I haven't been following the Michael Moore thread very closely, but it seems to bring up again what we conceive "the working class" to be. A post which I just submitted to another list bears on this question. Since I have been on that list only briefly, I do not yet know its conventions as to quoting its posters on other lists. Hence I have suppressed the name of the poster I was responding to and have paraphrased (in double pointed brackets) rather than quoted the post. The post's arguments are clearly fragmentary, but are intended more to identify topics than present a finished product.
<<The poster claimed that many "workers" [my not his/her sense] have life circumstances different from blue-collar workers and thus are not working class. The poster noted that pulling some workers away from the category of "working class was reductionist.>>
In an earlier post, responding to an earlier criticism, X noted that he/she did not identify as marxist. That makes sense. But perhaps non-marxists should drop completely the "ambiguous category of the 'working class'" and adopt a consistent stratification terminology. For marxism "working class" is not merely a static category but a historical and political conception, a _process_. It is to be grasped through its dialectical unity with the capitalist class, not through any painstaking enumeration of its componets at a give moment. The retired, the disabled, convicts, $100,000 per annum computer consultants, UPS drivers, Burker King cashiers, public school teachers, postal clerks, University of Colorado Associate Professors, strawberry pickers . . . .are separated from the means of production, and for a sense of the capitalist mode of production as a historical process it is this shared entry into the relations of production, not their innumerable differences, that is decisive. (_Some_, but not all of those differences are important _politically_ but not for fundamental understanding of capitalism.)
Nor is is X's procedure, strictly speaking, "reductionist." It is reductionist if I attempt to explain neural activity wholly in terms of quantum reactions and other sub-nuclear processes. But it is true that neural activity is necessarily _consistent_ with the laws of physics, even though those laws have no direct explanatory power at that level. In a cosmos in which the conservation of energy did not operate there would be no neural activity. Any reduction, valid or invalid, must show such a relationship of dependency of the "higher" level upon the "lower" level. But the working-class is neither the sum nor the product nor has any other relation, internal or external, to the "occupational situations" into which it may, arbitrarily, be divided. Working class simply belongs to another explanatory realm from dishwashers, factory workers, and unemployed. The expression of the former in terms of the latter is neither reductionist nor non-reductionist. It is incoherent, as though one would put fish and tadpoles and beach pebbles in one category, while one put redwood trees, foxes and boulders in another category. (One can do that of course, but it wouldn't be very useful in understanding relations.)
(There is a demographically fairly insignificant class of petty producers in the U.S. They could probably be lumped with small capitalists to make up about at most 10% of the population. Probably near to 90% of the population of any nation without a large peasantry is working class. Charles Loren in _Classes in the United States: Workers Against Capitalists" (Cardinal Publishers, 1977) estimated that in 1970 U.S. classes could be roughly grouped as: Working Class 90%; Petty Producers 8%; Capitalists 2%. One could juggle those figures in various ways, but something near to them provides the best basis for political and historical analysis.]
One _always_ runs into borderline cases, but just as in law hard cases make bad law, so in understanding class borderline cases cannot be one's point of departure. There are also, of course, the declassed: those who occupy positions in the coercive power of the state -- cops, fbi agents, professional military, prison guards. Some occupations _may_ lead workers to voluntarily become agents of state power -- firefighters, public school teachers, social workers: but when they do so they are scabs, like gay-baiting factory workers for example, not fundamentally separated from their class as are cops or prison guards. A teacher may simply stop acting as a narco agent; a cop may not without resigning from the force, just as a gay-baiting factory operative may cease his gay-baiting without quitting his job.
<<X argued further that working poor and underclass should be differentiated.>>
I would reject the category of the "underclass" altogether. But in any case many in the "underclass" today will be the "working poor" tomorrow, and a petty producer the next day.
<< X further noted disparagingly that in certain circles (I presume he meant marxist circles) everyone who works is working class.>>
For political purposes this static conception is useless. Politically, all Marxist (I would say in fact all progressive) activity has a core task, that of uniting the working class (to the extent possible under given conditions) around a progressive agenda. Since I assume that at this time even minor reforms, or protection of minor reforms of the past, will only be possible through the growth of a mass movement outside the orbit of the Democratic Party, the distinction between reform and revolution is not relevant now.
The relations within the working class that are important are those which cut across the whole class and form fault lines within it: gender, "race," sexual orientation, disability, citizenship (I include illegal aliens in the working class), legal status (convicts, ex-convicts and those on parole or probation) and so forth. And in respect to those fault lines, which fragment the class politically, I think the key perspective is not a sociological description but a passage in Marx's _Wages, Price and Profit, though one first has to generalize from his specific point:
* * * These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of modern ndustry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement. * * *
I think of "wages" here as shorthand for the overall condition of the class. And I include in the class's "resistance" all struggles against the forces which divide it: sexism, racism, what Marta Russell calls "ablism," and so forth. Racism, for example, does not only divide white and black workers, it divides white workers against themselves, and white workers who are unwilling or unable to fight against racism within their ranks are scabs ("degraded to one level mass of broken wretches") as surely as those who cross a picket line.
Carrol Cox