> The concept of class can and usually does remain an
> abstraction to most intellectuals who identify with ruling classes
> throughout
> history, including those of the present bourgeois social order.
Ted replied: Class, for Marx, is an internal relation, an internal relation that's positively developmental of the "human mind." So it's a rejection of the idea of things as "fixed entities," i.e. as externally related "substances," the idea underpinning, as Whitehead shows, "rigid logic." (To the extent required by the reasoning, axiomatic deductive reasoning implicitly assumes that the entities being reasoned about maintain their identities as their relations change.) If we mean by the "conversion of abstractions into entities," as I assume Dewey does, the ignoring of the fact of internal relations, the attribution of this error to Marx's idea of class and class struggle misunderstands the idea. *********** But, as I said before in this exchange to my way of assessing the situation:
Social relations between classes are relations between people of more or less political power. The employing class are the modern lords of the manor: they own the places of employment. The individuals they employ to produce wealth make up the working class.
** I don't think Marx would disagree with this assessment of who is in which class in the class struggle. People who must sell their skills and time to the employing class in order to make a living are in the working class. People who own the means of production and employ workers to produce goods and services for them, who own and sell them as commodities, those people are in the capitalist class.
Mike B)
Everybody's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer." - W. C. Fields http://www.iww.org/culture/official/preamble.shtml
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