Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 02:54:26 -0700 From: billbartlett at dodo.com.au Subject: Re: Working class/communism
At 12:18 PM +0200 2/7/02, Tahir Wood wrote:
>I would say that there is a fairly broad band of strata between the bourgeoisie and the working class, which represents, let us say, the fuzzy boundary between the two fundamental classes of capitalism.
But even a fuzzy boundary still requires a definition.
Tahir: What sort of definition would you like? I did give some explanation for the phenomenon that I was describing.
>The second option: This is workerism of a certain kind: here the communist, against all the facts of his own life, argues that only a worker can be a communist, that only workers have revolutionary potential, and the party must consist purely of workers - no 'petty-bourgeois elements'. This paradoxical position of the communist involves tortuous attempts to show that everyone outside the bourgeoisie is actually a worker.
Even by (what I regard) as the ridiculously narrow interpretation of working class you have implied, I must say that the above is nonsense. Arguing that "only workers can be communist" etc might be paradoxical if we swallow your implied premise that the people arguing it are not working class.
Tahir: Bill, your verbiage is outsripping you here. There was no "implied premise" whatsoever. It was said straight out: the majority of communists, including Marx, do not come from the working class in any meaningful sense. I justified this assertion, which I admitted would be controversial, both theoretically and empirically. It was rather a long post, I admit, and your attention probably wandered.
But actually, I think it makes sense to argue that all those who have to work for a living are all working class.
Tahir: Yes, but it raises other problems to say that, which is exactly what I was trying to explain. The most basic example here will problematise your hopelessly simplistic definition, which BTW owes nothing to marxism or communism (everyone who works is a worker - wow that's a real theoretical profundity). Now consider a guy who hauls fruit and vegetables onto the sidewalk every day and scrapes by with the smal profits he makes from selling these. A capitalist? Sure. Someone who works? Sure. Geddit now, Bill?
In which case your paradox collapses like the share price of a company whose balance sheet is stripped of fraud. Either way, the essential premise of your conclusion is itself dependent on the conclusion being correct. A rather basic logical flaw.
Tahir: Whaaa!??
Since you don't seem to be offering any definition of working class, it is difficult for anyone to test your assumption that "not many communists are IN the class". Luckily for me, my working class credentials can survive the narrowest of definitions.
Tahir: Gee Bill, I didn't realise it was all about you.
So I can safely challenge you without fear of being accused of paradox. So I'll ask the question; Why don't you think many communists are IN the (working) class? What is your definition and why. Granted the boundaries will be fuzzy, but surely that is no excuse for neglecting to offer any reasoned definition at all?
Tahir: I didn't set out to define working class - you can take any reasonable definition you like and the problem I was referring to will still remain. I think workers are those people whose alienated labour brings capital into being. This or any other definition cannot do more than give you a general mental model of what workers are. There remain people whose status with respect to the class and membership of it is variable - I gave examples so there is absolutely no reason for you to not know what I mean by this. If you want to shift this discussion on to the domain of semantic theory, make sure that you are able to cope with such a debate.