Here was ravi's original post, which is the basis for my response:
I know this comes up every now and then, but I still am not satisifed with any attempted answers. So, I ask: What is the working class? Does it include white collar workers? How about $150,000/month senior engineers? Is wealth an issue? A recent immigrant software engineer might make $80,000/year but (s)he may be building his/her life in the US from nothing, while a $40,000/year worker might have a family home and future inheritance (of parental savings) that could amount to say half a million or more.
In an earlier thread, someone criticized my questions as "trial lawyer"ing or some such. I will try to preempt such dismissal, once again, by reinforcing that these are genuine questions, not rhetorical or sarcastic ones. --ravi
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What follows is a set of loosely connected observations and suggestions rather than a coherent text.
There will be at least as many answers to this question as there are ways of asking it. I would reject your way of asking it, while granting the scholarly usefulness of your question for some purposes. (Note: Almost any system of classification is tautologically true: e.g., Animal, vegetable, mineral. Every item in the universe may be correctly placed in one of those three categories. Classification systems, therefore, must be judged by their usefulness in fulfilling a given purpose, rather than by their truth or falsity.)
Though it tells us nothing about the working class in the u.s., and though it was probably incorrect in many respects, Mao's _Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan_ is, I think, _the_ classic work in political examination of classes, and it's worth abstracting from it for class analysis in quite different contexts. Two points are important: (1) The Chinese Revolution flowed from this analysis and (2) It took off from an empirical investigation of a particular political practice. That is, the question Mao asked (himself) was not "What are the classes of China" but "What understanding of classes in China will make sense of this political practice?"
What, then, is the political practice in the u.s. of which we can ask a similar question? And my answer is that there is no developed political practice which will allow the kind of concrete class analysis of the u.s. which Mao provided of China. For political purposes, then, the question of "what is working class" must consist _wholly_ of (a) pure theory of class in a capitalist society and/or (b) predictions of what _will_ constitute the working class at some hypothetical future date. Tendencies are far more important than current empirical actuality. And in any case the implication of Marx's comment on the anatomy of man explaining the anatomy of the ape is that we can only understand a period by looking back on it, which means the present is unintelligible except from the perspective of various hypothesized futures. And finally, I assume that the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach is a core epistemological principle: one can understand the world only by attempting to change it.
A few further observations.
1) I would assume (a) that all possible "psychological types" will be represented in the working class and that (b) there are no grounds for assuming the proportions in which psychological types will be represented. Hence psychology, at least at the present time, is irrelevant to class analysis.
2) I'm not interested in having a class analysis which merely groups individuals into various descriptive categories. I won't argue with analyses that focus on that, but they respond to quite different questions than I pose here, and seem of doubtful political use. It is useful to put soft candies in one box, hard candies in another, for the sake of picking out quickly the candy one wants. One does not analyze class to pick candies out of a box.
3) Political class analysis starts from the whole, not the individuals, and hence empirical descriptions of individuals or groups of individuals can only enter (if at all) at a late stage in the analysis. Hence, for example, I'm not going to concern myself in the least with your senior engineer's income or lifestyle..
4) Class is a relation and a process, not a set of particulars. One cannot reduce relations to the things related, since as Marx points out, relations must be thought rather than perceived. We can't understand the relations by a description, no matter how complete and accurate, of the things in relation. I am interested in identifying and exploring the _relations_ that generate class in the u.s., not in the particulars (individuals) placed in each of the slots.
5) The working class exists only in relation to capital. When we say a person is working class we say nothing about kind of work, race, gender, age, income, employment or unemployment, education, intellegence, politics, we merely indicate that that person is among those who as a totality have a certain relation to capital.
6) There's an important teachers' strike in B.C., the teachers there being the first government workers in Canada resisting the government's orchestrated attack on working conditions. (I think someone on either LBO or Pen-L has posted on it.) Those teachers are probably going to lose and the lives of some of them ruined. Consider the PATCO strike. Consider the Homestead Strike. Consider the Paris Commune. A working class comes into existence as a conscious class looking backward on the ruined lives of those who are first to stand up.
7) Strata according to income or quality of work done cannot be derived from analysis of the capitalist system _as a whole_ but, rather, depend on starting by the enumeration of individual cases and the gathering of those cases into groups defined by quite arbitrary criteria. Information so gathered may be of great interest or importance for various purposes, but it cannot be of any significance for understanding the capital-labor relation, the relation which makes capitalism what it is.
Probably other observations will come to mind, and I'm not attached to any particular wording, but this will do for now.
Carrol