Re: [Marxism] Class in America

["Paul H. Dillon" <illonph@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

When a Class is not a Class

Today the NYT began a series on class in America The information is bound to
be interesting but the analysis is bound to be useless. This is because they
don't have a politically meaningful model of social class: that is of the
system through which a society reflects and enacts the economic
relationships that determine the distribution of wealth in the society. The
Marxist model of classes does accomplish this and the NYT dismissal of Marx
early in the article, not only revealed the author's absolute lack of
familiarity with Marx's work, it presaged the meandering recounting of
ongoing research that followed. In this post I simply want to clarify some
significant aspects of a Marxist theory of social class and show how they
account for patterns that the NYT article, working without a cogent theory
of social class, could only report.

The dismissal was given in the following quote in which the author also
recognizes that modern sociologists must result to ever smaller divisions to
account for their phenomena in any meaningful way, just as the Ptolemaic
astronomers were forced to produce ever greater numbers of epicycles to
account for the movements of the planets before the correct heliocentric
model of the solar system was adopted.


"When societies were simpler, the class landscape was easier to read. Marx
divided 19th-century societies into just two classes; Max Weber added a few
more. As societies grew increasingly complex, the old classes became more
heterogeneous. As some sociologists and marketing consultants see it, the
commonly accepted big three - the upper, middle and working classes - have
broken down into dozens of microclasses, defined by occupations or
lifestyles." (my italics)


(1) Marx understood perfectly well that there were many social classes in
society. His historical analyses of the 1848-51 Revolutions in France are
probably first examples fine-grained sociological analyses of historical
processes since Ibn-Khaldun; histories that paid attention to the specific
behavior of social groups identified on the basis of their economic
activity - workers, peasants, small shop-owners, landlords, factory owners,
etc. Marx defined economic classes on the basis of an individual's
relationship to the means of production - the land, the infrastructure, and
all of the material factors that enter into the distribution of goods and
services, including money a form capital must assume for goods and services
to be exchanged and distributed in a capitalist economy. He also recognized
that different historical epochs had different class structures and that in
real time these class structures from different epochs overlapped. XIX
European societies contained classes from feudal agricultural modes of
production - peasants and landlords - as well as the classes of the emerging
capitalist mode of production, workers and capitalists, of which factory
workers and factory owners, (morphed into today's "labor and management") is
only an early and very abstract stereotype.. Shop owners, traders, barbers,
prostitutes, and many other occupations have existed across historical
epochs; others exist only within a specific historical epoch or mode of
production. Their "specific gravity" and "hue"  in different modes of
production depends entirely on the dominant industry, the one whose
relations of production set the tone for the economy as a whole.  But in
every capitalist economy, the relationship between capital and labor is the
dynamic that drives the historical trajectories of the societies in which it
develops.

(2) Marx's division of society into two classes: the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie is an ideal sociological reflection of the relationship between
labor and capital, the two economic categories Marx applied to the analysis
of capitalist economy. In Marx's theory the relationship between capital and
labor is sufficient for determining the dynamic movement of the capitalist
system in the abstract, its relationship to historically existing societies
similar to the relationship between a physicist's model of a dynamic system
and the engineers realization of that abstract system in a specific concrete
context where other factors need to be taken into account.

The NYT articles own listing of the relative status of the occupational
categories hints at the correctness of the Marxist definition of class as
the relationship to the means of production. Law, health, and computers
stand at the top . . . It is not difficult to show how these function in the
reproduction of capitalist circulation. Take the legal profession. The
existence of private property is a precondition for capitalist production,
in particular private property of the productive resources. The legal system
is a huge edifice built to support and maintain the existence of private
property. The vast majority of all laws in contemporary society concern
property relations and these relations are implicated in all other branches
of law not directly concerned with property. Little work is required to
discover the intimate connection between property, the legal profession, and
politics as the formulation of law which is the quintessential expression of
society as well as control of State Power.. The "prestige" of the legal
profession can be immediately accounted for from a Marxist perspective,
using the same categories that are applied for understanding the other class
criteria for evaluating class given in the NYT links.

One also can think about class in terms of how much command capital has over
a person and how much command a person has over capital. This is measured by
a person's overall wealth. . Marx's definition of a worker is anyone who has
nothing to sell but his or her own labor, regardless of the occupational
area in which they are employed. A capitalist, on the other hand, by virtue
of access to capital, is in a position is in the position to command labor
and thereby benefit in the surplus value, the profit, generated through the
combination of labor and capital. Of course as an individual person, the
capitalist still has his own labor power that he can sell but he or she
doesn't need to from necessity.

Marxist model of class is also sensitive to the technological dimensions of
the economy's leading productive activities, the activities that define the
economy as a whole, as the energy and telecommunication/computer industries
defines our own economy. This ability allows it to account for anomalies
that the SES approach to class can only account for through the addition of
new categories to its model. One such anomaly is given in the article's
description of "mobility at the top."


"Even as mobility seems to have stagnated, the ranks of the elite are
opening. Today, anyone may have a shot at becoming a United States Supreme
Court justice or a C.E.O., and there are more and more self-made
billionaires. Only 37 members of last year's Forbes 400, a list of the
richest Americans, inherited their wealth, down from almost 200 in the
mid-1980's." (from article)


A Marxist analysis would immediately begin by pointing out that a major
technological revolution had occurred during the period described. Although
everyone remembers the burst of the 90s bubble, the fact is that many new
new capitalists came on the scene with the cybernetic revolution, the first
major technological revolution affecting overall productive relations since
the development of the aeronautics industry. Bill Gates, the world's richest
man, is most clearly emblematic of this "new money:" Notice also that the
occupational category "computers/math" has emerged, a category that did not
exist 50 years ago, as such, but would be "math/engineers" if at all. An
important dimension for the study of class would concern the relationship
between a family's accumulated wealth and how it becomes invested in
different technologies, at which stage of the technological cycle.  One
could obviously never arrive at such a formulation following the approach to
class exemplified in the NYT article, first in a series.


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