Insofar as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not form a class
(The Class Struggles in France, MECW 11: 187 (1975)).
Marx lists seven distinct factors here, and of course he's talking about class, but with necessary changes being made one might depart from here for thinking about other kinds of solidarity.
In this connection and in a more coolly reflective moment than I had in face of the torrent of economic reductionist stupidity that gripped the list yesterday, and which deserved harsher words than I gave it, though not directed at a specific person -- apologies for that, Carl, but not for the sentiment -- with respect to class that if we think of things this way, we will not be able to ignore sex, sexual orientation, race, or even civil rights or liberties in thinking about class. A class is not a gender-neutral (meaning male), sex-orientation neutral (meaning straight and nonkinky), color-blind (meaning white), etc., entity. It's a process (E.P. Thompson's term, from The Making of the English Working Class) that involves contest about lots of these issues.
We can't get to "cl;ass" by stripping them away. We can only grasp "class" as it's constituted. In America, many of the things leftists find most frustrating about the "working class," the ugly racism of the white working class, the rampant homophobic machismo and sexism of all the working classes, the cult of violence and xenophobia, all that is tied up, as better analysts than I have observed, with a profoundly sexualized and racialized conception of self and class.
I tried to explain this to Rorty, but he remained, as I told him to his considerable resentment, a vulgar "Marxist" to the core, unshakable in his belief that all of us are really fairly directly linked in our behavior to our economic interests understood in pretty narrow terms as wages and benefits. This hypothesis makes pretty good sense of the behavior of the upper classes, and I hope people have read Doug's brilliant preliminary essay on the ruling class in the new LBO, but it makes utter nonsense of the behavior of the working class. The fact is that whatever the defects of the finer points of Thomas Franks' What's The Matter With Kansas?, he's got a crucial point that American workers do not conceive themselves as narrow economic maximizers and don't act in what Marxists (or for that matter neoclasscists) would predict would be in their "best economic interests." So trying to ignore racism, homophobia, and sexism and "concentrate on class instead" involves a fatally wrong notion of class. As Chuck says above, shared economic interests are only a part of it.
Marx hated moralism and rejected morality for lots of reasons, not all of them good. But maybe the amoralist "ethics is ideology" stance is one that can be useful for some purposes. Let's forget whether it's wrong to write off women, minorities, and gays until after the revo, and ask whether there is going to be a revo or even significant political change if we do.
We can put this in terms of analysis of the problem for struggle -- since class is so deeply sexualized and racialized, we can't hope to understand why the working classes act as they do without those assumptions about sexual and racial identity. Yes, identity. We can put it in terms of numbers. Taking women, gays, and minorities together, you have the majority of the working class. We can put it in terms of solidarity: what kind of culture and common bond can we have unless we also address the sexual and racial constituents of the working class identities that are formed or deformed by capital?
All that said, the handful of people who say that race or sexuality or sex is "more important" than class are, in my view, misguided or (in some cases, like Harold Cruse) worse, But they're not a real major problem.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 16, 2007, at 11:37 AM, ravi wrote:
>
> > A [genuine] question: what is the basis of
> solidarity? Surely it is
> > more than back-scratching?
>
> With class, in part, a common role in production,
> broadly conceived.
> But that's not necessarily visible to the naked eye
> - it takes a lot
> of organizing and educating to make it clear. On
> nonclass things,
> common humanity. It was touching to read the story
> in the NYT
> yesterday about the Massachusetts legislators who
> switched their vote
> on same-sex marriage:
>
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/us/15gay.html>
>
> > One legislator who switched his vote was
> Representative Paul
> > Kujawski, Democrat of Uxbridge, saying meetings
> with gay and
> > lesbian constituents convinced him that “I
> couldn’t take away the
> > happiness those people have been able to enjoy.”
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better Heartthrob. Get better relationship answers from someone who knows. Yahoo! Answers - Check it out. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545433