The problem with these discussions, it seems to me, is that people confuse Marx's work when he's writing as a *social scientist* examining actually existing capitalism (what is), his writing in which he predicts what might be or what might come to happen based both on this empirical investigation AND on his work as a *social theorist* examining what ought to be or, in other words, doing what is called political philosophy/theory. Now, Marx didn't necessarily make this distinction clear in his work and he moved back and forth between these modes of analyses rather fluidly.
I think it perfectly appropriate to engage in an analysis of how and why people see themselves as members of various classes. Afterall, is this not what M&E did in, say, the Manifesto when they wrote about 'fractions of the middle class' and 'section(s) of the ruling class' asking how they might come to see themselves as allied with or antagonistic to workers? Does the artisan, small entrepreneur, landlord, shopkeeper come to see her interests as aligned w/ workers and what motivates her to come to this position?
Carrol, I don't care about the objective reality that most people are workers in so far as they have nothing but their labor power to sell; we *know* this. The point is they don't know this or rather, they do, but they don't see the reasons for this as illegitimate--not quite yet anyway and their analyses need to be advanced. The question is not merely why, but to examine how this happens and under what conditions they might learn to see themselves otherwise. M&E argued that history was the history of class struggle, no? And, they also wrote that history would be an endless recycling of these struggles from one stage to the next, but M&E were good liberal humanist believers in progress so they argued that the difference between a proletarian revolution and all the ones that came before was that a proletarian revolution would have the *majority* of people swept up in the goal of abolishing private property: "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movment is in the self-conscious, independent movement of the mimmense majority, in the interst of the immense majority"
And Sam, thanks for the lecture re subjective idealism. Again, it is only subjective idealism if I were to attribute people's ideas about their class location and class interests to some mysterious inner force. But I'm not doing this am I? No. I'm arguing that the material conditions of their labor matter as to whether or not they see themselves as working class or not. Managers don't see themselves this way; they think they're special--somehow not part of the working class and protected in some important ways from the vagaries of working class life. Waitresses, as I said on Lou's list, are interesting because they see themselves in direct relation to the consumers of the product/service they produce and this means the conditions of the labor shape their consciousness, perhaps in important ways. Perhaps not. Cooks, as you know, are a step removed from this sort of relationship w/ consumers; they are also paid differently. Hence, the antagonism between cooks and waitresses.
Now, none of this may be particularly important. But I think it is, particularly as we are supposedly, in the West anyway, a 'service-based' economy in which more and more of us appear to be engaged in the production of services rather than 'material things' (Again, this is a manifestation of a globalized division of labor, is it not?) So, my questions might be:
1. What does it mean when our work involves the production of services and ideas? 2. What does it mean when we work on people rather than things, when the teacher produces well-adjusted students who have the right skills to negotiate the labor market, when the therapist produces the well-adjusted clients in couples therapy who came there to resolve their disputes over who does the second shift and they walk away mumbling stuff about Martians and Venutians without ever asking about the structural gender inequality that produces this breakdown in communication, when the worker at McDonald's trains customers to know that they'd better quickly decide they want a Supersized #2 as soon as they get in line? 3. What does it mean when the conditions of this 'service' labor involves, more and more, direct contact with those who consume those services, when those conditions make it appear that the struggle that must be fought is between the producer and consumer. and when those conditions make it appear that workers' interests are aligned w/ management and opposed to consumers? 4. What does it mean when contemporary management ideologies speak of everyone as a customer, for we have internal customers (our colleagues and employees) and our external or traditional customers?
Kelley