>Huh?
>
>1. Are you claiming that the "poor" are not working class?
>
>2. Middle Class? I don't understand at all.
>
>Now there is a capitalist class, about 5% of the population (including
>small capitalists). (One can quibble for pages on the class position
>of top executives. Put them where one will, they do not make a
>demographic difference.)
>
>There is a small class of petty producers, like my son-in-law, a
>computer consultant who has incorporated himself. Let us say
>(being extravagant) that they make up 10% of the population,
>almost certainly an over-estimation.
>
>Then there are those who might be called honorary members of
>the ruling (capitalist) class: commissioned officers in the military,
>the permanent faculty of a very small number of private prestige
>universities, parts of the state bureaucracy (such as the higher
>levels of the judiciary), etc. etc. Perhaps 1% of the population.
>
>Then there are the declassed (mostly from the working class):
>police, prison guards, perhaps "lifers" in the non-commissioned
>ranks of the military -- all those the Chinese called lackeys
>and running dogs. A few more percent.
>
>And then there is the working class (proletariat) -- about at
>a minimum 80% of the population.
>
>The "Middle Class" is a conception that almost makes one believe
>in conspiracy theory: it was invented for the sole purpose of
>confusing perceptions (both of workers and working-class
>intellectuals) of the class structure of capitalism. Every time the
>expression enters a conversation rational political analysis
>flies out the window.
>
>The bulk of your "middle class anarchists" are almost certainly
>proletarians. Workers have as much right to be slackers or
>whatever as anyone else.
>
>Carrol
I now write:
Listen, Carrol, I don't want to get into a long thread of Weber vs. Marx vs. Weberian-Marxist vs. Marxist-Weberian conceptions of social class and status groups -- lbo.talk has been there and back and I purposely opted out of that discussion. When I use the term "middle class" I'm using it in a sloppy, casual way which in no way implies a wholesale rejection of an orthodox Marxist approach to understanding class as an ensemble of social relationships tied to ownership/non- ownership of productive property, blah de blah. But I think you're out to lunch if you really think that a minimum-wage single mother (who rents) and the son of two-income professional couple making 125 grand a year (who own their own home) should or will ally politically strictly on the basis of their non-ownership of productive property.
And really, these typologies/primers/MacGuffey readers for my edification are rather unnecessary.
John Gulick