Re: [A-List] Romantizing working classes - class and boundary & Henry C.K.

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

MP: Classes decay  in the face of the advance of industry and there is
nothing new about this  process.

^^^^^ CB: Do you subscribe to Lenin's definition of classes ?

MP: Produce the definition.

I will explain in unmistakable terms what class means to me and this is not
the classical Marxist understanding of class as I understand the meaning of
classical American Marxism and its interpretation. As I understand matters you
consider yourself a classical Marxist or classical American Marxist. As I
have  stated many times I do not by any stretch consider myself a classical
American  Marxists, although I am American by citizenship, citizenship status and
culture.

The issue is the decay of classes as an expression of the advance of
industry or what is the same the revolutionizing of the material power of  production
or what is the same a revolution in that which is fundamental to the
technological regime. The decay of the industrial working class has been a  process
spanning roughly three decades and some place the high point of  expansion of
the industrial classes - its zenith before it begins dcay, in  America at the
late 1950s.

An example of class is as follows. The men and women who work for say
General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, producing vehicles directly and indirectly are
called an industrial working class. They are called an industrial working class
because of their relationship to property as the actual process of production.
Their are layers of people - strata, within the corporate structure that is
the  above auto producers that one may argue over their designation, but what
is not  arguable is that the people who build and assemble vehicles in plants
like  Jefferson Assembly in your home town are industrial workers. They are
part of  the industrial working class.

The workers in "heavy industry" in the former Soviet Union were industrial
workers and theirs was an industrial working class although their relationship
to property in the process of production was not identical to the property
relations of the industrial workers in America. I am confident to state that
the  people building vehicles and subway trains and tanks in the former Soviet
Union  were industrial workers and members of the industrial working class or
the  working class.

A lawyer is not an industrial workers or part of the industrial working
class as most people in our country understand and experience the reality of
class and its immediate form - manifestion. Former Chrysler CEO Bob Eaton was  not
part of the industrial working class although he was most certainly part of
Chrysler corporation. Class is a material relations expressed as what we do
with  a given set of productivity instruments we find in existence and use to
reproduce our daily lives or means of living. Car salesmen are not considered
part of the industrial working class although they generally sit in the
identical relations to property - in relationship to the bourgeoisie power, as
industrial workers.

Unemployed workers are considered part of the working class because they
possess no means of subsistence other than the sale of their labor power, even
if they are not able to sale their labor power at a given moment or for an
undetermined amount of time. The reason they are part of the working class and
not necessarily part of the industrial working class, is because of they
relationship to property as the process of production.

A class is a very large group of people that are identified by having
something in common. Everyone knows that lawyers are not industrial workers  because
they lack something in common that is understood as the meaning of  class,
although all lawyers are not rich by any stretch of the imagination or  own the
kind of property that dominates the individual and compels him to work  on the
owners behalf or the institutions that express the property and social
relations that evolved on the basis of the owners of production. Today, one  does
not have to own a factory to be a capitalist, but can be a capitalist by
occupying a social position - station in like, that allows them to be regarded  as
a capitalist in their societal treatment and the privileges afforded to
capitalist are bestowed upon them.

Therefore I define class from two directions in our society and also a
historical category: a). What one does - the actual tools, instruments, machines
and underlying energy source deployed as production of things and ones
relationship to this infrastructure of things as laboring and b). The  persons
relationship to property rights in the process of production. This does  not exhaust
class because ones dimensions of wealth - as an aggregate of people  or
distinct social group measured against other social groups in society, also  defnes
class. Dimensions of wealth can in turn express ones relationship to
property as owner - or rather allow one to be treated and occupy a social  station in
life that arose as an expression of a real class.

For instance anyone possessing the power of say 100 million dollars can be
treated and occupy a social position in our society identified as a bourgeois
or  capitalist life style or social status. This does not mean the individual
must own factories, oil wells or physical property to be regarded as a
capitalist. Classes are also defined and measured in relationship to one  another.
In America we had a significant sharecropper class for many decades  after the
Civil War. This class decayed with the advance of industry or the
mechanization of agriculture. As a large social group the sharecropper class no  longer
exists. Class must always be defined - for me, and spoken of concretely  and
not just in its abstract setting as a property relations - in my opinion.

For instance the millions of people on welfare in our country are  understood
by me to be of the working class rather than the bourgeoisie or the  lumpen
proletariat class that some classical Marxist speak of. What makes them
working class is their relationship to property and many members of this section  of
the working class have no connection with production. Some folks on welfare
actually work.

I do not object to using class in a more limited and narrow meaning because
it is the meaning of things we are interested in. I do not object to anyone
speaking of doctors as a class, lawyers as a class with these classes having
stratification based on income. I do not object to anyone speaking of the
second  class citizenship status of blacks or women. Although all balcks and women
are  not working classs or of the industrial working class in large or small
scale  production.

This matter of class can be complicated because service workers can be part
of the industrial working class, but lawyers and car salesmen and stock
brokers  are never confused with being part of the industrial working class. Michael
 Jackson is not an industrial worker, but his dad once was working in a steel
 mill. What is not complicated is that a lawyer is not an industrial worker
and the workers that have built truck engines over the past 50 years are part
of  the industrial working class and never confused with the class of
doctors. I beleive their are also subjective deminsions to class.

That the industrial form of the working class is in decay is indisputable
even as some parts of earth are at the front and middle of the industrial
revolution Europe experienced some time ago. Since we are in America and not
somewhere else in the middle curve of industrial development, I am confident to
state that we are definitely not going through the industrial revolution we
already went through. I do not need to have every read an ounce of Marx to know
we at not at the front curve of the industrial revolution. Lets look at how
someone else has decribed some of the process of the Industrial Revolution
Europe went through.

Rationalization of the Industrial Revolution

By 1700, the tendency of the agricultural state and the craft guilds to
resist industrialization was weakening.

In 1762, Matthew Boulton built a factory in England with more than 600
workers, and installed a steam engine to supplement power from two large
waterwheels that ran a variety of lathes and polishing and grinding machines. In
Staffordshire, an industry developed to export low-price, good-quality pottery,
using hand-made chinaware brought in from China by the East India Trading
Company as models. Josiah Wedgewood (1730-95) revolutionized the mass production
and sale of low-price pottery, causing eating and drinking to be consequently
more hygienic, thus contributing to a reduction of diseases and an increase in
 population.

The textile industry overcame the production mismatch between spinners and
looms as well as yarns and weavers with the introduction of a machine known as
"Crompton's mule", which mass-produced quantities of fine, strong yarn to
keep  weavers from idly waiting for yarns. Between 1780 and 1860 other textile
processes were mechanized with automated looms, and when the power loom became
efficient, low-wage women replaced men as weavers. By 1812 the cost of making
 cotton yarn had dropped 90%, and by 1800 the number of workers needed to
turn  wool into yarn had been reduced by 80%. And by 1840 the labor cost of
making the  best woolen cloth had fallen by at least half. The history of
industrialization  is one of forcing wages down, until the advent of labor unions.

The steam engine accelerated the industrial development of Europe. In 1763
James Watt, an instrument-maker for Glasgow University, perfected a true steam
engine with a crank and flywheel to provide rotary motion that could be
harvested for a great variety of production work. In 1774 industrialist Michael
Boulton took Watt into partnership, and their firm produced some 500 engines
before Watt's patent expired 26 years later in 1800. The steam engine liberated
 the factory from water power and its streamside location and relocated it to
 regions that produced coal, making coal-producing countries industrial
powers.  In New York state, a Watt engine drove Robert Fulton's experimental steam
vessel  Clermont up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany in 1807.

(Here one can visualize the relationship between new invention in machinery
in unison or under the impact of the development of a new energy source. As
this  new way of production is expanded the form of classes change in
correpsondence  with the deployment and utilization of the new productivity regime.).

It was not until 1873 that a dynamo capable of prolonged operation was
developed, but as early as 1831 Michael Faraday demonstrated how electricity  could
be mechanically produced. Through the 19th century the use of electric  power
was limited by small productive capacity, short transmission lines, and  high
cost. Up to 1900 the only cheap electricity was that produced by generators
making use of falling water in the mountains of southeastern France and
northern  Italy. Hilly Italy, without coal resources, and with a historical
experience in  handling water, soon had hydroelectricity in every village north of
Rome.  Electric current ran Italian textile looms and, eventually, automobile
factories. As early as 1890 Florence boasted the world's first electric
streetcar.

The coming of the railroads greatly facilitated the industrialization of
Europe. The big railway boom in Britain came in the years 1844-47. The railway
builders had to fight vested interests, canal stockholders, turnpike trusts,
and  horse breeders. By 1850, aided by cheap iron and better machine tools, a
network  of railways had been built linking inland factories with exporting
ports. After  1850 the state had to intervene to regulate what amounted to a
monopoly of  inland transport in Britain.

Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 transmitted the human voice over a wire. At
the end of the century the wireless telegraph became a standard safety device on
 oceangoing vessels. Radio did not come until 1920. The world continued to
shrink  at a great rate as new means of transport and communication speeded the
pace of  life.

The Industrial Revolution brought with it a sharp increase in population  and
urbanization, as well as new social classes. England and Germany showed an
annual growth rate greater than 1%, which would double the population  every
70 years. In the United States the increase was greater than 3%,  which was
readily absorbed by a practically uninhabited continent with abundant  natural
resources. In contrast, the population of France remained static after  the 18th
century, which partly explained the decline of that country as a major
modern power until it embarked on a policy of colonization.

The general population increase was aided by a greater supply of low-cost
food made available by the previous Agricultural Revolution, and by the growth
of medical science and public health measures that decreased the death rate
and  added to the population base, with the rapid growth of cities.

The factory-owning bourgeoisie use the discontent of the peasants to gain
control of the government from the landed aristocrats. But their rule over a new
 working class created by the Industrial Revolution was harsher than that of
the  aristocrats over the peasants. Skilled artisans were degraded to faceless
 production laborers as machines began to mass-produce the products formerly
made  by loving hand. Wages fell, working hours lengthened and working
conditions  became inhumane and unsafe. In Britain, the industrial workers had helped
to  pass the Reform Bill of 1832, but they had not been enfranchised by it
because  of their poverty, as the control of government fell to the bourgeoisie.

Henry C K Liu is chairman of a New York-based private investment group.  His
website is at _http://www.henryckliu.com_ (http://www.henryckliu.com) .


In my opinion the reason Mr. Liu states that a new working class was  created
by the Industrial Revolution (in the paragraph above) is because this  form
of laboring and how the workers were associated together deploying a  specific
set of tools, instruments and energy source, did not exist before the
Industrial Revolution, which did not happen all at one time, but took place in
stages and phases and crossed various junctures - boundaries, as described by
specific inventions used to build and create a world wide infrastructure  based on
industrial applications.

When Henry Ford borrowed the singer sewing machine production methods -
assembly line production, and applied it to his facilities, and other industrial
manufacturers in turn followed and applied these same method, a new
quantitative  boundary in production was crossed. And the industrial working class
expanded  along with the expansion of industrial production.

Of course a boundary or crossing a quantitative boundary in the industrial
system means what boundary applied to anything means: to move beyond a a
distinct configuration - (of industrial production), based on a specific
combination of that which makes industrial production  . . . ndustrial  production. One
can easily chart each distinct boundary of development of the  industrial
system as it sublated the old agrarian social relations and agrarian  classes and
became the dominant form of class association in one country after  another.

Using electricity rather than the steam engine meant the crossing of a
distinct quantitative boundary in the industrial system because the application  of
electricity did not qualitatively change the entire industrial system - (as
an infrastructure relations as distinct as the feudal infrastructure
relations),  For instance the era or boundary of production driven by the  steam
engines as the primary energy source represents a distinct boundary or era  and
this boundary or era was superseded by an era or boundary of quantitative
expansion of the industrial system driven by electricity.

Is the industrial working class as we have known it between 1930 and 1980
changing and undergoing decay or is it still in ascendency or stagnate?
Computerization, advanced robotics - not simply the automatic machine or  automation
as Marx knew it, is reconfirming our society - America, and  world - even as
less developed areas industrialize and leap beyond industrial  implements as is
the case with China. This why why the class struggle in China  is so complex.

By my estimate and also by scores of authors, we are undergoing a
qualitative transformation in our society comparable to the qualitative change  that
took place between 1762 and the manufacturing changing applied by Henry  Ford.
Today we at at the beginning of such great change and Matthew  Boulton, who in
1762 built a factory in England with more than 600 workers  using stream power
understood a great change was upon him and everyone else,  even if he could
not see or have a vision of our modern fossil fuel energy grid.

I am convinced beyond any doubt whatsoever we are at the front of the
communist economic revolution and it's impulse arises from the revolution in the
mode of production taking place rather than simply from the old industrial
vision of what communism should look like.

One hundred years ago the new form of the working class was the industrial
working class and one can chart its growth from roughly 1762 to the time most
Americans - the majority of the population moved away from the family farm and
 our society forever became urban. One hundred years ago the communist
rightfully  placed their faith in this new arising class.

Some still place their faith it the industrial working class even as it
decays before their very eyes.


Melvin P.