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

[Sean Fenley <satellitecrash@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Chris,
I once saw a movie called Matewan, there is a labor
organizer in this movie from the IWW, he says there
are two kinds of people those who work and those who
don't. capitalists control capital and workers work,
all those who work can come together and build
communism. just because much of production has turned
into production of information this does not mean that
the size of the working class has decreased, in fact
the work of a low income working class person is more
than ever like that of a professor or journalist or
some other kind of intellectual laborer... it's
socialized labor to use a term from negri

eldridge cleaver argued that the lumpenproletariat
were the most radical element of the proletariat, and
certainly a lawyer is not going to be as into
revolution as a street beggar who struggles to make it
past each meal, but i refuse to believe that
professors, doctors, lawyers are all part of the
ruling class or at least working only in the interest
of the ruling class, some of them are working class
people. it depends on their salaries, if they've
invested in the stock market, what they own, or what
kind of work in particular they do. A labor lawyer
most likely won't be a fascist and a doctor working in
a low income section of new york city most likely
won't be a right winger either; doctors in maine have
been fighting for price controls on prescription drugs
recently to give one example... lists such as this
exist to rethink what class composition means in
today's capitalism, the professionals of marx's time
are not the professionals of today. with more people
getting degrees than ever all professions are being
reconfigured...

in addition there's a few others factors that you are
not taking in account. under real subsumption the
previous autonomy and extension that some professional
classes, and public sectors and services were
allocated are not there any more. new groups are being
proletarianized, their work processes
ultra-specialized and bureaucratized or even done away
with; and big government and social welfare are being
viewed as stumbling blocks to economic growth or as
faded ideologies (definetly some truth to it, but no
viable option on the left has arisen except for maybe
chiapas and a few isolated other cases).

you've admitted yourself there are communist
professors. there are also communist doctors (e.g. Che
Guevera) and lawyers. now as for communist capitalists
i don't think that works (there are multi-zillionaires
of course who finance radical projects: The Haymarket
Foundation) and i would have a hard time believing a
cop who could convince me s/he is a communist, but
this analogy applies to most jobs i think.

last comment on management vs. worker thing; middle
managers are still working class, they have just been
duped by the capitalist class, just as profs.
disseminating capitalist ideology have been as well.
If we take into account Gramsci's notion of hegemony
any of us could have been a potential distributor of
capitalist propaganda, who's to say how a critical
thinker is made or developes, myself and most leftists
in general are lucky in some ways that they are able
to take apart the falsehood and half-truths that
attempted to be programmed into our minds starting
almost the day we are born. Some of us are able to see
through what's totally untrue easier than others, or
have a harder time compromising on the our political
ideals than others.

-Sean

--- Chris Wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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
>
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