Ronnie Spector's Middle Class?

[Carrol Cox]

Paula, let me offer a useful principle for construing a text. If your
understanding of a text depends on the assumption that the writer is completely
brainless, then your construal just might be off center. Here there are two
problems. (1) E-mail comes in something like soundbites, and for that reason the
entire context for a point can never be given. (2) The same content can take take
different judicial forms. In addition, you invoke a really stupid cliche here,
about something being true in theory but not in practice. There is a famous
example of the dishonest assertion of this stupid principle, according to which
the bumble bee is, according to aeronautics theory, unable to fly but because it
is ignorant of theory goes ahead and flies anyhow. I first saw this in the*Readers
Digest* when I was in junior high. Now it so happens that according to aeronautics
theory the bumble bee is perfectly capable of flying: theory and practice fit
perfectly, but the anecdote is immortal because this suppose gap between theory
and actuality is such a beautiful way of keeping the working class mired in
capitalist ideology.

Now a "working definition" is, what? A theory is what it is. And the whole point
about working definitions is that they are *always* wrong part of the time. Where
definitions are just plain right there is no work to be done and we can go on to
other matters. In the case of understanding class in the United States of 1999
*everyone* has an *unconscious* working definition (i.e., high level theory). You
are working with an extraordinarily abstruse though unconscious theory, a theory
that there must be a point to point match between theory and empirical actuality.
This is called positivism.

A working definition, a helpful as opposed to obscurantist, working definition is
absolutely essential in this case, and that is precisely what I was offering in
the post to which you respond. I have other things to do now than develop that
into an account of minimum length (i.e. 15,000+ words). I'll make a couple
comments. Eisner is a big capitalist. Part of the ruling class. Your $174,000 a
year man/woman is a triviality of no interest until we get our basic understanding
of the structure/dynamic of u.s. capitalism in hand. The baseball player is also a
demographic triviality, existing only to confuse discussions like this.

We need to understand the world to change it, not to pass trivia tests.
Carrol

Now as to your s

pms wrote:


> Carrol,
>
> So, you're saying that some baseball player making $8mil/, or a guy who's
> been with GE 10 yrs, making $174,000/yr, or Michael Eisner, are working class.
>
> This may be true in theory, but isn't it kind of useless as a working
> definition?
>
> pms