[Marxism] Working class

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'll try to answer your questions briefly...

1. Is the working class declining ?

Declining in relation to what? I would say as a proportion of the world's
economically active population, it's growing, i.e. more people becoming
dependent on a wage or salary for their main source of income (see ILO
stats).
Against this idea, it is argued however that more salaried people are
becoming middle class (possessing significant assets, higher education and
higher income). And against that idea, there is also the "middle class being
squeezed" hypothesis according to which an increasing number of middleclass
people are losing their previous social position and become downwardly
mobile. As far as the numbers go, they stack in most countries in favour of
a growing working class.

2. What defines membership in the working class ?

Broadly, the socio-economic compulsion to work for an employer as the main
source of income, because of lack of alternative means of livelihood, or the
dependence on wage income. But class boundaries are not mathematically
precise. At one end, there is a group of workers who supplement subsistence
production on own account with wage income. At the other end, a stratum of
workers possesses assets sufficiently large to make working optional.
Additionally there are more intermediate cases, such as beneficiaries who
could work, but who for one reason or another don't (or work parttime), or
students who partly work and are partly subsidised and so on. Another reason
why no mathematically precise definition is possible is because within one
lifetime a fraction of the population transits from one class to another.
Intergenerationally, people may identify with one class culture although
they have in reality transited to another class. Class membership can also
be viewed in cultural terms, and in that case objective criteria may combine
with subjective criteria (what social and cultural identifications people
have, their membership of organisations and associations with certain
class-specific aims). In some historical periods, classes exist as very
self-conscious cultural groupings, in other periods people experience class
identifications as much less meaningful.
The larger the number of wage and salary earners has become, the less useful
rhetoric about the working class has become, and the less you can predict
about social behaviour from this characteristic alone.

3. Does the working class include others besides wagelaborers in material
production ?

Yes, because the basic criterion is dependence on working for a wage or
salary (being employed) as the main source of income. The "proletarian
condition" has nothing much to do intrinsically with type of work or type of
output. Material production is also difficult to define, because what is
"material"?

4. Do wagelaborers outside of the sphere of material production create value
?

That's a controversial issue, I would say yes, but depending on the social
relations and economic relations involved. Material production is an elusive
concept. But if the work consists purely of a transfer of ownership title to
products, it makes no net new addition to the value of social product
thereby. The "productiveness" of much seemingly ""unproductive" work
consists in reducing costs for somebody else. Marx seems to argue that a
service is the useful effect of a use-value, the production and consumption
of which coincide. But Marx's understanding of services was limited because
in his time he experienced only a limited range of services, e.g. lawyers,
doctors, accountants, personal servants and the like. The concept of service
requires a much more profound dialectical analysis.

5. What are service workers ?

Again a controversial issue. Many services in reality create products, and
many services get called products, even although the output may only consist
of (the transfer of) an ownership title. Service industries generally
include health, welfare and education, real estate, insurance, banking,
business services, and government services. This is an output definition,
rather than an occupational definition. But the statistical classification
systems are in many cases woefully out of date, and many of these sectors
combine production of labor-services with production of tangible products.
Generally, the commodification of services means that services are turned
into products. This means that the product is either a distinct
labor-service or a tangible product which substitutes for a service.
Exchange requires alienability, and mass-reproducible services are few.

6. Are teachers in the working class ? Do teachers create value ? Can
teachers be exploited  ( and who will teach the teacher ?) ? Same question
about office workers, postal workers,nannies, computer workers, clerks,
secretaries, nurses, garbage pickup workers,
water plant workers, public lighting workers, housekeepers, utility shutoff
workers, et al.

See 2 above. Teaching occurs at many different levels, and the salaries
vary. If the salary is sufficiently high, it may make working a choice
rather than a necessity. Teachers can obviously be exploited. All the other
workers you mention typically belong to the working class. Capitalism tends
to recast teaching (a personal service) as a form of commercial production
which creates value like any other, i.e. the personal service is fragmented
into distinct products, so that the transmission of knowledge and skills to
(future) workers becomes a commodity exchange. However economics cannot
consistently theorise this, and talks about education sometimes as
consumption and sometimes as investment, or both at the same time. The
commercialisation of education occurs via an ever more refined specification
of mandatory educational outcomes and skill acquisition, necessary to
"economise" education in terms of priced inputs and outputs. Originally
teaching was a middle-class activity presupposing the higher education of
teachers themselves, but to the extent that the teacher becomes more and
more a salaried producer, he becomes a worker "like any other" and is
proletarianised in that sense, unless his income permits significant
accumulation of wealth or makes working an option.

7. What is the difference between the working class and the working masses,
if any ? working people ?

The working class is defined as per question 2. The working masses include
not just workers and managers in various industries, but also the peasantry,
self-employed producers of various kinds, and part of the working
bourgeoisie ("functioning capitalists"). The working masses are
distinguished from those masses who do not work (children, unemployed,
retired, sick etc.).

8.  What is the significance of the difference between those who do
predominantly mental labor as opposed to those who do predominantly physical
labor ? What are white-collar workers ? What are intelligentsia or
intellectuals ?

Significance in relation to what? Manual labor is typically thought of as
involving little brainwork and a restricted number of manual tasks, but
mental labor may be just as restricted and narrowly focused. On the other
hand, manual work might involve a great deal of mental work also, and it
might involve a combination of a diverse range of tasks. The distinction
makes little sense other than in specific analyses of the division of labor,
in which job design involves both technical necessity and imperatives of
social control. Most work involves some of both, so the distinction is only
relative. White-collar workers are basically office workers as distinct from
blue-collars workers (operatives in industrial plants). The intelligentsia
is broadly all those with a tertiary education. Intellectuals are those who
concern themselves with public or more generally human issues.

9. What are the "middle strata ", "middle classes" etc. ?

Broadly they consist of the new middle class of salaried, higher educated
professionals and self-employed proprietors who may or may not hire a small
number of employees. But the exact characterisations of the middle classes
vary - criteria of income, occupation, asset-ownership, culture, parental
background etc. are used. There are other intermediate strata such as
students who may not be clearly identified with any particular class.

10. What does "proletarianization of the middle strata" mean ?

Essentially, that the opportunities for upward mobility shrink and that
incomes and assets decline for this group, so that they find themselves in
the same socio-economic situation as the working class, despite a higher
education or higher socio-economic background.

11. Does "proletariat" mean the same thing as "working class :" ?

The terms are often used interchangeably, but strictly speaking they are not
the same. What defines the proletariat is that it owns no property or
significant assets beyond such personal belongings as you might have in your
living quarters. Members of the working class may own significant assets.
For more historical information on this issue, see the second volume of Hal
Draper's magnum opus.

12. What is the significance of the changes in the division of labor and
organization of production due to the scientific and technological
revolution for all of the above ? ( What is the scientific and technological
revolution ? )

Marx pointed out in the manuscript "Results of the Immediate Process of
Production" that there exists a tendency within capitalism to integrate
scientific activity ever more closely into the production process. He also
suggested that capitalism implies a permanent process of technological
change forced by competition. However, there are historical "waves" or
"clusters" of technological innovation which drastically change the
character of production, leading to a conventional periodisation of history
in terms of distinct technological revolutions (see e.g. Fransisco Louca and
Christopher Freeman, As Time Goes By). The main effect of technical change
has been to increase productivity in the manufacturing and agricultural
sector to such an extent, that in developed capitalist societies the
majority of workers are occupied in the services sector. At the highest
level of this development, the possession of specific knowledge and skills
becomes a principle of class structuration. Rapid technical change has the
effect of more rapid job and social mobility, and this makes traditional
cultural definitions of class seem less relevant.

13. Does the term "mode of production" have more than on meaning in Marxist
terminology ?  Does it apply to changes in organization of production short
of a shift from capitalism to socialism , or feudalism to capitalism ? That
is, changes in the socio-economic formation ? Does it apply to changes due
to development and revolutions in science and technology since the
Industrial Revolution ?

Marx used the term mode of production rather vaguely, so yes. But basically
it refers to a specific combination of forces of production (labour-power,
technologies, instruments/tools/equipment/structures/materials, improved
land, systems of labor-coordination) and social relations of production
(work relations, legally encoded ownership relations, social dependencies,
class relations). This combination characterises the way wealth and the
means of life are produced. An historically distinct mode of production is
one which can mostly independently re-create its own initial conditions and
thus perpetuate itself for a long time. At any time however, there will
usually exist a specific mode of production in a society which is dominant,
but it could even be a hybrid mode of production (combining two or more
several distinct systems) or there could be an articulation of several
different kinds of production systems representing more modern and more
archaic epochs. Marx suggests that the mode of production "overdetermines"
the modes of distribution, circulation and consumption, so the mode of
production is the basic determinant of economic life. Specifically, he
argues it is the way in which surplus-labour is extracted and appropriated
that is the fulcrum of the social order. But changes could also occur within
an established mode of production which do not change the social relations
or productive forces in essential respects. Sometimes these changes are
defined as different epochs, or as social regimes, or as sub-modes of
production - one talks for example of early feudalism, classical feudalism
and late feudalism, early capitalism and late capitalism, or merchant
capitalism and industrial capitalism and so on. Capitalism however features
a unique mode of production because it elevates the principle of
accumulation of the social surplus-product through trade above all else,
which implies the constant expansion of commerce in all areas of social life
and a gradual elimination of other modes of production. As a corollary, the
"economic" or "economy"}becomes a separate sphere, legally and culturally,
which never existed in precapitalist society just like mass unemployment
never existed in pre-capitalist society (bar the odd exception perhaps, in
the event of natural disasters). Some post-Marxists like Andre Gunder Frank
reject the concept of mode of production as being useful, among other things
because it is difficult to distinguish one from the other in a neat and tidy
way or arrive at a satisfactory periodisation. Trotsky's concept of uneven
and combined development suggests that archaic and modern forms of
production may combine in unique ways. But in defense of Marx, it could be
argued that he aimed to study a mode of production in its pure form only,
abstracted from historical peculiarities of a given country, in order to
understand its main developmental dynamics. The only difference between
Marx's approach and Weber's "ideal type" is the abstractive procedure used
and the epistemic status of the result. Marx claims to have abstracted from
history the real structure and tendencies of capitalism. Weber makes no such
claim for his ideal types, because he considered it impossible to know
social reality "as it really is" - the ideal type functions only as an
illuminating analogy.

Hope this helps,

Jurriaan



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