Re: [Marxism] Working class

[Sologdin@xxxxxxx]

--working class declining ?
politically?  economically?  in terms of size?  we'd have to measure world
population v. unemployment rates, CPI v. averages of income, political
contributions to campaigns v. total amount spent, union membership v. total 
employment,
and a host of other items to even begin the analysis.

--membership?
"position in the production process" is the short answer

--others besides wagelaborers?
absolutely.  cops, e.g., are unable to strike, work for low salary, and
produce "bourgeois security" by upholding property ownership and protecting 
capital
from organized protest.  the suggestion that they don't "work" is pure
fantasy.

--outside sphere create value?
yes.  to use the cop example, surplus extraction is the measure of wealth
added by their presence.  e.g., property values decline in high-crime areas.

--service workers?
the tail end of a long industrial process, if we use fastfood "restaurants"
as the model.  the average burger goes through a six week journey through
factories and warehouses before the last worker on the assembly line, the 
fastfood
minimum wage employee, microwaves it.  this fastfood system is essentially a
long pre-digestion mechanism, (i.e., our stomachs are now in the factory) where
foods are stripped of fibers and suchlike to enable their faster
consumption--more time for work, you sodding proles!

--teachers in the working class?
surely.  just like cops--but the surplus value is stealthy, hard to see for
the bourgeois eye.

--difference between the working class and the working masses?
none, except to sectarians.  but there is of course a difference between
klass-in sich and klass-fur-sich.

--mental v physical labor, whbite collar workers?
the maoists will insist on the (perhaps oxymoronic) concept "bourgeois
workers" here.  i would rather run these items through the cop model above--same
result.

--middle class?
a misleading term, is all--like "conservative" and progressive," a relational
signifier.  nothing more.  it's a weberian corruption to designate class by
metaphorical position in some stratified schema; marxism has no stratification
thesis, like weberianism.  class is determined, as above, position in
production process.

--"proletarianization of the middle strata"?
it means a fear of comfortable suburbanites who might lose their jobs and be
forced to work with shovels rather than computers.  the middle strata are
already workers, objectively.  this notion here merely reifies their subjective
fears.

--"proletariat" mean the same thing as "working class?
we risk severe conceptual confusion to separate them.  i prefer the latinate
"proletariat," but others will surely like the germanic "working class"
better; it's an aesthetics.  no difference, except perhaps to sectarians.

--changes in the division of labor and organization of production due to the
scientific and technological revolution?
many and much.  such is standard operating procedure for capitalism, right?
all that is solid melts into air...capital constantly revolutionizes the
MoP--this is its "historic role," or so.  to make a fetish, though, of recent
advances in computer machines is dire error.

--"mode of production" have more than on meaning in Marxist terminology?
certainly.  most of the major concepts can be teased out in different, often
contradictory ways.  this is inherent to subjecting the texts of marxism to
severe protocols of reading, as the derrideans might say.

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