I don't have the time/energy to reply to your response in a sufficiently comprehensive manner (being a victim of the housing cost super-inflation detailed in the post sent by Doug on the dot.com boom and social inequality), but I'll say this much: it was not my intent to suggest that the working class' ontological status as a vehicle for social change is hopelessly compromised by homeownership and pension funds, only that the concept of "contradictory class location" can usefully be applied to the working class itself (in retrospect, hardly an earth-shattering assessment on my part).
In my eco-socialist utopia, would their be private ownership of certain important means of consumption, like housing ? I haven't figured out a good answer to that question, but there certainly wouldn't be a "free market" (sic) in housing which would enable speculation in landed property (maybe for those indivs/households who prefer their own private housing units instead of communes/co-housing the community would grant usufruct rights in exchange for those indivs/households contributing more socially neccessary labor or sacrificing other privileges).
John Gulick
On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Rob Schaap wrote:
> G'day John,
>
> >Sorry for sounding more neo-Weberian than the Weberian Marxists, but don't
> >those segments of the working class (defined in standard Marxist terms)
> >who own their own housing (and thus have a stake in seeing landed property
> >values rise) or have pension funds in the stock market qualify as having
> >"contradictory class location" ?
>
> Well, I've only quite recently contradicted myself in these terms - a
> mortgage and a compulsory superannuation plan are mine. But I'm not sure
> how actually contradicted this makes my like. I don't see, for instance,
> how rising values help me. My house is already worth more than I paid for
> it (if you don't count the 120% interest bill, anyway), but that becomes
> relevant only when I sell it, by which time my intended new home will very
> likely have appreciated at a comparable rate!
>
> And, in case it's an issue for some, I'm not sure a Marx-inspired society
> is interested in taking people's family homes away from them. They ain't
> means of production and families do need family homes, so why not leave us
> in ours? That being so, what's to lose?
>
> And my super depends on market ups and downs (themselves dependent on an
> equity market in another country) - which a government pension system, like
> the one we had when first I hit the job market, did not. Furthermore, it
> could be argued (couldn't it?) that the little lump of extracted surplus
> that the 'fund manager' drip-feeds into my superfund is but a continuation
> of my career-as-parasite. I'm a public servant, after all. And if we
> pursue the lines this chat is following, that means I've been contradicted
> all along, doesn't it? I offer the boss no surplus value (at least, not
> directly) and I subsist (or better) on surpluses extracted elsewhere. Does
> this remove me so far from the life experience and material interests of
> private sector workers that I cannot reliably inhabit a like politics and
> be part of the same movement? Is it useful to frame all public servants as
> essentially thus contradicted?
>
> Well, I'm with Kate Hinchcliff on that - we'd be well on our way to
> disqualifying way too many people from 'our' project, then.
>
> Or am I missing the point?
>
> Cheers,
> Rob.