Re: more middle class Re: ruling class subjectivity, was: Re: AUT: a rejuvenated communist

["Chris Wright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

commie00 wrote:
i can't find much evidence of a middle class existing
after, at the latest, the 1950s.

Well, if we take the idea of class composition/decomposition/recomposition
seriously, we have to think of the possibility of a middle class as both a
historical and theoretical notion, i.e. the middle class also changes
composition in the course of class struggle and the recomposition of the
working class and capitalist class.

For example, the middle class was originally (19th century) composed of
small business owners and peasants who were small land-owners, and the
direcect functionaries of the state.  However, as capital expanded into
trusts, cartels, and corporations, as a whole series of professions
developed (often into petty proprietorships, such as doctors and lawyers),
the middle class became more dominated by these layers.  This process
radically altered in favor of 'state professionals' under the Keynesian
welfare state with its tremendous expansion of state positions of social
management (social program professionals such as social workers and staffers
in a massively expanded bureaucracy.)  This is where a lot of the middle
class went after the 1940's (also the massive expansion of lawyers to deal
with this state machinery.)  Another portion became an outlet for some
workers and middle class people to expand into the corporate bureaucracy,
hence the explosion of middle management in this period after WWII.  At the
same time, certain layers were pushed more and more into working class
postitions, such as technicians and engineers.  Since the 1970's, however,
we have seen an equally massive recreation of a professional/managerial
private middle class in the form of yuppies (esp. created around the stock
market), real estate developers, and all the other layers feeding off the
flight of money from production.  (I know, very schematic.)

I agree this layers chief characteristic is instability, and in it fact has
no clear boundary between itself and the working class at the lower end of
the class pole, and between itself and the capitalist class at the higher
end of the pole.  I even agree that it lacks an independent class
orientation.  I am not sure that is enough however.  If we take the idea of
class as a polarity seriously, then we have to understand that a large layer
will mediate that relationship in different ways under different historical
circumstances, in part as an outlet for a section of the working class to
escape its position (farmers in the 19th century, supervisors and lower
management since, the state bureaucracy and trade union bureaucracy since
the 1930's, etc.), in part as the direct subordinators and managers of the
subordination of labor.  I think we miss a crucial dynamic if we leave out
the way this middle layer is a mediation between capital and labor, which
does not appear socially as a direct relationship, but mediated through
managers, the state, professionals (who specialize in this mediation), etc.

a professor would be working class due to their
relation to reproduction. to chuck them over into some
non-class due to the fact that they may or may not
necessarily engage in the "management of class power"
(that is: reproduce capitalist ideology) is as absurd
as putting a line worker in an auto factory into the
middle class because their labour (re)produces the
wealth of capitalists, methinks.

Professors don't just reproduce capitalist ideology.  They disseminate it,
they reproduce and protect the fracturing of reality into comparments, they
are active reifiers/mystifiers.  Professors are closer to priests, unless
you want to call priests workers now as well?  Or unless you privilege
bourgois science as somehow less mystifying than religion?  The
Situationists had a searing critique of the relation of priests to
professionals.  Professionalism (alienation/fragmentation/reification made
into science, into a way of living) is the very heart and sole of bourgois
ideology in the present period, and the end of capital would not just
liberate professionals, it would also obliterate all their privileges,
privileges workers largely do not get under capital.  To compare an auto
worker and a tenured, full-time professor is close to comparing a manager
and a worker.  If we can't tell the difference between management and
workers, we are in serious trouble.  I hate to be pragmatic, but I know my
enemy because I answer to the bastards (sorry, I have hated almost every
manager I have ever had) every day.  Management (and the cops, courts,
polticians, real estate developers, stock traders, preachers, and, yes,
professors) are NOT on my side of the class line.  I don't need a theory to
know that.  I do however need to understand why they are not on my side, but
how they appear to be, and that is what we are really talking about.

Professors do represent a very diverse group, however.  Full-time tenured
professors training the next generation of capitalists and little bosses is
not quite the same as City College professors training young workers, nor
does capital treat them the same.  Part of the amorphous nature of this
middle layer is just that, it is constantly shifting and it blurs the class
edges.  And I think we should at least recognize in all honesty that the
majority of them openly defend capitalist social relations.  At the same
time, the massive expansion of working class youth into the universities in
the post-WWII era meant a massive expansion of university and college
professors, with a clear tendency to drive one section of this group into a
more clearly working class existence (a reason many City College professors
unionized, while at most major universities, professors did not.)

> but modern fascist movement are not rising out of this
> catagory... mostly because it doesn't exist. modern
> fascist movements seem to rise out of an upper strata
> of working class people (that is: well-paid
> blue-collar and white-collar workers) who are becoming
> increasing improvrished thru the "harmonization" that
> comes with capitalist globalization and the necessary
> destruction of national bounderies.
I would like to see some proof of this.  I say this because I think we tend
to use the word fascism very loosely, to denote any national chauvinist,
racist drives.  Not that I am in complete disagreement, but I am suspiscious
of an argument like this without backing.  and we would have to adjust for
our differences on the composition of the working class.  after all, from
your perspective, these layers can't be middle class because that class
doesn't exist.  In that sense, its a non-argument for the moment.

there seems to be a
declasse middle strata (consisting, perhaps, of cops,
middle management, most small business owners, etc.),
but they do not properly form a class since they have
not subjective class interests, but are literally
caught between the ruling class and the working class.

This is the nub right here.  I think your point is well made and while I am
arguing one side, I consider it a thorny problem and I am not tossing your
argument out (in fact, i am trying to test it from every angle.)  I agree
that the lack of an independent political subjectivity makes it dangerous to
use the term 'class' in a productivist or objectivist way, such as the
Leninist left does.  And I would definitely say that some parts of what is
now called the middle class slip more and more towards the working class end
of the pole every day (a whole layer of doctors have been undermined as
professional ever since the rise of corporate medicine, and HMO/PPOs have
seriously aggravated this trend.)  At the same time, the petty prorietors
and managers and state functionaries and ideological manipulators
(professors, media, etc) have been major defenders of capital and find
themselves tied in innumerable ways which give them privileges and power
over subordinate labor because it is their job to subordinate labor and
mediate its relation to capital without allowing any fundamental alteration
in that relationship.

At the same time, I am not ready to allow a layer of people whose job is the
daily suppression of the working class into our bosom.  I think we do an
enormous disservice to reality cannot discern the layers who are directly
responsible for the daily subordination of labor and the management of that
subordination.  They do exist, and they exist in a relation to capital
unlike that of labor (if labor could be depended upon to always subordinate
itself, these people would not be necessary and the overthrow of capital
would be a pipe dream.)

One could even argue that the very slipperniess of the middle class/middle
layer/middle strata is the key to its success (aside from capital's
impossibility of directly running the world itself simply due to its tiny
size), deflecting anger from capital as a whole to managemet.  Look at
Dilbert, the arch-enemy of middle management, but without ANY critique of
capital as a whole, which Scott Adams defends.

Anyway, now I am wandering. Thanks for the thoughtful comments, I hope I did
them some justice.

Chris



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