The fact that the brain undergoes physiological changes in response to learning is to be expected, the relation between a specific change in the brain and social system are and will be tenuous, since social systems are not the product of a brain or of the cognition of the single individual but of the collaboration of men in communal activity.
2. Your regard for abstract form as distinct from substance is quite consistent with your difficulty in regarding class as a different kind of abstraction from say the concept of number or of number relation. I imagine (correct me if I'm wrong) that you regard the number, two, as an insubstantial representation of duality, without any relation to real experience (which will leave you with the problem of justifying its use outside of pure arithmetic exercise). In doing so you ignore the fact that the material number two is in essence a symbol that represents all paired relations from the second person who comes up to bat in a baseball game, to the second of a pair of apples I take out of my lunch-bag, to an assistant in a dueling match who is expected to redress unfair practice if it incapacitates of kills the principle duelist.
Seen in this light, class, based as it is on the most minimally specified kinds of data (the social relation to production) which are themselves quite abstract, is hardly to be regarded as anything but the first step in the analysis of a specific political economic situation, e.g. the decline of primary production in the U.S., the policies of the US government in Iraq, or the unionization of geeks in Philadelphia.
The failure to realize the developing division of labour and differential relation of members of community to production in socialist states and organizations is exactly a product of the failure on the part of some, not all, Marxist theoreticians in realizing just how abstract the class concept is. Many, both in the past and currently, regard the differential distribution of private property as the essence of class. Private property is not properly an economic term, but a legal representation, characteristic of capitalist law, of the differential control of the means of production. Class as a political-economic phenomenon exists wherever there is differential control of the means of production whatever the more concrete social relations indicated by the provisions of law and the practices of government.
3. The two factors you regard as those that make such theoretical constructs such as game theory and rat models inadequate for the explication of highly specified conditions: "the shortcomings of the concept itself (i.e. lack of clarity, fuzziness, lack of consistency, lack of empirical meaning, etc.) and the shortcomings of the application of the concept (i.e. applying propositions involving the concept outside the scope conditions, or failing to specify such scope conditions at all)."
are both equally if not better represented as the application of abstractions to conditions for which they are unsuitable (a basic problem of all reductionism). Lack of empirical meaning and the relation of the concept to the scope conditions are exactly the manifestations of the relation of the simplified representations of an abstraction forced onto a conditions that require more concrete explanatory formulations.
Your example of class, by the way, is a. specific to Capitalism and is as such not representative of the universal concept of class. b. somewhat compromised by the idea that in capitalism labour sells work. The capitalist sells labour in the form of finished commodities, the labourer gives away labour power in exchange for a wage that represents an abstracted, social, concept of the minimal subsistence needed to reproduce the worker (and the next generation of workers). It is the difference between the value of the labour embodied in commodities sold and the socially determined wage of the labourer that is the basis for surplus value. The determination of the subsistence wage, or salary for that matter, is in capitalist economies a function of the social determination of wage rates (and salaries) which represents first and foremost the considered minimal needs of the labourer relative to the general rate of surplus value. Clearly, the reproduction of a semi-skilled labourer will cost more than that of un-skilled labour, and the subsistence cost of the skilled labourer will be more than that of the semi-skilled labourer. This relation is highly dependent on the differential costs of living and on the different conditions for subsistence between economies and regions. Thus the cost of unskilled labour in the US may necessarily include that of ownership and use of private transportation, the purchasing of processed food, and taxation for advanced water and sanitation systems that are less likely to be important in the determination of the costs of unskilled labour in India and China.
4. The problem with the concept of Class is not that it is empirically empty, but empirically too full, it includes far too many actual conditions than can be usefully applied to specific historical conditions. When we specify, we progressively restrict the substance of the concept by focussing on those conditions to be explained, rather than on the universe of relations that are true for the entire history of human civilization.
I strongly recommend that you read Thompson's book. True the "raw materials" of the industrial capitalist working class were indeed a product of late feudal economies (where else would they come from?), but the rather turbulent history of the development of the British industrial working class is that of the remaking of peasants, journeymen and master craftsmen (invariably under protest)into industrial labour.
Victor
----- Original Message ----- From: "Wojtek Sokolowski" <sokol at jhu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2005 18:51 Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Re: working class?
> This is a reply to Victor:
>
> 1. My position on apriori cognitive categories is close to that of Emile
> Durkheim (who I believe proposed this solution for the first time) and
> Noam
> Chomsky. The capacity of potential to develop and apply categories is
> innate or genetic, while the specific manifestations of these categories
> are
> determined by the structure of social organization and language.
>
> Recent advances in neuro science suggest that experience can affect the
> structure of thebrain and some cognitive scientists (e.g. Lakoff)
> acknowledge that. The implications of that is that a particular form of
> categorization may not be unlearned as easily as some may hope - which has
> obvious implications for those who hope to replace "bourgeois" categories
> (false consciousness) with the "proletarian" ones.
>
> 2. I am not sure what you arguing regarding the validity of abstract
> concepts. Obviously, abstract concept not always need empirical
> verification that 2+2=4 is true even if no 4 objects of a particular kind
> could be found. The usefulness of such abstract concepts may come in
> their
> ability to generate empirical propositions - but I do not think that the
> concept of class is of that kind. The concept of class is not very
> abstract,
> it is an empirical concept whose validity is limited to one particular
> social-historical situation, but may not be applicable to other
> situations.
> This is the same order of abstraction as, say, types of ownership (public,
> private) it may be useful in the US today, but was not very useful in,
> say,
> the USSR in the 1950s.
>
> 3. The fact that certain concepts "fail" to bring the desired empirical
> results (as your discussion on the game theory seems to suggest) may be
> due
> to two very different factors: the shortcomings of the concept itself
> (i.e.
> lack of clarity, fuzziness, lack of consistency, lack of empirical
> meaning,
> etc.) and the shortcomings of the application of the concept (i.e.
> applying
> propositions involving the concept outside the scope conditions, or
> failing
> to specify such scope conditions at all). The failures of game theories
> you
> mention (and the rat choice model in general) seem to be due mainly to the
> second factor. The problems with the class-based analysis, I believe, is
> of
> the first kind - the notion is too vague to be useful, and resolving that
> vagueness usually result sin such high level of abstraction that it
> borders
> on triviality.
>
> To illustrate - if the fact of selling labor is important to defining
> class,
> why the kind of labor being sold or conditions of that sale should not
> matter? Do people selling manual and mental labor belong to different
> classes or the same class, and why? How about doing different types of
> mental work (say computer programming and teaching sociology)?
> Furthermore,
> does the place where the labor is being sold matter? Does the person
> selling his labour power to a government owned organization belongs to a
> different class that one selling his labor power to a private firm? How
> about the same but in China rather than the US?
>
> 4. You sate that classes are products of different relations of
> production
> - which at one level is tautological or true by definition - just like
> "unicorns are horses with one horn growing out of their foreheads" - true
> but empirically empty. If you want to apply that statement to specific
> socio-historical conditions you need to explain the process by which
> relations of production produce classes.
>
> As I previously argued, the notion that capitalist relations of production
> "produced" the class of people labeled as "working class" - that notion is
> historically inaccurate. There is plenty of scholarship suggesting that
> "working class" of the 18th or 19th centuries was in fact a product of the
> feudal relations - capitalism simply found a certain use for this class.
> Further more, "capitalism" (i.e. industrialization) profoundly changed the
> nature of that original working class by differentiating it beyond
> anything
> recognizable. So what capitalist relations of production actually
> produced
> was not the working class it initially exploited (that was the product of
> agrarian relations) but the middle "yuppie" class - skilled and while
> collar
> workers.
>
> To summarize I think that the usefulness of the concept of class as used
> by
> Marx was confined to a particular time and a particular place - and
> attempts
> to use it in a different or a broader setting are doomed to produced
> either
> trivial tautologies or empirical falsehoods - which btw is true of much of
> classical and neo-classical economic theorizing of which Marx is an
> offspring.
>
> Wojtek
>
>
>
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>