[Marxism] Income mobility in the US (was: millionaire mullahs)

[<Loupaulsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here's the thing about that report: all of the data and findings might be
completely accurate, and yet it approaches the issue of class mobility in
such a way as to come up with largely meaningless findings.  

In the first place, a Marxist class analysis has to do with one's relation
to the means of production: do you own the means of production, or are you
selling your labor-power to the owner of the means of production?  Bourgeois
sociological class analysis, which really got off the ground in the 1950's,
puts together a layer-cake model of society made out of income groupings.
Most of these layers really are sectors of the working class.

Anyway, in the second place, everybody knows that young people make low
-salaries-, NO MATTER WHAT THEIR SOCIAL CLASS OF ORIGIN IS.  The distinction
between a child of the ruling bourgeoisie, and a child of the petty
bourgeoisie, and a child of a privileged layer of the working class, and a
child of the destitute sections of the working class, is not that they have
wildly different taxable incomes between the ages of 16 and 24.  If you are
a child of the ruling class attending a fine school, you might not have to
earn any taxable income at all.  This doesn't mean you aren't in the ruling
class.  A child of the working class who isn't going to college at all might
be working full time and might have found a union job and be making more at
the age of 20 than many college students working part-time.  This does not
mean that he/she is not in the working class.  And if the ruling-class child
is looked at again in 20 years and is a corporate CEO, and the working-class
child is unemployed 20 years later, that does not mean that they have
switched social classes with each other.

The point is that if someone REALLY wants to look at mobility among classes
in a meaningful way one has to do it in such a way that these income
fluctuations in a person's lifetime don't completely confuse the issue.
(That's why most bourgeois sociologists who deal with it seriously look at
intergenerational mobility: is the adult in a different social class from
his or her parents?)  Looking at changes in income bracket in the course of
a lifetime in such a way that you deliberately keep in all the youths at the
first point in time is a RECIPE for getting confused and meaningless
results.  Which is probably the whole point of it.

Lou Paulsen


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