I certainly agree with your commentary on Ravi's post, and agree that the role and character of theory on social practice is necessarily practical and historically situated. From the point of view of practical theory categories are indeed only "correct" in relation to the object of the theorizing, and this object, if it's theory is to be anything but an idealist maundering about , must be testable by practical activity (The 2nd and 11th theses of _Ad Feuerbach).
Sorry, but I find the exhortatory style of "theorizing" to be too authoritarian and intellectually abrupt to be regarded as classical outside of the Chinese cultural area. I much prefer, say, Lenin's 1899 _Development of Capitalism in Russia_ (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/volume03.htm#1899-dcr8app-index) to Mao's _Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan_ True the latter became the basis for the strategies for revolution in China, but the single-mindedness of his focus on the exploitation of rural class conflict for organized rebellion demonstrates a theoretically superficiality in Mao's thinking that led to the deadly sillinesses of his post-revolutionary policies for building the socialist state, e.g. the Great Cultural Revolution. If anything I prefer Mao's _Oppose Book Worship_, but only as a model for a "how to do" handbook for otherwise untrained investigators of social conditions.
Practicality should not be limited to short-term objectives as was the case for "The Report" After all, _Capital_ the truly classical study of class was an intensive investigation designed to provide a conceptual framework for several generations of revolutionary activity.
I do not agree with you that there is no practical value to be had in the investigation of class relations in the US. I suggest that considering the datedness of Marx's analysis of Capital (the Capitalism described in _Capital_ is mainly that of England up to the late 1850's, early 1860's), and of his familiarity with alternatives to the capitalist mode of production (mostly the 18th and early 19th century Utopias and Romantic representations of cooperative peasant communities) the original Marxist paradigm is in sore need of revision. It is my view that the review of Marx's analysis of the development of class relations in light of current conditions is of paramount importance for revision of the strategic object and of the tactical means for social revolutionary activity.
Victor Friedlander-Rakocz victor at kfar-hanassi.org.il ----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2005 3:43 Subject: [lbo-talk] Some Observations on Class, was Re: working class?
> I've only peeked at two or three of the many posts on this thread, and
> have not read any of them completely or carefully. I think, however,
> that the following thoughts may suggest a somewhat different set of
> perspectives on the questins raised.
>
> 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
>
> -----
>
> 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
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