tragic thing.

[alcibiades_mystery]

29. A college professor is certainly forced to sell labor for basic survival

The relationship of almost every college professor to their labor is one of necessity. They are not, obviously, forced to sell that specific form of labor, but most are forced to sell labor for survival. That their labor doesn't involve building things out of steel doesn't make the work they do or their relationship to that labor different.

Put another way, they are not forced to work AS COLLEGE PROFESSORS, but neither is a factory worker forced to work AS A CAR MAKER or AS A SOCK MAKER, nor a miner AS A MINER. The point is not what you DO, but whether you can ensure your survival without selling your labor power. Few college professors could quit working tomorrow and still ensure basic survival. They hold the same relationship to production as the worker in the shoe factory, for this reason. As I said above, that doesn't mean they share the same conditions, although I think you'd be surprised.

[doublep]

39. even the CEO is in the same boat

I think I see what your belief is. That there are college professors out there that don't have enough wealth stored up to survive the rest of their lives at their standard of living without continuing to work. Then your distinction is a about a matter of wealth, not of job title. Job title is in fact completely irrelevant. There could be college professors or even a dishwasher who is in a position that they could retire, and there could be a situation where a highly paid CEO must continue to work in order to service debt. Of course, it is easier for a CEO to retire but that does not mean there are cut and dry categories of "forced to sell labor" and "business owner".

[alcibiades_mystery]

40. The second part of the definition

is that you have some control over the capital that drives your work. While it is certainly true that control is very small for some business owners (as it was in Marx's time as well - he analyzes the whole category of petit bourgeoisie, as Mao analyzes the landholding peasant), there is a measure of control that makes this relation to the means of production different in kind. Similarly with the CEO: while he may need to service debt, he or she has a measure of control over the capital (even though it may be technically "held" by shareholders) that make the CEO's relation to the means of production different. They simply have a different stake in the labor process.

As for the dishwasher who doesn't need to sell his or her labor to ensure basic survival, no, that person is not working class. That person has a hobby called dishwashing, whatever his or her wages and working conditions might be. That person is a dilettante.

[doublep]

49. you sure are good at classifying people

useful skill

[alcibiades_mystery]

53. Is there something inherently illegitimate about social analysis?

Are there not different forms of labor and relations to production?

The fact is that all your objections were already handled in the initial definition. It is not MY definition, either. And it is a definition that begins not in the mind, but in the material relations that organize our lives. I suppose people who say "this rock has X form of composition, while this rock has Y form of composition" are also "good at classifying." That seems neither here nor there. It's also unnecessary to get personal. You can take or leave the categories as you see fit. Really has little to do with me, personally.

[doublep]

58. no

just bad social analysis. When you say that a such and such person (CEO, dishwasher, small business owner) is classified in a bad category because of some choice they've made, then I think your whole classification system is bad.

[alcibiades_mystery]

68. None of this has anything to do with "bad" or "choice"

So I really haven't the slightest clue what you're talking about. A relationship of a particular kind either exists or it does not. That has very little to do with a person's decision.

[nealmhughes]

44. A college professor or a research chemist at a major drug company, earing

are under classic Marxist terms rather "exempt" from the simple quad division of capitalist, bourgeois, petit bourgeois, proletariat and lumpen. However, these men and women are dependent upon someone paying their salaries. They do not exist upon stored and invested capital, they do not hire workers directly upon whom they in turn are dependent. That is not to say that they may not choose whom to hire, and that others follow their direction such as research assts. or teaching assts. or clerical satff, however, ultimately, it is an institution which has the capital who hires them all, whether it be Harvard University, the Bugtussle School of Barbery and Winetasting, or Pfizer.
The college professor may well earn more in terms of pay than a shop or small manufacturing concern where the day to day running of the enterprise is run by others and they take only profits, but their class is not really the same, even though their financial status may not really differ significantly.
The US refuses to accept that the majority of the people are workers and use material possessions and educational level as a substitute for "foreign" definitions for class.

What was it Peron sang on the balcony of the Casa Rosada in Evita? Oh, yes, "People of Argentina, we are all shirtless now!"

[alcibiades_mystery]

47. The exemption makes sense when knowledge workers are a

very small part of the workforce and (capitalist) labor organization is mostly industrial. It makes less sense after structural changes in the economy that turn more and more people into "knowledge workers," even at extreme levels of various forms of exploitation. This has been the problem of class analysis since the 70's, when information economies really started coming into their own. Not surprisingly, it is precisely this problem of analysis that has caused the left the most trouble, and provided the right with its greatest resource for splitting and undermining class struggle (the illusory difference, from the perspective of production, between the software programmer and the assembly line worker).

[alcibiades_mystery]

33. Double post...my bad

[mike_c]

23. EXCELLENT post-- K&R....

This is a distinction that most folks don't understand, but it's at the heart of why many "conservative workers" act against their own interests. They regard members of the capitalist class who live similarly to themselves as "workers" whose roles they might attain if they get along, work hard, etc-- in other words, they see a continuum of class where there is actually more of a bimodal distribution. They believe they can help themselves move "up" the continuum by emulating the values of the capitalist class, without realizing how fundamentally distinct they are. Many, like myself, find that after a lifetime of labor, we're still just as working class as we've ever been, and that the continuum is in fact a convenient lie exploited by the capitalist class to keep the working class divided and weak.

[aikoaiko]

26. They Call Me the Working Man

Words and music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

http://youtube.com/watch?v=qNycvEJ3NQE&feature=related

I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin
Yes, Im workin all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess thats why they call me
They call me the workin man

They call me the workin man
I guess thats what I am

I get home at five oclock
And I take myself out a nice, cold beer
Always seem to be wondrin
Why theres nothin goin down here

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess thats why they call me
They call me the workin man

They call me the workin man
I guess thats what I am

Well they call me the workin man
I guess thats what I am

[FreeStateDemocrat]

41. This is the kind of liberal elitist bullshit that continues to cost us elections.

[FreeStateDemocrat]

42. This is the kind of liberal elitist bullshit that continues to cost us elections.

[alcibiades_mystery]

43. Cogent analysis!

:eyes:

[Kitty Herder]

45. Are you being sarcastic? nt

[Two Americas]

65. oh really?

Class analysis is liberal elitist bullshit? There sure is a crying need for defining terms around here.

[Kitty Herder]

46. Excellent post, Alcibiades!

[ConsAreLiars]

48. A very important concept for people to understand, and nicely summarized.

K&R. And a good discussion.

Of course there are different strata within the working class, as well as among those who own the means of production and whose income is derived from paying the workers less than the value of what they produce. And the role of those who control finance capital is rather different than that of the owner of a single handicraft factory, and so on. And so on.

But the basic difference in class position is the fundamental thing, and the rest are secondary when it comes to comprehending the two very different undertandings of the common good and the commons.

[lumberjack_jeff]

52. So it's not a "characteristic" such as owning a pickup...

... because sometimes you might choose/find it necessary to sell your labor to meet survival needs and other times not. In other words, it's transient. Not like owning a pickup... which is... uh... forever.

Did I get that right?

You seem to be making the case that there's no such thing as "working class", so therefore it's impossible to insult them, or to work counter to their interests or to violate their trust in any collective way.

I find the distinction between a self-employed contractor who contracts with multiple clients from a teacher which (in my experience) contracts with one to be completely arbitrary. "Working class" is a very real demographic, despite the reticence of those who occupy it to admit it, and there is very little class mobility in this country - I've had lots of forms of transportation, but I've pretty much always been working class.

We don't have a problem with identifying the wealthy. We don't seem to have a problem with identifying (and self identifying) the middle class. We have a chronic problem with working class though, and the result is public policy which, (unsurprisingly - since they don't exist) fails to meet their needs.

[alcibiades_mystery]

55. That's a strange reading

You seem to be making the case that there's no such thing as "working class", so therefore it's impossible to insult them, or to work counter to their interests or to violate their trust in any collective way.

False. I am making a case for what constitutes a working class, and what constitutes that working class is a particular relationship to the means of production, not a set of characteristics extrinsic to that relation (where they live, how much education they have, what kind of beer they drink, or even what kind of job they perform). That's the main point.

As for the self-employed contractor, you're correct that these categories are extremely porous on their borders. Traditional class analysis along these lines always had trouble with independent artisanal work, which was declining in scale at the time these categories began emerging. It similarly had problem with piecework and other traditional female work practices that took place outside institutionalized capitalist spaces (i.e., the factory). These are strong points, and put pressure on the categories. A fair assessment of free contract workers would show that market forces actually operate very much like institutional hierarchies, and their relationship to production bears a close resemblance to wage work for an employer. Nobody's disputing that; still, the difference - however small - is legitimate and significant. Nobody who is an independent contractor would say it is the same as wage work; there's a clear difference in your relationship to your own labor.

But that's not really the point. The point is, as I said above, that the software programmer who listens to The Flaming Lips, drinks Heinekin, and lives in San Francisco has a great deal in common with the waitress in Tuscaloosa, who drinks Miller Lite at the local country bar: from the perspective of their relationship to production, to the social use of their own labor power. And we have focused too long on their extrinsic differences (which are, nonetheless, important, and not to be discarded), such that we think CLASS is made up of these differences: one working class, one not. It's not the case. Their class position with respect to their labor is identical, and the sooner we wrap our heads around that, the sooner we end not only "insults" of the working class (which are symbolic, and beside the point), but exploitation of labor, which is the real problem.

When the working class is imagined as a set of cultural signifiers and identities, an "insult" is the worst thing we can imagine. When the working class is made up of relations to production, exploitation of labor is the real enemy.

[lumberjack_jeff]

56. I need to think about this.

But my gut reaction is very close to the opinion expressed upthread, which IMHO bears repeating; "In other words, it's pseudo-Marxism brought to bear in service of the well-to-do, like a Che Guevara T-shirt on sale at Hot Topix."

The independent contractor who makes $30k/year may have a different work style, schedule and conditions than he did as a wage earner making $30k/year, but his needs from society are not meaningfully different.

I find it a definitional exercise intended to pluck out blue collar workers who have some autonomy over the means of their production in lieu of white collar professionals who would be insulted to be described as working class.

It leads to developing social policy for "the working class" which has very little relevance to the vast majority of laborers. At least now they're simply invisible - without the added injury of being the victim of identity theft.

[alcibiades_mystery]

57. Most "white collar professionals" ARE working class today

Whether they would be "insulted" by that is in some sense beside the point, but certainly shows us where rhetorical and organizational work needs to be done.

Once we start to see the commonalities in terms of exploitation, then we can begin to transform society to deal with them.

As for "pseudo-Marxism," the problem of general proletarianization (real subsumption of labor) has been the major organizational problem since at least the 1970's. The only thing "pseudo" is to cleave to an anachronistic definition of "working class" arranged around sets of idealized signifiers ("blue collar") that ignore changes in the material organization of production (the development of information and service economies). That's pseudo-Marxism writ large.

In any case, I say upthread and in my reply to you that locating the commonalities does not mean obliterating the differences. I'm not stupid. I know that an illegal immigrant waiting to be picked up for yard work has different conditions of labor than a untenured university professor, or a software programmer. That's obvious enough, and any attempt to form coalitions between such groups must be careful to highlight those differences in conditions even as it leverages the common: their common relationship to forces of production.

[lumberjack_jeff]

69. No, for the purposes of social needs, "professionals" are not working class. n/t

[nadinbrzezinski]

61. By the way, not that you will mind it

this folks is CLASSIC marxist analysis....

Thanks by the way... been years since I read it OUTSIDE a college textbook or other texts

[Sanctified]

64. LOL, small business owner is not working class, LOL.

Your blue collar truck driver who owns his own rig (if he is so lucky, most likely the bank owns it) is still forced to sell his labor to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of his rig. If his rig breaks down and he does not have the capital to fix it he is out of a job, the teacher has better access to capital because they are not self employed and can easily approach a bank for a loan because they have an employer with proof of a steady income.

[Two Americas]

66. well done

Well done and much needed here. Thanks.

I especially liked this:

"When the working class is imagined as a set of cultural signifiers and identities, an "insult" is the worst thing we can imagine. When the working class is made up of relations to production, exploitation of labor is the real enemy."

[xchrom]

67. thank you for this -- i believe you also highlight

a problem with higher wage workers who believe themselves different from say auto workers in detroit.

it's a hard sell -- but unions should most certainly appeal to certain white collar wage workers.

people up and down the wage scale have more in common than they think -- in fact the differences are illusory.