On Sep 26, 2020, at 1:12 PM, John A Imani <johnaimani3@...> wrote:

Louis Proyect, in his review of  “The Sinking Middle Class", cited its author Dan Roedigger:

“...as important as it is to recognize that teachers, nurses, and millions of less adequately paid office and sales workers are key elements of the US working class, contradictions of everyday life won’t let us rest there What are we to do with a teacher, or nurse, or sanitation worker, or meatpacker from Green Bay who becomes a labor activist while professing to still (or also) be middle class? Must she pick? Should labor scholars decide for her? These questions are especially vexed because the working class is largely defined by a relation to capital and management, while the middle class includes a variety of such relationships and often turns significantly on personal choice.”

So the former is an economic category while the latter is a 'state of mind'.  Agree.  'Middle class' is a myth of mind perpetrated upon and perpetuated in us to divide us, as the working class, from ourselves.

The determinant(s) of one's class is(are) the element(s) of the value of the commodity that that one brings to the market.  The commodity that we as workers sell on the market is our ability to labor, our labor-power, designated in Marxian economics as v. So long as the element of the value of the commodity that members of the asserted 'middle class' sell on the market is limited to their ability to labor v then they are 'working class', matters not how 'well-paid' they are.  So long as they can just as well be fired as hired then they are working class, all other such self-flatteries, all other feigned pretensions aside.

Comrade Proyect then cited Marx:

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production...

Can I give a good non-Christian "Amen".

Such confusion of sociological descriptors with economic categories also infects the usage of the term 'petit-bourgeoisie'.  All too oft used as a castigation, it is an "I will know it when I see it" type of proposition, hurled as an aspersion upon those in certain professions, e.g. teachers.  Or those perceived as affecting a certain lifestyle.  As above, 'states of mind'. 

But most peculiar is its usage amongst self-proclaimed-Marxists when Marx and Engels are quite clear that petit-bourgeois is an economic category, specifically, a class. A class whose elements of value of their commodity offered on the market differs from the elements of value of the products of other classes.  An accounting of those elements of the petit-bourgeois' commodity value would here take longer when this has gone on long enough.  But suffice it to say (by Marx and Engels):

“Of course he (the capitalist) can, like his labourer, take to work himself, participate directly in the process of production, but he is then only a hybrid between capitalist and labourer, a ‘small master’.” Marx. " Capital Vol 1. " https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch11.htm

“It now turns out that not every sum of money can be transformed into capital — that a minimum exists: the cost price of a single labour-power and of the necessary instruments of labour. In order to be able to live like a worker, the capitalist would have to have two workers, with a rate of surplus-value of 50 per cent, and yet save nothing. Even with eight, he is still a small master.” Engels. “Synopsis of Capital” (Vol 1) Chap 3. Section 5. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/1868-syn/ch03.htm

JAI