On Jun 19, 2007, at 10:56 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Class cannot be defined or explained or recognized by the functions
> performed by its members, for a class consists not just of functioning
> adults.
>
> A Class includes infants. It includes retired but active grandfathers.
> It includes grandmothers in nursing homes. It includes daughters and
> granddaughters. It includes second cousins existing on handouts from
> their relatives. It includes unmarried older sisters. In the case of
> 'ruling' classes past and present it includes a rather large
> sprinkling
> of "high-class servants" -- witness the palace servants who became
> Kings
> of France; I suspect a slim strata of the professoriate (e.g. a
> certain
> Henry Kissinger) should be included under this heading. It includes
> divorced spouses. Sons-in-Law; Daughters-in-Law. A whole complex
> tangel
> of relationships few of which will be immediately visible, and there
> will be no way by description of formal position (C.E.O., Secretary of
> State; University President) to identify all or even most of the
> relations which constitute class power and the exercise of that
> power. A
> University President with several daughters and sons-in-law is not the
> same as a University President unmarried or childless.
>
> Power-elite analysis is a sort of sophisticated and scholarly
> version of
> conspiracy theory. In any case it is not class analysis.
How is this version of a class all that different from Marx's famous sack of potatoes passage?
> Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple
> addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form
> a sack of potatoes.
>
> Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence
> that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their
> culture from those of the 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 forms no community, no national
> bond, and no political organization among them, they do not
> constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their
> class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a
> convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be
> represented.
Historically, the wives of bourgeois men provided important social services in the creation of the class and the projection of its power (charity, parties). But the bourgeois men exercised their class power through their positions in corporations, financial markets, governments, foundations, parties, and interest groups. Today, the gender lines have blurred, but the social roles are still crucial - and they absolutely depend on institutional position. I don't get how the senescent grandmother or the dependent second cousin function in any meaningful way as members of the class, except to suck off some of its surplus.
The equivalence of power elite analysis and conspiracy theory is rather odd. Conspiracy theory usually reduces the complexities of class analysis to the machinations of a handful of dudes in a soundproof room (whose deliberations the conspiracy theorists can nonetheless reproduce in detail). Power elite analysis takes account of conflict and imperfections, and analyzes the relative power of institutions and of individuals' roles in them. Unlike conspiracy theory, which sees everything as proceeding smoothly from top to bottom - like solid lines with arrows only at one end - power elite analysis sees a lot of slippage, and has to make room for at least some popular influence or constraint on elite power.
This does seem pretty consistent with your agentless view of politics and history, though, Carrol.
Doug