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

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fred,

You say you have a "conservative" approach to class, and it is.  Much
more so than those of use lumped together into "workerist" currents in
the early 1970s.  Class as a shared social position is broader than
where an individual stands in relation to the point of production.
However, your formulation is much more correct than not.

The paradox for Marxists has always been that we see and define "class"
where members of that class do not see it and "class consciousness" as a
condition of being subjectively aware of one's objective class standing.
It constructs a kind of operative "objective" reality that others do not
see, and hence regard the concept as one of those dumb social science
models--you know, something that describes very accurately how the world
works...on the rare occasions that it actually works that way.

Frankly, when it comes to the kind of distinctions some on the list have
made between working class and a proletariat, the entire technique of
social categorization becomes, very literally, an occult or esoteric
formulation...intellectually interesting perhaps, but socially
meaningless and politically confusing.


This also why I tend to question the idea that what socialists say
creates class consciousness...the disagreement in the earlier thread.
Capitalism shapes the experience of class, and workers' reflection on
the experience generates consciousness of class.  This happens with or
without us.  I see our job as combating workers' misunderstandings of
their experience and to build a political expression of their class
understanding of that experience.

The workers aren't a social object simply shaped from the outside.
E.P. Thompson's MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS framed the work of a
generation of labor and social historians by insisting that class must
make itself.  Class is a meaningless category, he argued, unless members
of that class subjectively define themselves as such.  Conditions under
capitalism define a potential class and frame the possibilities for a
realization of that potential.

Solidarity!
Mark L.









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