Hello everyone,
I'm responding to this thread a little late. On Sunday I came back from a
3 day trip to San Francisco -- a trip that in terms of kilocalories per
second would put me, at the world level, in the upper classes of
consumption. I wasn't in any big long white limousine, just in my super
economical Totyota Corolla, but nevertheless well near the very top of the
world's pyramid of wealth.
But yes, I'm just U.S. middle class, barely maybe, maybe not at all by some
standards. There so many surfaces
off of which the images refract. I get pay checks and don't earn any money
directly off rents or capital. So that makes me working class--I have
nothing to sell but my labor and in my case I sell intellectual labor when I
can.
Upon returning I found 82 messages from three mailing lists, not the least
active of which xmca. I saw Eva's message beginning "So, Paul" and I knew I
was in for it. Well, some things get put off until there is time to give
them fair attention. But I couldn't put off the brief reflection on middle
class when I read something in a later series of posts about middle classes
being dominant. From what Eva so lovingly labeled, "my brand of marxism", I
couldn't understand what this possibly meant.
What is it that the "middle class" dominates? Consumption? Taste--like
prime time TV? Politics? The world economy?? Actually it seems that all
of these fields are dominated by
the inexorable logic of capitalist production. In fact, the middle class
dominates nothing. From a marxist perspective, middle class is a concept
akin to dephlogistinated air in pre-molecular chemistry. Consider the
following:
Viewed from the perspective of consumption alone the middle class can't
really be defined globally--the living standards of different nations'
middle classes varies greatly. Nevertheless, we recognize the difference
between middle class and lower class in whatever country we travel to and
it's mostly true that lower classes perform manual labor even if everyone is
consuming lrelatively low levels of kilocalories. Nevertheless most
intellectual labor is clearly not rewarded as interest or capital and most
intellectual labor earns a pay check. The key, from any brand of marxist
perspective, is to situate the groups relationship to the total process of
production-distribution-exchange-consumption.
"Middle class" is a sociological concept not a global concept like
"capitalist" and "proletariat" that embrace both sociological and economic
content at the same time. From the perspective of production, middle class
includes several types of economic groups: (1) the traditional
petit-bourgeoisie, small business people, (2) well paid, unionized labor in
advanced capitalist countiries, and (3) most importantly in the present,
people and groups who perform what Marx and marxists have wrestled with as
intellectual labor (all management falls into this category). I think the
latter group, intellectual laborers,
constitute the primary constituency of the sociological middle class, a
view I think is commonly shared by the masses of people in the world
themselves who can quite simply see that intellectual workers have things
easier than those whose labor is either skilled or unskilled manual labor.
the wide spread view that getting your kids a "college education" is the key
to getting them the good, the middle class life.
January's reading and the Star and Bowker book from which it is taken,
provide a good approach to the analysis of intellectual labor, one that I
don't believe has been followed up by those pursuing marxist social
analyses. It would
seem that intellectual labor consists overwhelmingly of producing,
distributing, exchanging, and consuming classifications. One can
distinguish social
institutions for producing classifications of all kinds -- universities --
and institutions related to the production of specific systems of
classifications as well as jobs within all types of productive enterprise
that predominantly consist of applying classifications; e.g., quality
control. Some systems of classification seem only to be consumed internally
within the units that produce classifications but most systems connect out
to other activities within the social whole. From record keeping to
accounting practices to research related to the activities that are being
recorded and accounted for, all of this involves what could generically be
called classification labor. Some of this classification labor relates
directly to material productive processes (e.g., weights and measures,
always extremely important, as the cathedral example illustrated), and
progressively involves standards that incorporate technical knowledge, such
as loads for various kinds of materials resulting in building codes,
electrical codes, perhaps, hopefully, environmental codes, etc. Other
classifications relate to the operation of social organization itself, e.g.,
medical standards, educational standards, management, personnel, and
financial standards, laws and regulations of all kinds.
Intellectual work creates, maintains, modifies, and applies classification
systems. This happens in the everday application of these systems (e.g.,
general contractors building to code and lumber mills cutting wood to
certain standard dimensions) as well as in the process of creating or
redefining these systems (e.g., chemical research for treatment of woods
affecting fire codes, psychological studies resulting in the modification
of personnel selection criteria or classroom educational practices).
Of course there is no final standard, and all of the forces interact, in
the
process of determining which standards of classification prevail. But
insofar as the classificatory systems affect the process of distribution of
the social capital, rather than the process of its material production,
different
types of dynamics will determine the bases for adopting one over another
classificatory scheme. Political processes, for example, will have less
influence over the classification of gravel/concrete mixtures for building
bridges than they will over the classification of endangered species.
Marxist theory traditionally has made a point about class interest in the
domain of distribution of social capital as a key factor for understanding
the outcome of social processes--generated from the unfolding of the class
struggle between labor and capital.
Where is the middle class interest located in that distribution? There
really isn't any common "middle class interest." The interests of
intellectual workers in the middle class is often at odds with that of
unionized labor or small business. The middle class simply doesn't exist as
a concrete social form.
From a marxist perspective the class struggle between capital and labor
determines the distribution of the social product. This follows directly
from the definition of the generation of surplus value in the process of
wage labor. Does the so-called middle class exist in such a way as to be
able to influence the structural relation (wage labor) by which that
distribution is determined? Since the middle class is clearly not a
category for defining any group's relation to the productive process (since
it includes several different types of groups defined by different relations
to the process of the production of surplus value), we would have to look
at the specific nature of the productive relations.
I think the examination of specific classificatory labor in relation to
other productive processes in the generation of surplus value would be an
important undertaking. Clearly the costs of reproducing intellectual
laborers are much greater than those of producing manual laborers and the
capitalist system takes care to "protect its investments". Intellectual
workers are still workers but as history has repeatedly shown, they are the
most easily coopted to the interests of capitalist hegemony. When they side
with working class interests, as Crane Brinton showed in "Anatomy of
Revolution" almost 50 yrs ago, revolutions tend to occur and to be
successful. However, as we've also seen, intellectual workers tend convert
their specific relation to the productive process into the basis for new
kinds of domination (bureaucratic domination).
Paul H. Dillon
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