Re: [Marxism] What does the modern working class really look like?was:: [Re: DISILLUSIONED WITH MARXMAILers!]

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Marvin Gandall wrote:
> 
> If your situation were not involuntary and you were a genuinely independent
> contractor who was turning an after tax profit in excess of the pay and
> benefits of an employed language teacher providing a comparable service,
> then you could aptly be described as a "petty bourgeois".

I think it is a mistake to focus too much on putting individuals into
this or that class. What difference does it make, and how does it
contribute to one's sense of the society as a whole, at a given time. It
is this individualist focus that generates identity politics -- which
when the identity is "worker," generates what has been discussed here as
workerism. Class does not really tell one much, if anything, about any
given individual.

_At the present time_ when, as Joaquin keeps reminding us, there is no
mass movement of any kind, the only context in which discussing class
makes sense is the context of understanding capitalism as explored in
Vols. I & II of Capital -- i.e., in its 'pure form,' at the highest
level of abstraction. It is during periods of heightened political
activity, when at least something like collective and conscious class
struggle emerges, that it becomes useful -- vital -- to carry out class
analysis more concretely, in terms emerging from the concrete struggle.

Carrol


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