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

["Chris Wright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Sean!  Thanks for the reply.  Here's some mutterings :)
> 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.
True, but the fink was the small business owner.  And nobody I ever heard of
in the IWW was a raging pacifist.  Also, the IWW did not really consider
'white collar' workers as workers.  They pretty much had an "industrial
labor = working class" direction (and not without some justification in
those days.)

> just because much of production has turned
> into production of information this does not mean that
> the size of the working class has decreased,
Never said it did.  I think it has increased with a different class
composition in the process of formation.  As a computer worker, I am not
interested in being duped into being a 'professional' because I do not have
grease under my fingernails.
> 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
I don;t agree with Negri's idea of socialized labor.  I think it destroys
the notion of heterogeneity in the working class, reducing all labor into
one mish-mash.

> eldridge cleaver argued that the lumpenproletariat
> were the most radical element of the proletariat,
Eldridge Cleaver also argued that raping white women was a revolutionary
act.  Cleaver (Eldridge, not Harry) had a lot of ideas, almost all of which
were formed by a virulant and often not terribly radical Black Nationalist
perspective. I am not even sure I accept the idea of a lumpenproletariat, a
much more dubious notion than 'petty bourgeoisie/middle class'.
Lumpenproletariat is a 'Marxisante' term (particularly popular among Maoists
who decided the working class was counterrevolutionary) for underclass, an
argument which splits the working class along money and racial lines in
practice.  I would think someone opposed to a middle class would be
extremely hostile to a notion like lumpenproletariat.

> 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,
As you say below, how people come to revolutionary ideas is not always a
simple product of class.  Most lawyers are NOT capitalists, nor are doctors
and professors, for all but a tiny, tiny few.  Most of them do work in the
interest of capital, however.  In fact, with the changes in labor law and
immigration law (two big Left Lawyer hang-outs), these lawyers are rapidly
disappearing.

>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.
Salary?  Investments?  That is a slim basis for a capitalist.  Lots of
workers have investments and even own buildings as landlords or small
businesses.  I think this is a less than helpful line of thought to take
because the small business owner who pays $6 an hour for back-breaking work
and who skips checks and does other dirt is actually worse to work for, even
though they may not even make as much as a skilled worker, say in the
building trades or computers, who owns stock and drives a really nice car (I
know truck drivers for Pepsi who own Lexus's).  The pure petty proprietor is
no capitalist, but they aren;t a worker either.  These fringes (workers who
own a small side business, for example) make a good case for the notion of a
middle layer, rather than a distinct middle class, but I think it is a very,
very thin layer.

> 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...
True, true.  But a labor lawyer still mediates the relation between capital
and labor.  Sometimes they are great people who hate capital, but many times
they are more laywer than labor.  In fact, in a certain sense, the trade
union bureaucrat is a kind of labor lawyer, negotiating around contract law
and contract-based grievances.  They also happen to be some of the worst
enemies of class struggle and defenders of the most thorough-going class
collaboration.  As I think you are saying, the relationship is complicated,
slippery and ultimately not one that fits a neat definition.

> 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...
I think my point is exactly that: the middle class of today is radically
different from the middle class of days gone by.  It is a product of capital
constantly responding to the class struggle and its need to produce profit.
Capital is certainly not sentinmental about driving section of the middle
class into the working class.  In some sense, that is one way to look at the
whole history of capital.  However, i also think that capital constantly
reproduces new middle layers which mediate the relation between capital and
labor.  In the end, call it a class, call it a layer, call it whatever you
want.  I don;t think we can simply look to them as workers in any meaningful
sense.  But who that 'them' is does change radically over time.  I think the
point about doctors is more true than ever before.  I also don't think a
plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills is a worker.  I think a doctor working in a
clinic or the few public inner city hospitals are more and more obviously
workers.  At the same time, they also act as bosses over the nurses.  My mom
was a nurse.  Hospitals are not like 'ER' (an impression many people outside
medicine suffer from).  Also, the AMA (American Medical Association) is not
a union, but an organization with some of the most conservative politics in
the country around healthcare (Next to the AHA, American Hospital
Association).  In other words, as I think we both agree, the middle
class/layer/whatever, has no fixed position, but one which is constantly
shifting and which allows for a tremendous range of relations within it.

> in addition there's a few others factors that you are
> not taking in account. under real subsumption
(again, Negri's opinion, and one that cannot, IMO, withstand a critical
appraisal)

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).
Indeed, I agree with this, in so far as I agree that the composition of the
middle class changes over time because it cannot simply remain immobile
while the capital-labor relation is recomposed/decomposed.  That is not an
argument for a middle layer or middle class not existing.

> you've admitted yourself there are communist
> professors. there are also communist doctors (e.g. Che
> Guevera)
As to Guevara's communist credentials, I think that is a mistaken
identification.  And of course there are communists from all layers of
society (I know all kinds of middle class people who have thrown in their
lot with the working class and communism.)  In fact, the Left in this
country is dominated by middle class people who perpetually alienate working
class people from communism.  Or, to be even-handed, there are plenty of
intellectual workers whose attitudes and habits are so corrupted by
bourgeois ideology that anyone not totally corrupted by it, but who wants to
fight against capitalism, is quickly turned off.  Is it any wonder that the
Leninist/Trotskyist/Maoist Left in this country is almost totally middle
class?  Is not the critique of these politics that they are the politics of
state-capitalism, not communism?  And what layer has led every
state-capitalist regime in the poor countries and under fascism?  The middle
class professionals (see Che above, Mao, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh, Boumedienne,
Ben Bella, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, the leaders of the MPLA in Angola, Nelson
Mandela, and ad infinitum) domainted all these movements, at the expense of
the more strictly bourgeois elements who were often so tied to foreign
capital that they had to be kicked out (hence the veneer of socialism).  As
a result of this, i would think a class composition point of view would have
to have the most sophisticated appreciateion of the middle class/layer, not
a denial of its existence.

> and lawyers. now as for communist capitalists
> i don't think that works
Friedrich Engels??

> (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.
Slumlords?  Real Estate developers (reverse slumlords)?  Politicians?  Stock
market traders?  In fact, the whole host of parasitic speculators who rose
on the post-1982 economic 'boom' (read: stock market bubble.)  This is a
large layer, maybe between 10 and 25% of the population at any given point
in time, and it cannot be judged by income, but in relation to the
antagonism of the labor-capital relation.

> 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,
Ok, when is the last time a co-worker fired you?  Have you ever been fired
by a non-management person?  Have you ever been suspended by a co-worker?
Have you ever been docked pay or had your vacation time cut by a co-worker?
When is the last time your co-worker told you "Work overtime or you're
canned"?  When is the last time a worker got a raise because they cut the
number of workers?  Or stock options for getting more workers to do less
work?  Do I even have to go into the privileges that no worker can get
access to?  It is NOT just about 'ideas' or ideology.  They have a social
role as the human carriers of capital's power in the direct relations of
production and in ALL social spheres.  Its about the material imposition of
work and domination through, threats, violence, intimidation and fear;
through lies, propaganda, and ideology.  Their job is to enforce our
oppression.  I think that is a big difference.

Anyone can distribute corporate propaganda.  True enough.  Not anyone gets
paid to do it.  Not anyone does it for a living.  Not everyone is a
professional purveyor of capitalist ideology, whose remuneration depends on
their ability to do so.

Anyway, 'Nuff said.  I will exert my minimal self-control and shut up now.
Chris



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