That may be an interesting question, but, to analyze it, we'll have to look at concrete social formations (at diverse levels -- cities, nations, regions, etc.). Which social formation are we talking about here?
>When I was a Maoist we used to characterise the ruling class of some
>country as a class alliance, of, say, the comprador, bureaucratic
>and national bourgeoisies. That sort of thing still interests me,
>because as I've said I like to understand these particularities of
>agency. All this is without going back into the question of
>composition of the middle class, the political significance of which
>I alluded to recently.
I'm going to show and have my students discuss _Lumumba_ next week, and I was browsing _Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961_ (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1972) for choice excerpts. The book comes with J.-P. Sartre's analysis of the rise and fall of Lumumba and the tragedy of the Congo. Sartre says that Lumumba was a Jacobin centralist and universalist, originally of a social grouping (pejoratively) called "evolues" [evolved by the colonizer's standard], who were "men whose common and personal interests had long since made them both willing and able to betray him [Lumumba], and who were convinced as early as the first days in July 1960 that _he_ had betrayed _them_" (p. 25). Lumumba rose above particular and immediate interests of "evolues" -- hence the hostility of most of them to him. The insoluble dilemma for Lumumba was this: to bury ethnic and provincial chauvinism and separatism that threatened the sovereignty of the newly independent nation and achieve national unity, he needed a truly nation-wide mass movement, but it was the very ethnic and provincial chauvinism and separatism, rooted in hardly socialized production in the colonial enclave economy, that made it nearly impossible for him to build such a mass movement. Further, he didn't seize the opportunity to summarily dismiss the Belgian officers and possibly win the support of the restive rank and file of the Force Publique. Likewise, he had no socialist program that could take advantage of spontaneous uprisings of this or that segment of wage workers in urban areas. As for the "non-evolues" in rural areas, they were still solidly under the control of the "tribal chieftains" who had been made "the 'native' representatives of the Belgian administration" (p. 41), according to Sartre.
>But to take just one interesting example of the ruling class again,
>that of the 'bourgeois woman'. What class does the wife of the
>biggest, fattest and baddest capitalist belong to? The 'capitalist
>class'? Why? Here we come back to theory and class composition in a
>way that interests me very much, since I'm hoping to complete a text
>on gender soon. And I welcome whatever help I can get with that.
What's her relation to the means of production? To the extent that legal discrimination against women in owning property, making contracts, etc. has been abolished, the "Woman Question," as far as the bourgeoisie are concerned, becomes moot. No more paradigmatic modern novel that obsessed over the peculiar predicament of the middle-class woman. It's interesting that socialists in the nineteenth century -- Engels included -- thought of the question of gender mainly in terms of the status of middle-class women. Today, the gender question that we should pay attention to is that of working-class women (and peasant women, too, in underdeveloped nations). -- Yoshie
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