> -----Original Message-----
> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
> On Behalf Of Yoshie Furuhashi
> Sent: Friday, January 21, 2005 12:16 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org; furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Classes and Strata (was Boycotting the unorganized?)
>
> Michael Dawson MDawson at pdx.edu, Fri Jan 21 11:29:19 PST 2005:
> >But, as Kevin Phillips explains, there is a sizable group of people
> >who are "not in the top one-fifth of 1 percent. [They make up to]
> >$300,000 to $400,000 a year.... Whereas the people at the top who
> >make their money out of investments. The former group "are...people
> >who actually work," and whose privileges would mostly disappear if
> >they stopped. The latter work only to amuse themselves and sustain
> >their ideology about "earning" their dividends.
> >
> >Recognizing the former group and explaining how it is indeed "in the
> >middle" strikes me as necessary to a realistic and convincing
> >analysis of this society. Telling them (and others) that doctors
> >and lawyers are just workers seems to me to be as wrong as calling
> >them capitalists. They are tweeners.
>
> We could use concepts of classes (thinking in terms of relations of
> classes to the ownership and control of means of production) and
> strata (thinking in terms of incomes and other differences) at the
> same time, in order to keep track of, for instance, the trend of
> proletarianization (for which the concept of classes is
> indispensable) while recognizing income and other differences within
> the working class (for which the idea of strata within each class
> should be useful).
>
> To take just one example, medical doctors who have private practices
> making $200,000 a year and medical doctors who earn the salary of
> $200,000 a year from hospitals, to take just one example, do not have
> the same relation to capital and the state, even though they have
> exactly the same pre-tax income. The former are petty producers,
> while the latter are workers albeit very well paid ones.
>
> Kelley wrote:
> >At 12:14 AM 1/21/2005, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >>if they can't rely on their family members' self-exploitation), so
> Bill's
> >>family members can't be said to be putting downward wage pressures and
> >>eroding industry standards. I'm not even sure if we can talk about
> wages
> >>here. Presumably, the living standards of Bill's wife, mother,
> children,
> >>and mother-in-law are more positively correlated with the store's
> profits
> >>than with their "wages," which puts them into a different class than
> >>workers for the bigger union and non-union grocery stores.
> >
> >Is self-exploiation even possible? Seriously. I ask because Carrol
> >once made the argument that a violinist isn't exploiting someone if
> >he hires another muscian to play a gig.
>
> Self-exploitation usually refers to the idea that market competition
> and financial obligations to the landlord, creditors, government
> authorities, etc. compel a self-employed person to work longer and
> harder than what's necessary for her own subsistence, often working
> longer and harder than a wage worker doing the same thing in the same
> industry would, simply to reproduce the conditions of her
> self-employment (i.e., not to go bankrupt, lose her business, and
> become a proletarian).
>
> If neither market competition nor financial obligations to the
> landlord, creditors, government authorities, etc. force a
> self-employed person to produce more than what she needs for her own
> subsistence, presumably she is not exploiting herself. Are there
> many small business owners in such a position? Doubtful.
> --
> Yoshie
>
> * Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and
> <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>
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