"Can "working class" be seen in a
cultural way as in having community, needs, dreams etc. or is it solely
"false", "negative" or in opposition to the middleclass. Is "working class"
simply an identity without content a product or construction of "civil
society" or is there something more."
In the first place, working class isn't formed in opposition to "middle
class" but to "capitalist class". The last section of the last volume of
Marx's Capital, which Engels put together after Marx's death, was devoted to
class and was incomplete. The manuscript, and Capital itself ended where
Marx was beginning to discuss these issues:
"What makes wage-labourers, capitalist and landlords constitute the three
great social classes?
"At first glance--the identity of revenues and sources of revenue. There
are three great social groups whose members, the individuals forming them,
live on wages, profit and gorund-rent repsectively, on the realisation of
their labour power, their capital, and their landed property.
"However, from this standpoint, physicians and officiales, eg., would also
constitute two classes, for they belong to two distinct social groups, the
members of these groups receiving their revenue from one and the same
sources. the same would also be true of the infinite fragmentation of
interest and rank into which the division of social labour splits labourers
as well as capitalists and landlords--the latter, e.g., into owners of
vineyards, farm owners, owners of forests, mine owners and owners of
fisheries."
[Here the manuscript breaks off}
My conclusion is that Marx himself, at least in Capital, didn't develop the
theory of relation between community, social class and economic class in
capitalist society per se. The 18th Brumaire is much richer for a
discussion of the interests associated with each economic class and how
these play themselves out in historical processes.
The term "community" is somewhat alien to Marx's terminology with the
significant exception the extended discussion of community found in the
Grundrisse (also published by Eric Hobsbawn as Pre-Capitalist Economic
Formations). Here Marx describes the creation of the working class as the
result of a dissolution of community and relations of production that were
not strictly economic (e.g., feudal relations). The formation of the
working class presupposed the dissolution of communities. In these writings
Marx is discussing broad historical epochs, not specific branches of
industry, and definitely not the ideas of workings class as opposed to
middle class. Workers are defined in relation to capitalists and vice
versa. The contradictions between these two aspects of capitalist society
leading (theoretically) to the transcendence and the elimination of both
poles. Workers define themselves as community in carrying forward the
struggle against capitalists in so doing they destroy the capitalists and
transform themselves into something other than a working class.
In this sense Marx pointed to one clear form of false consciousness in the
Grundrisse:
"History knows nothing of the congenial fantasies according to which the
capitalist and the workers form an association etc., nor is there a trace of
them in the conceptual development of capital." This is also an interesting
statement because the two poles of dialectical analysis are clearly singled
out (the historical development/the conceptual development).
Another direction for pursuing the issue of working class community concerns
the factory organization, especially in the early phases of capitalism when
factories had associated communities where the workers lived. Here there
was a greater isomorphism between the economic class and community (in the
sense I take it Nate means) and I'm sure that Marx himself referred to 19th
century social reality when he wrote of working class as a social group
with characteristics other than the simple fact of having nothing to live on
but ones labour power.
Nevertheless, whether economic class relations cohere into or form the basis
for a "community" (eg, a group that has picnics together on May Day or the
Paris Commune) they would still seem to be necessarily fundamental to the
development of a child's concept of self and others as well as of the world
into which s/he aspires.
Paul H. Dillon