Re: marxism-digest V1 #1811

["Jose G. Perez" <jose_g_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carroll,

    I think on a theoretical level Phillip's problem goes deeper. His basic
line of argument is something like, are these relatively privileged students
worth taking away from the workers part of their paychecks? He views the
students (as I assume everyone/everything else financed out of surplus
value, from street sweepers to bank tellers) as partaking of the
exploitation of the working class. He, like a certain pseudo-Marxist sect
we're all familiar with, thinks the only REAL proletariat is that engaged in
the actual production of commodities.

    Of course, the truth is that ALL workers are paid the FULL VALUE of the
commodity they sell, labor power. Surplus value arises because labor power
(under certain conditions) creates NEW commodities, which the bourgeoisie
wind up owning. They pay for one thing, labor power, and get another,
products. There is of course a constant tug of war between the buyers and
sellers of labor power JUST AS there is between the buyers and sellers of
all other commodities. But the tug of war is over the price of labor power,
not over how the income realized from the sale of the commodities created by
labor power is to be divided between the worker and the capitalist.

    Wage and productivity trends in the last 20 years or so in the U.S.
confirm that the value of labor power, and the value of the commodities
produced by labor power, are quite independent of each other. In
manufacturing, which for our purposes here we can use as a proxy for the
entire commodity-producing sector of the economy (i.e., the value-producing
sector), productivity (output in constant dollars per hour of labor) has
doubled or more since 1980, whereas wages have been largely the same or
declined slightly.

    That's on the theoretical/economic side of things. On the political
side, I, like you, was flabbergasted by Phil's instinctive sectarian
reaction, and by his totally idealist and unmaterialist approach to the
issue of the student's consciousness.

    Instead of seeing the struggle for what it basically was, a movement by
a section of the working people (albeit a relatively privileged section) to
take more of the surplus value the capitalists control and use it for
education, he focuses instead on what he imagines is in the student's heads.
And he finds there, instead of the white liberal guilt of the 1960s, the
idea that the state should bear the cost of higher education, and thinks
THIS consciousness is more "backward" than those of the petty bourgeois
radicals of the 1960s who at that time still imagined that they were
something other than workers who would have no choice but to sell their
labor to survive.

    But even if it were true that these students are more "backward" than
those in SDS in the 60s, Marxists would realize that it is precisely in the
movement, in the struggle that the consciousness of those involved WILL
change, and that is why it would have been so important for the Communists
not to stand on the sidelines shouting correct slogans at the students as
they marched by, but join in the struggle and try to spread anticapitalist
and socialist ideas among the young rebels.

    As for the which class is which issues, you are absolutely correct. But
even if one were to grant that these students are "middle class," it doesn't
justify at all Phil's line. Whether you view students as "middle" or
"working" class, by having come into conflict with the bourgeoisie on this
kind of issue the student movement revealed that it is a potential ally of
the working class movement and that labor's strategic approach should be to
support the student struggle against tuition hikes.

José

----- Original Message -----
From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 5:57 PM
Subject: Re: marxism-digest V1 #1811


>
>
> 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
>


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