Specters of the 'Middle Class' (was That Obscure Object....)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Frances + Kelley:
>I tend to be a bit suspicious when I hear leftist academics insisting that
>teaching makes them a part of the working class. I wonder if they are
>perhaps making this claim simply to deny their own privileged position.
>Must say I thought the same thing when Michael Moore was here and called
>us a bunch of bourgeois smarty pants, or however he phrased it--I was
>somewhat shocked by how many of us began talking about our own working
>class backgrounds--you'd think from hearing us that no one on the left is
>from a middle class background, when, in fact, since the New Left, we've
>been disproportionately middle class. While I'm at it, I'll throw in those
>middle class white boys who insist that they are bisexual so as to avoid
>the onus of being straight white males.

The fact of teaching doesn't make you working-class or middle-class or any
particular class. You can be, for instance, wife of a bourgeois
fundamentalist and teach your kids and fellow fundamentalists' kids _for
free_ to promote home schooling. Since no wage labor is involved in this
example, your class location isn't determined by your teaching, which is an
avocation supported by your husband's wealth. You can be a _self-employed_
tutor who caters to rich kids; in that case, you are petit-bourgeois. I
teach for wages, nor for free, and I'm not self-employed; nor am I a small
capitalist who teaches kids for fees while also employing other teachers. I
don't live on investment income. So that makes me working-class. Simple as
that.

On this question I'm strictly a Marxist--though of a post-Foucauldian kind.
Unlike certain other Marxists, I read Foucault, etc. and in fact write
about them; Especially with regard to questions of sex/gender/sexuality +
social reproduction  + ideology, post-structuralism has interested me a
great deal. However, post-structuralism helps us little if we want to think
about one's objective--not subjective--relation to capital.
Post-structuralism may help us some if we want to focus our attention to
and closely examine the internal stratification of the working class and
how it gets reproduced materially and ideologically.

As Barkley Rosser pointed out on this list, it doesn't at all mean that
most college teachers think of themselves as working-class, which is a
great problem. However, this gap between objective conditions and
subjective grasp of them can't be closed by mulling over one's privilege. I
want to see the gap closed, and for this purpose I think it important not
to confuse job characteristics with objective class locations. In other
words, feeling like 'middle class' doesn't make you middle class.
Furthermore, acknowledging this fact doesn't make you blind to the
objective and subjective differences in working conditions between me and
Paula, for instance.

BTW, I'm curious as to your and Kelley's definitions of 'middle class.'

Yoshie