The Sinking Middle Class | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
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Paul D'Amato
Marx also used it to describe ideas he considered to be representative of the interests of that class, even if those propounding the ideas were not strictly members of the petty bourgeoisie ;
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18th Brumaire: The peculiar character of social-democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.
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Mark Lause
David R. Roediger not Dan Roediger.
On Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 2:12 PM John A Imani <johnaimani3@...> wrote:
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John A Imani
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
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Louis Proyect
On September 22nd, Politico reported on how rank-and-file union members were snubbing Biden for Trump. Perhaps inadvertently, the second sentence reveals what kind of trade unionist this means: “To rank-and-file members in some unions, especially the building trades, it doesn’t matter. They’re still firmly in Donald Trump’s camp.” Historically, construction unions have operated as a white-only job trust and would be naturally part of Trump’s hard-core support. While Anthony DiMaggio debunked the myth of Trump’s “blue-collar” populism in CounterPunch, Democratic Party pundits insist that unless it connects with these types of workers, it will lose to demagogues like Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump. Just hot off of OR Books press, David Roediger’s “The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History” digs deep into the origins of this line of thinking and concludes that it is time to put it to rest. Despite the book’s title, the subject is a demographic that academics and journalists describe interchangeably as the middle-class or the white working-class. Since Black people tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democratic Party politicians, Roediger’s chief concern is to interrogate how this obsession developed. Roediger has been writing about race and class in the U.S.A. ever since his 1991 “The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class” that paired him with Theodore Allen and my good friend, the late Noel Ignatiev. For these three scholars, the task was to explain how the white working-class could identify with ruling-class values. Speaking for myself, I always attributed that to the phenomenon Karl Marx described in “The German Ideology.”
full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/09/25/the-sinking-middle-class/
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