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Class / War

  
  

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petunia
11:46 / 29.11.07
To avoid further oil spills on the shores of the Badiou and Zizek threads, I propose this thread.

The background:

In the Zizek thread, I pulled out a quote of Zizek's which seemed to align him with the Stalinist cause to some degree:

Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism.


AAR noticed this and asked me:

Just out of interest, what's actually wrong with this assertion?

Race is a social construct, not something that constitutes us - it doesn't exist down at the roots. Dig deeper than 'race' and you find economics - race is nearly always a blind to distract us from economics: "Let's go and better these savages!" being an excuse to go and steal a load of resources and take over land.

Fascism claims race is a) a real, objective thing and b) essential - neither of these assertions are true. Whereas class warfare is demonstrably real (who put together my trainers, who cleans up my shit, who's going to clean up this library when I've gone home and who will still be doing this when I've got my cushy teaching job?) and fundamental to the social field.


To which I replied:

The point I was raising was not specifically to do with the validity of the statement, but more that, in giving a certain 'ontological' grounding to the situation which gave rise to the Russian revolution, Zizek is flying his colours. It seemed to me to run in line with what I saw as a reading of Stalinist Russia as 'obviously a mean, bad thing, but they meant right, not like those nasty Nazis'. It's not a reading that I necessarily agree with.

As for the right/wrongness of the statement itself - I'm not sure.

I think it's a good reading of the situation in Nazi Germany - economic strife used as a grounding for a party based in National Pride at the expense of the Jewish, Communist, Romani etc Others. It's be interesting to follow way that people will do anything if put in a position of economic concern.

But I find myself disagreeing with the claim that class conflict is inherent to, or constitutive of society, though I'm not sure why. I can see that class coflict is a major part of our culture, and I can see that the essential unrest, within which our culture resides, is used as a tool by policitians to justify War on Fear, persecution of poorer people and/or foreigners, etc. I just feel an unease when I see people try to use this as either a Universal Theory or a means to say capitalism is a Bad Thing.

When you say
Race is a social construct, not something that constitutes us - it doesn't exist down at the roots.
and
class warfare is demonstrably real... and fundamental to the social field.

I'd have to disagree. I can only see that class is just as socially constructed as race. Antagonism between classes is no more fundamental than is antagonism between races.

Both situations are historicaly constituted facts which rely on the past having taken the course it has done. To subsume racial conflict to economic considerations of wealth and need seems to be a little short sighted. Yes, there are times when race is used as a 'cover' for what are, at core, economic problems (Blair's blaming of London shootings on 'a distinctive black culture' comes to mind...) but I think there are certain other forces at play when we construct ideas of race, and when we use these ideas to discriminate.

So I'm not sure that class warfare is any more a) a real, objective thing or b) essential than is race.

As I've probably made obvious here, I should probably read more Marx(ian theory) to get a better understanding of this stuff. I just find myself slightly knee-jerky when it comes to people trying to valourise any of the murderous 'communist' movements by placing them in a theoretical field of correctness or necessity.


This then spilled over to the Badiou thread, where _pin asked me:

And now I would like to ask petunia, do you mean that

- you don't believe that antagonistic pairings in society map to roles we'd normally associate with owning and not owning the means of production?

- in a from each, to each economic model would also yield roles we'd normally associate with owning and not owning the means of production, but that these would not here be antagonistic?

- mapping wealth in a mathamatic way is tantamount to phrenology and the role that that played in racial politics.

I may be wrong, and if so just PM me an answer and wipe this post or whatever, but it seems like a relevant question that we can ask, regarding Badiou's project. What data is permissible when constructing a politics? What and is not, functionally, real enough?


To which I posted a rather sprawling, and decidedly off-topic:

Hmm..

I'm still quite unformed in my thinking in this, so bear with me here...

you don't believe that antagonistic pairings in society map to roles we'd normally associate with owning and not owning the means of production?

I both do and don't. I see antagonism between many different groupings. There is frequent vertical conflict (strikes/activism, etc). There is also frequent horizontal conflict (different working class gangs in a patch of land, conflict between racial/religious groupings). I think that, while a lot of this can be explained in economic terms, there are deeper underlying problems. Um..

So I have some issue with the term 'means of production'. There is a certain story that seems to underpin this term - whereby a person is the owner of their work, they are a resource and the Boss exploits this resource. But if a person is unemployed, where is this resource? There is (in my reading, admittedly underinformed) a materialst assumption of 'means of production = stuff', and I don't think that applies. Um..

I think that organised religion has created a great amount of antagonism in the world, and I don't see what religion has to do with the means of production.

So no, I don't think that all antagonistic groupings (and they aren't necessarily pairings...) are related to owning/not owning means of production. The growth of capitalism our of feudalism has led capital to be seen in the same terms as ownership (and self ownership), in the way that a feudal lord would literally own the land and people on it. As the processes of capital move away from direct land-based work, I think conflict moves into a different sphere.

I suppose I mean to say that there are forms of control to which differing peoples find themselves opposed in different ways, but that these forms of control are not the product of a capitalist society, rather the product of certain structures of society. Capitalism allows for varied structures of society. Between totalitarianism and anarcho-capitalism, I am not aure we can assume that capital holds the same necessary role of control.

Is this what you mean by in a from each, to each economic model would also yield roles we'd normally associate with owning and not owning the means of production, but that these would not here be antagonistic??

mapping wealth in a mathamatic way is tantamount to phrenology and the role that that played in racial politics.

I am not sure (again). I have a limited understanding of mathematics so I do not know how it could be used to form a ontology or a politics. I don't really think that we can use an objective method of description to describe something as subjective as class war - how does one mathematically delineate the discontentment of a worker? How does one define the structure by which a worker is forced to remain in that position? Quality of life as a sum?

I wouldn't say it is impossible to map these subjective realms, but I really can't imagine how it could convincingly be done. Like phrenology, I'd be suspicious that the mathematician was making odd inferences through the selective issuing of data.

What data is permissible when constructing a politics? What and is not, functionally, real enough?

The thing I found contention with in the distinction between race and class was that race is most definitely real in the sense that we live it, race is a continually acted process which many millions of people adhere to, work by and interact through. However, at the same time, it has no objective reality. We may be able to point to differential characteristics in the body of a person, but where is the race? We are left with a constantly differing mix of traits and movements which are taken up by society and delineated in greater or lesser ways. Race is both 'given' to people and 'acted' by them as an identity.

I would say that class distinctions are just as real, in this 'societally objective' sense - people still act in terms of class, some have their class given by others, some act in terms of a class. But I don't think we can objectively (in a more scientific/mathematical way) map the class differences. We can map who owns what, but what will this tell us in true political terms? I earn under £10,000 a year, which would make me working class in strictly monetary terms. However, I have a middle-class upbringing and am partaking in a university education. I speak in an educated way, and I worry about my class. This makes me decidedly middle class. How would we quantify this? On what scale? What political meaning would it hold?

Your question of what data is permissible when making a politics is defintely tricky. I suppose you have to start with the aim your politics is to have. What is it that you wish to move towards? Or is it something you wish to move from?

In a sense, all data must be applicable to a politics - whatever we find important should be what guides us, but how can this be coded without ending up at 'I find my racial heritage to be important and wish to move my politics towards a whites-only country'?

So we then do need to find that data which will allow for a universalised politics? That data, that movement that will allow for the greatest prefered situation for everybody?


This was (rightly) noted as off-thread and I asked for to be removed. AAR then continued with:

On this:

"I'd have to disagree. I can only see that class is just as socially constructed as race. Antagonism between classes is no more fundamental than is antagonism between races."

So, as an experiment, of the following two options, what's the best description of the history of Europe, bearing in mind that both might be problematic?

a) Different races fighting eachother for supremacy.

b) Different classes fighting eachother for supremacy.


Lurid responded with:

I'm not sure I understand, AAR. They are both bad....but if you force me to choose one, I go for (a). Now what?


And Jackie Susann replied thus:

Does it work any better for you if you make the choices:

a) a dynamic conflict between economic forces.

or

b) a dynamic conflict between racial forces.

I think maybe the problem here is a confusion between the commonsense meaning of class (rough social group) and the marxist sense (process of transformation of the relations of production).

I think my preferred thought experiment might be, which of the following two is easier to imagine:

a) A society where the way things are produces and distributed is utterly irrelevant to society.

b) A society where the way people are racially classified is utterly irrelevant to society.

It seems to me that the former is obviously impossible, but the latter isn't that difficult to conceive (although, obviously, ridiculously difficult to put into practice). Hence, the irreducibility of class.

Would also like to emphasise that this argument has nothing to do with the outdated marxist one that class politics are more important (or really separable) from race politics.


Which spurred:

I'm more confused, Jackie. Class is a "process of transformation..."? I thought class in the Marxist sense was a division of people according to whether they own significant assets or are paid to produce things by those who do...roughly. So while I can accept a) a dynamic conflict between economic forces as an extremely rough outline of some periods of European history, I'm not entirely sure what it has to do with class, per se. That is, if Burger King and Macdonalds engage in a price war, this is certainly an economic conflict but would you really say it was a class conflict? The point being that if you analyse things in terms of economics, Burger King and Macdonalds look like pretty similar entities.

While I'm not sure if you can really say that European conflict followed that model, the fight for empire and the related resources isn't obviously disimilar either.

From Lurid

And:

Yeah, I think the problem here is that when I say 'marxist' what I actually mean is 'the pretty fucking obscure ultraleftist tradition within marxism'. For which economics refers, not to a specialised discipline or range of business practices, but the (inherently dynamic) ways things are produced and distributed in society. That is what I am suggesting is irreducible - although obviously, any specific manifestation (Burger King v MacDonalds, bourgeoisie v proletariat, etc.) is just as socially constructed as race.

From Jackie.

Nolte added:

...In which case the referent of the word class is so large as to be largely worthless, or largely trivial, probably both. I think there's a reason why even Marxist sociologists tend to operationalise class as a function of income, education and a few other core factors, instead of going with "the broad forces of production". Or am I creating a strawman here?


And AAR

Would also like to emphasise that this argument has nothing to do with the outdated marxist one that class politics are more important (or really separable) from race politics.

So you solve the problem of segregation in country X. Then what? Job done? Not that you were suggesting this, but there's a lot of fluffy obscurantists at my university who have the Marxphobia - and who seem to think that having a few people in wheelchairs on the BBC idents solves any problems our society might conceivably have...

[...]Let me re-word it - how are you going to solve the racist superstructure without tackling the base? - if that's what you're suggesting. If not, and I'm missing something which is quite likely, could you explain the position a bit more?

And this as as far as we've got.

It seems at the moment we have differing views that you Can/Can't describe the history of Western Europe/The World by means to a Marxist/Marxian/Inspired by Marx critique of the interplay of economic (or 'economic') processes.

I think further discussion of this would be helpful because:

a. I know very little of the Marxian tradition and would like to know more.

b. This tradition has shaped a lot of the arguments of the Left in the past century, it seems pretty important to work out if it's actually valid.

c. We're all after handy tools to fix society with and we (I) need to know which tools work best.

Onward!
 
 
Jackie Susann
00:53 / 30.11.07
This is the reply I posted in the Badiou thread, that seems more relevant here:

No, I think the problems are interlinked and mutually intractable - i.e., I think it's just as naive when Marxists say (used to say) 'once we have a revolution and sort out the base all these trivial racial (or sexual or whatever) superstructure problems will disappear'.


In reply to Nolte, the point of using that definition is to describe something which is an intractable core of all problems narrowly described as political, economic, or whatever - and that any response that only targets the narrow form of the problem falls down on that core.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
07:09 / 30.11.07
I don't mean to be snarky here, but I can't stop a little twinge of a smile when you say "narrowly defined as economics, politics" etc. My point being again that if you want to do social analysis, say an analysis of the stratification of production (possibly what is known as division of labour) in a given time and place (say London in 2007), there's no empirical or methodological necessity to start with a fixed idea of what that looks like. You might as well start with the loose notion that there are indeed people and aggregations of people, ideas, resources etc that engage and are engaged in this weird thing called work, and then work your way up to a particular picture that paints the way things are produced and distributed in a particular society.

However, I am confused. Are you merely explaining what the obscure ultra-left marxists mean by "class", or are you saying that this is the way it is, both, ot neither?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
11:59 / 30.11.07
Cheers for this reply, by the way.

No, I think the problems are interlinked and mutually intractable - i.e., I think it's just as naive when Marxists say (used to say) 'once we have a revolution and sort out the base all these trivial racial (or sexual or whatever) superstructure problems will disappear'.

Okay, sure - my concern is, though, that fervour and engagement can get drawn into:

a) thinking solely about race - or sex, or gender, or disability - and ignoring any economics that might be at play.

For example, calling the BNP 'racists' may well be true, but if you want to combat them you'd have to understand that, whilst having plenty of friends in the upper echelons, in a large part they appeal for support to people who have been ignored by the main political parties - the unemployed in run-down areas, and areas where poverty and a lack of future have let racial tensions flare up.

Blair, Brown, Cameron and the Daily Mail are all happy to call the BNP 'racist' - and plenty of middle-class people are happy to refer to the BNP target group as 'racist white trash' or 'ignorant chavs'. You can see, however, that this isn't going to solve anything any time soon.

b) thinking about superstructure and not base.

This point will put me in risk of saying some very unpleasant things, but I'll try to say them anyway: a few non-white faces on the TV, quotas (where they exist), and the current academic drive towards looking at literature in terms of race and gender etc, and often denouncing things that aren't up to 'our standards', are all attempts at cure which do nothing by way of prevention - the notional BNP supporters above are frankly unimpressed by seeing an Asian character on a BBC sitcom because nothing is being done to solve the underlying problems, it's not going to stop them from going along the right-wing path. In fact if anything it just gets read as 'the PC media', likewise the hard postcolonial-feminist slant at universities which is read as the 'intellectual elite who know nothing about the Real World'.

'The PC Media' and the 'intellectual elite' as conceived here are of course myths, and not arguments for going back to some mythic 1950s ideal. What I am saying is not that diversity is pointless or that the theoretical reading that goes on at universities is without value - far from it - I'm simply saying that it's only part of the work that needs to be done.

And what happens, over and over again, is that these first steps get seized on and people say 'there's no more racism', or that the problem is solved, when actually the economic issue is still there. Which is all the more pressing as we live in a status quo interested in keeping discussions of the economics behind it quiet. It serves the status quo to divert attention from the way the economy works to (of course important) questions like 'Does this novel create a monstrous image of the African?' 'Does this Shakespeare play create an image of women as child-like?' You can argue these questions back and forth without ever dealing with the real world, and such discussions can actually be used to trick us into thinking that, while the Shakespearean play and the 19th century novel are racist and sexist, we, because we can see this, must live in a society which is not racist and sexist. Which is not the case.

It's ridiculous to expect this problem to be solved purely in the superstructure just as it is ridiculous to assume that new economic measures are all we need. You weren't saying this, but power has a habit of forcing us to think this.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
12:03 / 30.11.07
Blair, Brown, Cameron and the Daily Mail are all happy to call the BNP 'racist'

Arguably off-topic, but are they? Surely the problem is that the BNP are legally a legitimate political party, and that this is then compounded by the mainstream political parties' response being to say that those who are drawn towards the BNP have "legitimate concerns" and must be wooed back to the mainstream via policies and rhetoric which ape those of the BNP as much as they can get away with.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:03 / 30.11.07
I'll try and dig out the links, Fly, but I'm sure they're all on record as saying something along those lines (which doesn't discount what you said).
 
 
Jackie Susann
19:01 / 03.12.07
Nolte - I'm not sure what you think we're disagreeing about?
 
 
Closed for Business Time
20:34 / 03.12.07
Hurm... I don't know if we're disagreeing - I was just checking if the ultra-leftie definition of class you gave is one you agree with, or if you were merely quoting it as an example. I disagree with 'the pretty fucking obscure ultraleftist tradition within marxism'. For which economics refers, not to a specialised discipline or range of business practices, but the (inherently dynamic) ways things are produced and distributed in society.

But when you go on to say
That is what I am suggesting is irreducible I'm not sure if you're saying you agree with that. I might be overlooking something upthread.
 
 
Jackie Susann
00:56 / 04.12.07
Yeah, I mean, I think of myself in that tradition. But I don't particularly disagree with your example of an analysis of division of labour in London (except to the extent that even with that focus, the analysis would have to be global) - I'm not clear on how you meant that to be a counter-example to what I'd said.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
07:33 / 04.12.07
Simply because there are analytical concepts I'd claim are more fundamental than economics, fundamental in the sense of partially causing, and simultanesously not caused by economics. A good chunk of low-level (as in biological) psychology would fall under this heading.

Also, my point with the example I gave was to at least hint to the possibility that a relatively agnostic social analysis of (material? symbolic?) production in London need not, should not and (IMO) cannot start with a notion of class as per your example. I mean, what's the point in doing social analysis if you already have it all worked out, at least for ideological and political purposes? That's not science in my book. That's propaganda.
 
 
eye landed
13:33 / 04.12.07
class conflict is irreducible-- which i read as uncaused-- because class has no referent. it only exists as a cognitive or social structure. race conflict is reducible because the notions that constitute 'race' are tied to manifestations that can be shown to be fallible.

economic factors, which cause racial and sexual conflict and also constitute class conflict, are inherent in capitalism because the capitalist notion of work-- the exchange labour for the property of somebody else-- is a lie, or rather a cognitive or social structure. the basis of civilization is the exchange of labour for the products of nature, i.e. wealth!=property.

so what is the basis of this cognitive or social structure that we call class? im not sure we can find it in the physiology of the brain, which is distilled through evolution anyway. i want to look to evolutionary psychology, because i like recapitulation theory.

is capitalism based on a fundamental relationship between primitive humans? for example, are the bourgoisie pampered children provided for by their hard-working proletariat parents? or a decadent alpha male waited on by oppressed women? or a group of conquerers who have enslaved their rivals?

or is capitalism deeper than that, perhaps inherent in the relationship of predator and prey? or even in the war for dominance that took place between competing hominid species?

i can see class conflict in all of these examples-- that is, the lineation of privileged insiders and enslaved outsiders-- except predator and prey, which is the example that exists outside of primates, and the example where the classes are of an indisputably different nature. do the others exist outside or primates, for example a colony of ants enslaving another? does class conflict require that two people not be discernible in any regard besides their class? if not, then is the domestication of cows or corn also class war? or does it require that mobility is possible? a cow cannot become a man, but a poor man can become rich. a woman cannot become a man, either, and i think the sexes have a war more fundamental than class.

if we want to alter the nature of class, we need to get behind it. obviously political solutions cant work, since class is the basis of politics. will feminism or queer theory destroy class war by setting an example of equality? will neuroscience destroy class war by outlining its physiological mechanisms? will engineering destroy class war by providing resources for everyone? will war destroy class war by destroying the power of those who insist that class is real? or am i showing my naivite by thinking that a communist revolution is even desirable?
 
 
Closed for Business Time
13:56 / 04.12.07
Your definitely showing your naivete by contradicting yourself in your first paragraph, as in class has no referent. it only exists as a cognitive or social structure.
Dude. You just made the word "class" refer to something, thus giving it a referent.

Also the rest is a tad confused. I'll be back with some questions for you.
 
 
petunia
16:20 / 04.12.07
Would I be better off trying to understand 'Class' as related to 'Classification', rather than the traditional concept of Hierarchy?

I know this may be troublesome, but. I originally assumed 'Class war' to refer to the ruling class vs. the ruled. This I can see as a valid description of a thing, but I'm not sure I see the necessary connection to capitalism. It also seems to fail to account for violence/war between people(s) who are on the same tier of a hierarchy.

Marx refined this understanding of 'Class' to give an economically-defined account of how one rules - the war becomes between those who produce and those who own the means of production; those who make stuff, and those who profit from this stuff.

And then J Susann mentions the undertanding of economics as ways things are produced and distributed in society. This leads to a position where we can see the relations of ruling/ruled as dynamic and (potentially) in constant flux - 'Class' not as the enforced structure of 'King, Lords, Servants, Serfs' (though this could obviously be a structure of Class relations), but as the different roles taken on by, or enforced upon, people and how those roles related to the flows of desiring production*.

Which then comes to 'Class' as given through 'Classification' - we take on, or are given roles in society which become our modes of action, our means of production. This process of 'Classification' is a continual process, enacted through language, law, economics etc. Class war is thus the combat between the person/people and their given relations in the world.

Is this roughly what is meant by 'class war'?

If it is, then I see a slight problem - the relation between 'Classification' and Capitalism. I can see that the feudal system, is a strongly enforced system of Classification and that Anarchism is the ideal of a system without Classification, but I don't see the role of money in this. Many people speak of Anarcho-Capitalism, so it doesn't seem as though Capitalism is necessarily opposed to freedom ('freedom' as 'ability to choose one's own class, or lack of class, while allowing for other people to do the same). What am I missing?

Why does the process of exchange of money for goods, combined with the potential for growth of wealth necessarily entail Class War?

I'm pretty sure there's something (a lot!) I'm missing here. I can sense a blind spot but, yeah.. Does this make any sense, or am I reading the book upside down?



*Deleuzeian turn of phrase to try to look cool.. Would what i am describing be roughly what the term 'desiring production' relates to?
 
 
Jackie Susann
19:01 / 04.12.07
Nolte - I don't have any problem with the idea biology is 'more fundamental' than economics. For that matter, physics and chemistry are 'more fundamental'. It just seems to me to be beside the point.

Re:

relatively agnostic social analysis of (material? symbolic?) production in London need not, should not and (IMO) cannot start with a notion of class as per your example

I'm not sure which of my examples you mean, but this just strikes me as almost oxymoronic, since I described class (I think, or I meant to) as the dynamic processes of production and distribution of resources in a society. I am not sure how a 'social analysis of production' can avoid starting there. Where else could it start? (Sorry if this seems dense, but I just feel like we're talking past each other and it's better to try and clarify what I'm missing rather than develop the argument.)

Will come back to the other points later.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
20:36 / 04.12.07
Re the reduction argument - the difference I think would be that chemistry wouldn't be a proximal cause of economic changes, as psychological variables arguably are. And in that sense social cognition is more fundamental than social division (altho I'll grant that the two to a degree develop interdependently in the lifespan of any individual).

Hom... I do think we're talking at cross purposes to some extent. You say economics are the broad processes and structures through and in which things are produced and distributed in a society, correct? Do you then mean that class is the stratification and classification of individuals, groups, organisations and institutions, according to the positions they occupy in the dense networks of economical activity, into morally and/or politically relevant and similar sets?
 
 
Closed for Business Time
20:43 / 04.12.07
Further re the analytical start-position I posit up-thread. It seems to me that if you start with class (pre-)defined axiomatically you're assuming that that's what you're gonna find.

Don't get me wrong, I think class can be a valid aggregate variable, but I don't see that economics or other social sciences are in a state where class has a analytical status analog to a physical constant or some other given. I don't think it ever will. I do think that we can eventually agree on methodologies that will reliably and relatively precisely outline the structures and functions of classes in a given society. Whether that will resemble Marxist analysis remains to be seen, but I'd be surprised if some elements weren't retained.
 
 
Jackie Susann
19:59 / 06.12.07
I think part of where we're missing each other is you are reading 'irreducible' as 'where you start', which is not how I mean it - more like, 'if you haven't figured this in, there's something missing from your analysis'. In terms of contemporary society, I think there are a whole bunch of factors that have the same status. Like, in her book Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick says something like, any analysis of 20th century social relations that doesn't include a focus on male homosocial relations is centrally flawed. (Quoting, badly, from memory.) The same is, I think obviously, true of things like race, class in the sociological sense, and gender, among others.

I mean, in your London hypothetical, a really thorough analysis of divisions of labour would have to look at the way production is organised according to sex, race, national borders, how property relations are organised by heterosexuality, etc. (This isn't to say you couldn't do valuable work that focused specifically only on one of these topics.)

Where economics is different from those factors, is that you can't understand ANY society without understanding how production and distribution create social roles.
 
 
Jackie Susann
20:07 / 06.12.07
I see a slight problem - the relation between 'Classification' and Capitalism. I can see that the feudal system, is a strongly enforced system of Classification and that Anarchism is the ideal of a system without Classification, but I don't see the role of money in this. Many people speak of Anarcho-Capitalism, so it doesn't seem as though Capitalism is necessarily opposed to freedom ('freedom' as 'ability to choose one's own class, or lack of class, while allowing for other people to do the same). What am I missing?

Why does the process of exchange of money for goods, combined with the potential for growth of wealth necessarily entail Class War?

Well, I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that anarcho-capitalists don't believe in class, except maybe as a minor contingent social classification. I don't want to totally derail this thread, so I am not going to expand on this point here, but libertarian capitalists are just hopelessly wrongheaded, and there point of view is utterly irrelevant to a discussion of class war in more or less the same was as (say) Fourierists (i.e., archaic utopian socialists).

As for the question at the end of this post, the answer is kind of 'you need to read Capital', and I am not trying to be an arsehole when I say that - it's basically the question Marx's book is devoted to answering. I am not sure how much detail I should go into in trying to respond, or how much familiarity with Marxist jargon it's ok to assume here?

Generally, it might be useful to think in terms of 'class struggle' rather than 'class war', to avoid the implication that we're talking about violent confrontation.
 
 
Jackie Susann
20:19 / 06.12.07
It serves the status quo to divert attention from the way the economy works to (of course important) questions like 'Does this novel create a monstrous image of the African?' 'Does this Shakespeare play create an image of women as child-like?' You can argue these questions back and forth without ever dealing with the real world

I think this is a pretty weak argument, because it's easy to come up with examples of completely pointless, disengaged marxist academicism. You can argue the status of the law of value for decades "without ever dealing with the real world". It's also easy to find examples of Marxists who still seem to believe 'the real struggle' is about class in a restricted sense, which seems to exclude any questions of gender or race - I would point to Zizek as the most prominent, although that argument should prob. go back to his thread.

This argument always reminds me of Selma James talking about the need to reject "on the one hand class subordinated to feminism and on the other feminism subordinated to class".
 
 
petunia
20:25 / 06.12.07
Does that mean I've skipped a beat in trying to understand 'Class' as something not necessarily structured in the ways one traditionally conceives it?

I am not sure how much detail I should go into in trying to respond, or how much familiarity with Marxist jargon it's ok to assume here?

I would really like it if you could expand and, although I'm not too up on my Marxalia, I do have wikipedia. I know I really should tackle Capital to understand what all this means, but I hear it's rather big and time is a bit full for me at the mo...
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
20:34 / 06.12.07
It serves the status quo to divert attention from the way the economy works to (of course important) questions like 'Does this novel create a monstrous image of the African?' 'Does this Shakespeare play create an image of women as child-like?' You can argue these questions back and forth without ever dealing with the real world

Well, except no, you can't, because that novel and that play are not alien artefacts from some alternative universe. They are also part of the real world, albeit (in the Shakespeare case and perhaps the novel) from the real world's past. This is the only world we've got, and all culture is a part of that real world. Seeing cultural products as somehow distinct from some kind of realer world is an illusion, in my view.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
21:09 / 06.12.07
Jackie, if you're saying that a social analysis bereft of economic and political differentials is lacking something very important, I'm not gonna dispute that. All I'm saying is that I don't have to be a Marxist to do that, nor do I have to buy into any given definition of class.
 
 
eye landed
21:24 / 06.12.07
im clearly out of my depth, not having quite caught on to your post-modern use of 'class' until petunia explained it. and i dont think the rest of you are using it in the same way.

it seems we could all use a time out to define some terms. and it might help to expand this from the dialogue that its becoming.

theres a lot on this page, such as,

'For Marx, class is defined by one's relationship to the means of production. One either controls a factor of production or one does not.'

'It fell to Weber to make explicit the distinction between a class and a status-group. As he put it: ‘status position…is not determined by class position alone: possession of money or the position of entrepreneur are not in themselves status qualifications, although they can become such; propertylessness is not in itself status disqualification, although it can become such.’'

(my favourite)'The consumption habits of self-employed window-cleaners and of employed window-cleaners are very similar; their voting behaviour is not.'

(all from the oxford political dictionary section.)

but nothing on that page takes us into post-modernism; its mostly anthropological.

what are we really trying to say with the concept of class? i really didnt provide class with a referent by saying it was a social and cognitive structure. i provided it with a category. nations are also social and cognitive structures, but a different kind than class.

i think we need to return to this bit, from the preamble:

...a confusion between the commonsense meaning of class (rough social group) and the marxist sense (process of transformation of the relations of production).

class is a process? a process of an individual, or of society as a whole, or of, well, of a particular class?

class requires the idea that different people serve different purposes and have different goals in society. it requires that these roles complement each other, though not necessarily fairly. but how does the idea of class relate to these roles?

do i have a class? (clearly i dont have much class.) is my class unique to me? am i part of a class of many people? am i part of many classes that each contain many people? is the concept of 'different classes' even meaningful, or is class a force that permeates society without dividing itself into identifiable parts? or is class just a vague notion used by powerful individuals to scare others into accepting powerlessness? is class like a concept tree, or a venn diagram, or a pyramid, or a web, or a poem, or...?

i fear im shredding the word class completely. somebody rescue it.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
09:51 / 08.12.07
To petunia, I would say that yeah, you probably need to read at least the first volume of Capital, or maybe you could read the Grundrisse. Because while your questions are really quite valid, you're assuming that Marx doesn't actually ask those questions, or engage with them, and he most certainly does. So reading the text might help you.

I'm sure you're very busy, but trying to have a conversation about the different meanings of 'class' really isn't going to get you anywhere if you don't have some basic understandings first. And given that there are so many conflicting interpretations of what Marx was on about, you'd do better to read the 'original' and make up our own mind.

And Nolte, could you please list some of the basic 'human' or psychological traits that you think determine sociality before the dynamic distribution of resources? You seem to be hinting at some kind of biological determinism.
 
 
petunia
12:42 / 08.12.07
I'm sure you're very busy, but trying to have a conversation about the different meanings of 'class' really isn't going to get you anywhere if you don't have some basic understandings first.

Makes sense really. Might have to step out of the thread for a bit...
 
 
Closed for Business Time
14:11 / 08.12.07
I'm not hinting, I'm saying it loud and clear. But that doesn't mean that biology is all there is, or even that it's always the most important cause. Genetic expression is for nowt without interaction with external processes, which include social and economical processes.

But that's really a different debate - or are you saying that a (Marxist) analysis of class can't co-exist with biological causation?

As for a list of basic, universal psychological traits... Where to start, really. I guess the works of Bordieu, Mary Douglas and other Cultural Theorists (Michael Thompson, A Wildavsky, Dake et al) as well as Alan Page Fiske and his collaborators are as good a starting point as any, in terms of relevance to this debate. Otherwise I could just point you to a bunch of cognitive psychology. Do let me know if you'd prefer that.

Here's one nice summary of the strenghts & weaknesses + dis/similarities of those 3 approaches.
 
 
HCE
20:00 / 08.12.07
Could you give a brief summary of what you got from your reading, (esp. of Bourdieu) Nolte? I very much appreciate being pointed to sources, but two people can say Go read X and mean two very different things by it. See how Disco, for example, points to a specific section of Marx to read fro discussion of a specific matter? Something like that would help, too. Thanks.

Edit: Sorry -- is that your summary you linked to? Apologies if it is, a bit tired this morning.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
01:31 / 09.12.07
Yeah, I'm rather puzzled by the reference to Bourdieu myself. In which book did he claim there are some universal human psychological traits that determine behaviour?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
09:04 / 09.12.07
This is the only world we've got, and all culture is a part of that real world. Seeing cultural products as somehow distinct from some kind of realer world is an illusion, in my view.

Absolutely - but at the same time, a focus on culture can be obscurantist. There's a Deresiewicz article that probably puts the point better:

The last decade or two have witnessed an insidious shift in American culture, one that goes to the heart of the way we talk about our society. It's a shift that involves those two words I just used: "culture" and "society." How easily the first rolls off the tongue these days, whereas the second strikes a discordant, dated note. Because who talks about "society" anymore? For today's horde of "cultural critics" and "cultural theorists," some of them working in "cultural studies" departments, American culture (pop or otherwise) is the site of any number of important issues, trends and struggles, but American society is, well, nowhere. It's as if we've come to believe that our collective life is a matter of nothing more than images and brands, discourses and signs, and not, as we once recognized, material issues like poverty, jobs and (another word we no longer use) equality. Culture matters, of course--the very displacement I'm talking about is a cultural issue--but it matters because of its effect on concrete economic and political realities.

And as I've said before, not only is there this inherent boundary to what can be acheived, politically, by the study of culture as opposed to the underlying economics, but there's also the fact that an educational focus on the politics of a given bit of culture, at the expense of any other aspect, can harm the forming of a nuanced understanding of it - particularly this idea that a text has 'an' ideology, and that everyone who reads it is automatically interpellated by it, a situation so drastic that all one has time to do is to argue against what we, in the 21st century, see as the ideology of the text. And then we have the issue of people who don't know very much about Elizabethan England or Shakespeare marching around calling it 'racist', which while true is a gross simplification.

I also think that by making prominent the racism or sexism of a past culture, and by understnading that racism or sexism as that culture's prime aspect, we can risk letting ourselves off the hook (because it's 'different now') - rather like how the abuse of women in Saudi Arabia is always accompanied with a chorus of 'See there, you silly Western Feminists, you've got nothing to complain about really, have you?'

So, from a political point of view, 'is Othello a racist play?' is probably a valuable question to ask, and it might conceivably get a class thinking about racism; but if one wants to have a go at stopping racism one would be better attacking it at the source. And from a literary point of view, if one wants to actually understand Shakespeare one would have ot think about not just the politics but the matter of influence, the intellectual situation in Europe at the time, the verse form, the language, the state of drama, etcetera.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
11:26 / 09.12.07
I probably should have left Bourdieu out of this, not because his theories aren't pertinent, but because my readings of his work are quite limited. Anyway, as far I understand him, in Distinctions he outlines a theory of social stratification as a result of processes whereby we internalize what symbolic value things have - taste comes to indicate and structure social stratification.

Taste in psychological terms is the continuing association of emotions (likes/dislikes) with perceptions and actions so that habitual patterns of interactions result.

Cross-cultural developmental psychologists are seeing more and more evidence for the hypothesis that emotional reactions are the best indicators of moral judgment. Feelings like shame, embarrasment and guilt are crucial for the maintenance of social order, because it is through these that social order is internalised. The flip-side of these subject-centered emotions is stuff like contempt, anger and disgust, which serve as yardsticks by which we measure the conduct of others. These emotions are the drivers of conflict, and so they're the psychological foundations upon which all manners of conflict are based.

The works of Paul Rozin and his collaborators are the best that I know that link the biological and evolutionary foundations of emotional life to questions of morality and social order. Here's one paper that is free to access (PDF).

I fully expect to get slammed for my interpretation of Bourdieu, and I'd appreciate all the critique and commentary you can give me. As I said, I feel a bit shakey due to limited exposure, but no pain no gain.
 
 
BioDynamo
10:40 / 16.12.07
My reasons for looking at Marx are basically an experienced need for change. It can, for instance, be expressed through two quotes from the last page of Arkadij and Boris Strugatskij's book Roadside Picnic:

"This is the way I figure it: if a man works with you, he is always working for one of you, he is a slave and nothing else. And I always wanted to be myself, on my own, so that I could spit at you all, at your boredom and despair."

"Look into my heart. I know that everything you need is in there. It has to be. I never sold my soul to anyone! It's mine, it's human! You take from me what it is I want... it just can't be that I would want something bad! Damn it all, I can't think of anything, except those words of his... 'HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!'"

As for how to develop from the current, classed situation towards that screamed for happiness, freedom and satisfaction, well, Marx' critique of the idea of the current capitalist argumentation of growth in general wealth through entrepreneurship and sale of labour power seems to me to be true. The capitalist class will need to retain a social relation of capitalism to the working class in order to maintain its own class position, and will therefore be reluctant to allow breaks in that social relationship. Intra-capitalist competition is in no way external to this, nor is the "reserve army" of the unemployed, and Marx takes quite good accounts of them.

As for books to read, rather than send anyone into the gaping maws of Capital unprepared, I would recommend (for a clear and very comprehensive ultraleftist introduction to Chapter 1 of Capital that helps you along with the reading of the rest of it) Reading Capital politically by Harry Cleaver.

Also available as a .pdf somewhere, it is well worth a study circle or two. Written in the late 70's it remains one of the best introductions to phe political and class-struggle-oriented Marx, rather than the economistic, philosophical or (save us) determinist readings.
 
 
webmadman
21:53 / 06.01.08
Okay, my first post here, my heads a bit swimmy from wading through this thread- heady stuff for sure!
In my own reading of Marx, I found myself agreeing and disagreeing in equal measure- I think he gave us a lot to think about, but was very much in and of his time- a lot has changed since then, other things have remained frustratingly the same, depending on where and how you look. It would be very interesting, albeit impossible, to know what Marx himself would say about what's been done in his name...

From my own POV, I've shifted from the "means of production" paradigm, which has become increasingly abstract and fragmentary, and instead, I've come to look at class in terms of "access to resource"- from the basics necessary to survival to that of opulent luxury- and what an individual needs to do or go through in order to gain access.

For me, this tends to be more fruitful in an ontological sense, but I would never have gotten there without having been exposed to Marx's ideas.

That's my approach to a lot of things- throw it into this blender of a brain, mix it up, sift it through my own experience and see what comes out.

That's my 2 cents anyway, try to keep it simple, but nuanced and open ended...
 
 
eye landed
20:13 / 09.01.08
here is a quote from another thread which quoted this article.

I suspect that America's fabulous growth in productivity is another illustration of the disconnect between economic measures and human experience. It's been attributed to better education and technological advances, which would be nice to believe in. But a revealing 2001 study by McKinsey also credited America's productivity growth to "managerial innovations" and cited Wal-Mart as a model performer, meaning that we are also looking at fiendish schemes to extract more work for less pay. Yes, you can generate more output per apparent hour of work by falsifying time records, speeding up assembly lines, doubling workloads, and cutting back on breaks. Productivity may look good from the top, but at the middle and the bottom it can feel a lot like pain.

im sure yall will be underwhelmed, but i just had a realization on marxism. sorry for rephrasing marx when i do that; i hope theres something interesting in here.

marxist revolution is not progressive, its homeostatic. bourgois capitalists grow the economy until the only resource left to exploit is the proletariat. when the strain is too much, the proletariat take over-- in a revolution or an election or more subtly-- and grow infrastructure until its possible to return to the environment for resource-based economic growth. at this point, the proletariat give themselves up to the machine, as the capitalists once again extend humanitys tentacles.

this means that capitalists arent really capitalists, they are resourcists. capital is generated by labour. capitalists dont care about capital, they care about resources. they dont use labour to create capital, they use capital to create profit. communists create capital in the form of infrastructure, which are later transformed by the bourgois into wealth.

it kind of feels like im just 'zooming out' on class struggle. im seeing these two global entities rather than a collection of personal struggles. this detachment makes the model more ecological and less political. does this homeostatic model still demand inevitable revolution? am i misusing jargon and embarrassing myself again? who should i read on homeostatic communist revolution?

actually, im really taken with this concept of infrastructure. it has no inherent value, but allows 1. movement and communication, such as roads and computers; and 2. integrity and exclusivity, which lets us differentiate things, and thus transport and communicate them. this second part allows us to include things like families, religions, and art in the category of infrastructure.
 
 
webmadman
02:26 / 11.01.08
Yup, either system ends in the same place, keeping everything gridlocked and controlled... points to the general issue of theory (whether communist, capitalist or whatever-ist), it's usually upper/middle class folks saying how things ought to be. This is not an anti-intellectual stance, I read and educate myself on every level possible, but then I filter it through my own experience to the greatest extent possible...

I also think mass revolution will always inherently be co-opted- mob rule creates a power vacuum that some singular ego will always fill, giving mouth to whatever theory is most popular with that mob at that time (whether that ego believes it or not)...

So I think the only real revolution that's possible is on a personal level...

Personally, my own form of revolution is to use money as little as possible- in a monetary sense I've lived in destitute poverty for over 2 decades (previous to that I was raised by a single mother on welfare), but I live an incredibly rich life- I have everything I need plus a whole lot more- I refuse to allow my life to be mediated by an abstraction- but I live pro actively, when I see something needs doing and I have the wherewithal to do it, I do it- without expecting "reward"- to the point of refusing money, once someone gives you money, the dynamic changes and expectations are created. This generates a lot of good will in general and grants me access to the resources I need/want...

That's my personal path to revolution, not for everyone, but there is no one-size-fits-all, which brings me back around to my main criticism of Marx, he tries to postulate an all encompassing system and I just don't think that will ever work. I would also never refer to myself as being part of the "working class"- I haven't had a job in any traditional sense for almost 20 years- and I feel that term in and of itself can act as a bit of a trap.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
06:31 / 12.01.08
communists create capital in the form of infrastructure, which are later transformed by the bourgois into wealth.

What you're saying is, everything is capital. Because if 'infrastructure' is capital, then the social relations that your communists, using this logic, might initiate to counter the transformation of life into capital, are also a kind of capital.

The homeostatic thing doesn't work for me, for precisely this reason: any resistance is futile, and the resistors are only a part of an inevitable cycle -- already part of capitalism itself.

History is too complex to reduce things to this level of dialecticism.
 
  

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