class composition

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Aug 19 04:45:01 PDT 2002


billbartlett at dodo.com.au wrote:
>
> At 9:17 AM +0200 19/8/02, Tahir Wood wrote:
> >Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2002 00:26:21 -0700
> >From: billbartlett at dodo.com.au
> >Subject: Re: class composition
> >Do these "middle class housewives" have an economic need to work though? Because then they would actually be working class.
> >Bill Bartlett
> >Bracknell Tas
> >
> >To cut a long story short: could you explain to me in exactly what sense housework creates value and how this relates to capital?
>
> Sure, but first it needs to be pointed out that an individual's class does not depend in any way on whether an that person creates value. For example, I am a dole bludger. I try to avoid creating any value. But I'm still working class.

This was one of Gramsci's real idiocies. He argued (pre-prison days) that working-class wives were petty-bourgeois because they were not employed. The working class, how many times must it be repeated, is not a static category, a box into which one pops green marbles while popping purple marbles in another. Class is a social relationship. (Or as the Chinese would, or would have, put it, one divides into two.) There is NO class difference between a new infant, the infant's unemployed father, the mother who works at Walmart, the older half-sister who is serving time for shoplifting, and the uncle who is earning $90k a year (including overtime) as a Tool-&-Die maker at Ford. This attempt to get at a class by adding up the specific details of the lives of individuals is utterly bizarre.

Carrol



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