[lbo-talk] Working class ?

[amadeus amadeus]

Some thoughts on the thread.... It seems that the only way to objectively determine class is to look at who owns the means of production. Income is clearly pointless, since it makes no account of debt and liability, and the capitalist is measured by his/her "net worth," not by how much they have in their Christmas club account. Consciousness doesn't seem to make a hell of a lot of sense either, because the vast majority of the U.S. is clearly working class, but does not necessarily "identify" that way. The propaganda model most successful in the United States (including its "left") involves the invocation of abstract/ideological splits in the working class which have little-nothing to do with their objective economic reality-- privileged vs. not, poor vs. working, the "labor aristocracy" vs. 3rd world workers, 60s identity politics (black vs. white, gay vs. straight, etc.), and most importanly the notion of the "middle" class, which effectively splits the actual working class in two

 (or three, or four, depending on how you look at it). This has been a very effective form of psychological warfare by the capitalist class on its subjects.  The "good times" effect of all this in the short term, as Marx put it in the Manifesto, is the appearance of a myriad of classes (and identities, trends, multiplicities of lifestyles, etc.); the "bad times" reveal it to all be a bunch of bullshit-- a riddle wrapped up in a mystery based on a theory based on an idea.

 
The blame for the lack of working class consciousness in the US is not on the workers themselves, but on our political (democratic) and social (dictatorship) systems, and particularly on the Democratic Party, which is now selling worker consciousness for offshore-produced chotchkes and widgets. The Democratic Party is primarily responsible for spreading bourgeois propaganda to the workers, at the same time alienating them from political life.

 
--adx

Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
...teaching on classes and defined them as 'large groups of people differing
from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system
of social production, by their relation...to the means of production, by
their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the
dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode
of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate
the 1abor of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite
system of social economy...'

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