[Marxism] Re:Why the 'Militant' now says 'middle class radicals', not "middle class left" (response to Jack F. Vogel)

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It leads me to a question for you though, how does the SWP, or you
for that matter define the classes, specifically 'working class'
and 'petty bourgeois'? I ask because the latter in particular always
seems more an epithet than any really closely applied category.

I don't want to go into how the SWP defines classes.

I have a pretty "conservative" approach to what is the working class.
For me the core of the class is the factory workers, the agricultural
workers on the factory farms and big landholdings, the sea of temporary
workers,  AND THE UNEMPLOYED (often forgotten as part of the class).
There are many, many other workers, of course.  Everybody you see
waiting on tables, taking your money at a Wal Mart, and on and on.

Yes I believe teachers, air traffic controllers, and others whose work
has a professional character have been substantially proletarianized
over the years.  Airline pilots, a group I believe had a middle class
status, seem to be in the process of being proletarianized by declining
wages and job conditions.

There is nothing wrong by the way with people who are middle class or in
the process of being proletarianized unionizing to defend their rights.
I absolutely think this should not hinge on a theoretical debate over
the precise character of their relationship to the means of production.

I don't think marching with airline pilots in the Eastern Airlines
strike needed to hinge on a position on their precise class position.
Most political questions can be resolved without settling those issues
which involve all kinds of complicated assessments, discussions of
monopoly rent, and so on and so on.  Working-class  solidarity should
not, and for most workers does not, stop at the borders of the correctly
defined working class, whatever that is exactly.

But there are other "professional layers" -- CIA specialists, Pentagon
analysts that are organically tied to the ruling class even though their
class position is not capitalist.

Cops, prison guards, private security, border guards, foremen and so on
are organized enemies of the working class and have no place in a labor
movement that is about the interests of labor.  Individual differences
that do pop up are not decisive here.  Farrell Dobbs was once a factory
supervisor but that didn't change the basic character of the job.

There is no such thing as THE petty bourgeoisie or middle class (and of
course there is no such thing as THE middle class radicals which the SWP
treats as a single homogeneous reactionary formation,  just as they
treat all petty bourgeois strata except for the farmers who are allowed
to ally with the workers as long as they toe the line).

The petty bourgeoisie is a collection of classes, fragments of classes,
strata of all sorts.  Each profession, for example, is a DIFFERENT
strata.  Petty bourgeois strata often have conflicting interests, some
closer to the ruling class, some to the workers, and some looking both
ways.

Then there are strata that do not necessarily belong to any class on a
lifetime basis -- students who are in transition, etc.

One of the keys for revolutionary minded people who want to orient to
the working class -- and I thought this for a long time when I was still
in the SWP -- is to drop the strutting, posing, puffed up, and
prejudiced hostility toward "the" petty bourgeoisie.  Believe it or not,
I believe these attitudes are not at all rooted in the working class.
Workers have a practical attitude toward the people they deal with in
general.  These "revolutionary" attitudes are, at best, middle-class
intellectual posturing and snobbery of the worst sort, and they CAN
overlap and provide breathing room for reactionary prejudices of all
kinds including anti-Semitism and adaptations to racism.  Frankly, I
fought the stuff for a number of years in the early 1970s against what I
considered "workerist" minorities in the SWP.  I made the turn to
industry without changing my mind about those questions, including when
I saw the SWP adopt over time a much more narrow and prejudiced, much
more bitter and, today, far more reactionarty version of the
"anti-petty-bourgeois" garbage.





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