Carrol says:
> I must have missed (luckily) the post this nonsense comes from.
Gee, Carrol, shall I type it ALL in for you again, so you can have another go at it? I don't think so, you get all the posts on the mailing list just like the rest of us. It's just you prefer to spout off instead.
Here's the thread, condensed. I read a post by William Lear; it seems he owns a reasonably large percentage in the internet service company where he works. Thus he has employees, extracts and pockets the surplus value they generate, etc., etc. bodhisattva replies inter alia, "...owning shares is indeed immoral in my opinion...is a poisionous idea...But the idea that people can be innocent capitalists because the stock market seems so divorced from reality is wrong."
Now I am in a position to buy some shares of stock in the company where I work; that way I myself get to pocket some of the surplus value the company extracts from me, plus I can mouth off at the shareholders's meetings. I ask, "What's wrong with that?" That's question number one. Answer it, Carrol, ignore it, whatever, just spare me tales about the God damned Weathermen. Question number two was something I mentioned in passing, originally mostly for amusement value - here I'll cut and paste:
> > > ...Now if I buy stock, even one share, it would mean that at the
> > > age of 44, I will have stepped out of the proletariat into the
> > > bourgeoisie (as the pettiest of petit bourgeois, to be sure), a
> > > notion that I find both amusing and somewhat disturbing at the
> > > same time. I mean that in the technical sense that I would own
> > > in part the means of production, rather than being a worker paid
> > > for each day's work. If I misunderstand the distinction between
> > > proletarian and bourgeois, please clarify it for me.
Carrol says:
> It is a strange malady, this desperate attempt to escape from class
> analysis into some sort of subjective never-never land in which the
> most trivial matters can be dignified as "class."
I was not escaping from class analysis, I was asking a relatively simple question about it to a bunch of people who I thought might know an answer. If I were desperately trying to escape I'd go read alt.mag.playboy instead - no class analysis there, you bet.
I'm just a dumb humble workie for sure, and I don't know all the swell hightoned stuff others here do about Marxism, having neither the leisure time nor, duh, the attenshun span to gulp down fifteen-hundred-page theoretical discussions one after another like so many potato chips, but even stupid I one time got far enough into old what's-his-name's "Communist Manifesto" (that is, the first footnote to the first page) to read:
* By bougeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of
the means of social production and employers of wage-labour. By
proletariat, the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means
of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power
in order to live. [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.]
Sounds like hourly employees are in the proletariat, while stockholders are in the bourgeoisie, to me. However, even with a fairly lucid definition like that quoted above I admitted that I might not fully grasp the distinction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, as it does seem intuitively absurd to say an hourly employee with one share of company stock is bourgeois, and I asked for clarification. Didn't get any of that, though.
Max says:
> > Rubbish. Numerous union members have pension plans
> > which own stock. If they are bourgeoisie, then the
> > definition loses all meaning.
If anyone is reading this, please feel free to explain, as I asked before, what that definition might be.
Carrol says:
> Max is kind to call it rubbish. It is more like malicious rubbish.
> Similar views provided the basis upon which the SDS weather people
> erected their bizarre political theories. A local weatherwoman (I
> unfortunately financed her trip to a conference in Texas) drove down
> with some Chicago Weathermen and came back out of her mind. She later
> argued that the "American Working Class" was so incorrigibly racist
> and imperialist that the U.S. could achieve socialism only under
> occupation from the P.L.A.
What kind of nutso irrelevance is THIS? What the fuck have the Weathermen to do with me? This is 1998, not 1969, and I am a middleaged guy with a pedestrian job, not some carefree politics-major college student chock full of acid and surrealistic pseudo-revolutionary theory.
Max says:
> > So relax, you're still among the wretched of the earth.
No fucking doubt.
WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net