Re: marxism-digest V1 #1811

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Philip L Ferguson wrote:

> I would assume there is much in it that you would agree with Carroll.  Do
> you not agree, for example, that universities (certainly in NZ) are
> underwritten by surplus-value?  And that it is the working class which
> creates surplus-value?  And that it is the working class which is least
> likely to be found at university (except as cleaners, cafe workers,
> secretaries etc)?

In the United States I would assume about 80% of the student body
are working class. I have indicated before that I find the term
"middle class" profoundly unmarxist and obscurantist. Your whole
article seems based on that empty concept.

Leaving aside the small class of petty producers (who retain all or
most of the surplus value they create), not more than about 5% of
the population belong to the capitalist class. As Marx predicted,
advance capitalism has eliminated all the middle layers andf left
us with two classes, workers and capitalists. The conception
of a middle class (which on examination always turns out to be
based on consciousness, a non-materialist criterion) obscures
this fact.

Computer analysts, technicians, chemists, unversity faculty,
the vast bulk of supervisory personnel, public school teachers
most (not all) of industrial technicians, nurses, growing numbers
of physicians, dentists, accountants, engineers, the bulk of
those a pair of non-marxists 30 years ago called professional-
managerial, are parts of the working class.

Most do not have working class consciousness. Neither do
huge numbers of blue collar workers. They think they are
middle class. The first step in giving the vast number of
falsely labelled "middle class" working class status is for
marxist activists and theorists to recognize that they are
middle class.

I recognize that juridical and real status are not always
the same. At some point in corporate management one
finds that what appears as salary is in fact a share of
surplus value. The tenured professors at the great private
universities in the United States are not workers, but
they are not middle class, they are  capitalists.

I notice that here is no niggling discussion in your post
that some men are not working class but you choose
to focus on the fact that some women are not working
class. Disgusting.

No one has made a study of what proportion of  the modern
working class is objectively part of the aristocracy of labor,
nor what part of that aristocracy of labor may be won to
a working-class consciousness and what part must be treated
as actual or potential class traitors. That is because using the
absurd category of middle class those workers are verbally
expelled from the working class and the problem is by that
slight-of-hand swept under the rug.

I am not a trained sociologist or economist, and the empirical
detail of establishing class identity requires those skills. But
one does not need a great deal of detailed analysis to recognize
that with the virtual disappearance of the small farmer in
advanced capitalist nations along with the huge number of
petty producers, merchants, et cetera that primarily depended
on agricultural petty producers for their customers, what
we are left with are workers and capitalists, with only
demographically insignificant middle layers. That must be the
point of departure for an analyisis of the social position of
students.

And a discussion of student consciousness is irrelevant to
this debate. Consciousness does not define class.

Carrol