Bill I'm not going to spend too much more time on this because the argument is showing signs of becoming one of those circular argument for arguments sake types, but I'll make one or two brief replies.
>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.
But that assertion is based on a definition of working class that is unstated. The implied premise I was referring to, is the definition which leads you to conclude that they are not working class.
Tahir: I have no way of telling whether you understood my points about categorisation. You seem to want a watertight categorisation and I pointed why there couldn't be one.
> 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.
What is controversial is your definition, which your long post failed to set out. If your definition of working class holds up, your observation that it is paradoxical for them to be arguing that "only workers can be communist" etc is a justifiable one.
Tahir: Rubbish. Engels was quite obviously bourgeois and a communist; there are as many other examples as one might wish to find.
Essentially, my objection is that you seem to be trying to gloss over the real issue. You are treating it as settled, when I don't think it is at all.
Tahir: I suspect that the real issue here is that Bill really, really wants to establish his own working class credientials.
>> 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).
I reject that definition. I concur with Joanna Bujes, who suggested we distinguish on the basis of whether one has to work for one's living or not. The difference between this definition and your characterisation of it, is of course the *need* to work for a living. This is such a simple definition, I'm surprised you didn't understand it.
Tahir: I ignored it because it makes no difference to my argument. The point I made is that you can take any reasonable definition you like and the fuzzy boundary will remain. I sketched what I think is the political significance of this. Why don't you pick up on what was actually being discussed? Have you read What is to Be Done, for example? What is your angle then on infusing class consciousness from without, as Lenin argued and as certain communists have for years followed? I reject it as fatally flawed and gave some reasons why I reject that as well as its opposite (workerism).
> 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?
No, I don't really get what you are driving at I'm afraid. But when in doubt, I just give a straight answer to rhetorical questions. No, the fruit and vege hawker is not a capitalist. (He has to work for a living.) Yes, he's someone who works. Though as you point out, that isn't definitive. But, since he needs to work for a living, is not a capitalist, he's working class.
Tahir: OK so according to you small shopkeepers are working class too, because if they close their businesses they will have no income, since the work they do is what they are doing to make a living. So the only people in the whole wide world who are not workers according to you are those whose investments can sustain them without any action at all required from them that might possibly be construed as 'work'. But those of us who know a bit of Marx think the old guy had a bit of a point when he spoke about the petty bourgeoisie. I don't think that a small shopkeeper (or an engineer, or an academic, or a drug dealer, or a politician) relates to the mode of production in quite the same way as the proletarian who lines up at the factory gate every morning and receives a weekly wage.
>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.
This is not true. The problem you raised disappears if most left intellectuals turn out to be working class after all. I submit that they are.
Tahir: And I say that their class position is more often at the nexus of the two great classes and that this has political significance. This helps to explain some of the phenomena that are well known: e.g. the class ambivalence and political vacillation that can be observed among these strata. As I pointed out this is not only where many communist intellectuals come from, but also many anti-communist ones, fascists included.
> I think workers are those people whose alienated labour brings
>capital into being.
Why?
Tahir: Why? Which part of this definition don't you understand?
>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.
Yes, you gave examples. I have a rough idea what you conclude, but not how you arrive at these conclusions. I assume that those examples were selected according to some criteria. You aren't just determining class arbitrarily are you?
Tahir: They were mostly examples of people whose class membership in my opinion shifts during the course of their lives. To me this helps to explain the porous nature of class boundaries, which I will remind you once again is what I was writing about and which you still haven't expressed an opinion about. I am familiar with the arguments that everyone except the haute bourgeoisie is a worker - it was done to death by some people on aut-op-sy a while ago - so I don't really need to be told over and over something that I don't agree with, and which I think is based on a naive commonsense notion of categorisation.