[lbo-talk] what is the working class

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Sat Dec 5 04:49:16 PST 2009


At 09:21 PM 12/2/2009, brad bauerly wrote:
> >
> > one other thing. i have a hard time understanding your position because
> > this all seems like a lot of vague generalities and abstractions.
> >
> > to steal a line from jenny brown, it would help if you could run the
> > abstractions through an example or two.
> >
> > what is an example of a class ideneity or subjectivity? what is an example
> > of class as a structure. why is the latter more compelling to someone than
> > the former? perhaps this is the same complaint carrol had. i have no doubt
> > you have plenty of experience in the messy work of organizing, but it would
> > help if these ideas could be worked out in my concrete examples.
> >
> > i think we disagree a great deal and i think these concrete examples would
> > make manifest just how we disagree.
> >
> > shag
> >
> >
> >
>
>O.K. some examples...in the migrant workers rights group I work with there
>are alot of different identities and subjectivities, not sure if they are
>what one would call working class, more of historical/cultural but amplified
>and changed due to societal pressures and as a means to deal with what are
>clearly class barriers (don't get me started on all of the left liberals who
>constantly tell the migrants that they should be more proud of and
>expressive of their cultural heritage. As if they moved half way across the
>world to express a culture that is not really as 'untouched' as these
>'activists' think. As if their main concern is not just to feed their
>families and if they wanted to express their culture instead, like they
>would have migrated at all). Most are responding to class oppression by
>trying to make sense of it though their cultural differences. Pretty much
>the same scene at the workers center too. Over the top masculinity and
>anti-intellectualism as a response to class barriers and as a means to make
>sense of the world around them. Then there is the strike I was involved: in
>which us radicals thought we could build a workers culture around a
>marxist/communist identity by calling everyone comrade and discussing
>everything in marxist terms. This both succeeded and failed as we
>effectively formed a tight group of radicals and alienated ourselves from
>the rest of the union. My days in the anti-globalization movements were
>similar. There was a culture to this group but I would not call in working
>class, more like privileged and self-referential. Ditto the radical
>environmental groups I kicked around with in the mid-90's. So, none of
>these reveals a real working class identity or subjectivity, which is kind
>of my point, and those that tried to insert one tended to either make
>matters worse or simply divide and split. These identities were also
>mostly not chosen but put on them. This is also the reason why I have
>brought up the critique of the enlightenment critique of religion by Marx
>and how I thought it applies to subjectivity in general. Of course this
>then influences the workers and later workers chances to move out of this
>position, so it is not a unidirectional process but a fluid
>relationship. And it is here in he relationship between identities and the
>lack of structural change that is the key variable.
>
>Now as far as how we differ, I guess I expected you would say that and my
>response would be to ask you to specify how are positions still differ?
>
>BRAD

ok. well now I'm more confused. I'd asked for an example of a class identity or subjectivity. I was using your words, but they didn't make sense to me. so I was trying to understand through examples. So, if on your view, people have a class identity or subjectivity, what is that? Similarly, you used the phrase "class as a structure". I'm still unclear as to what makes class structural - on your view. I know how i'd explain it; I'm trying to find out how you illustrate an example of "class as a structure."

I'm also confused by this sentence where you write:


>"Of course this
>then influences the workers and later workers chances to move out of this
>position, so it is not a unidirectional process but a fluid
>relationship."

I assume "this" is a reference to marx's critique of religion. I pasted the quote below. What I am not clear about is how this influences current and future workers' "chances" to "move out of this position".

if anyone else is still reading, what do you suppose Marx meant by this sentence in the quote below? It's metaphorical, not literal but I'm not sure what "ad hominem" is standing for here:


>Theory is capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem,
>and it demonstrates ad hominem when it becomes radical.


>Religious misery is in one way the expression of real misery, and in
>another a protest against real misery. Religion is the sigh of the
>afflicted creature, the soul of a heartless world, as it is also the
>spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The
>abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the world is the demand
>for their real happiness. The demand to abandon the illusions about their
>condition is the demand to give up a condition that requires illusions.
>Hence criticism of religion is in embryo a criticism of this vale of tears
>whose halo is religion.
>
>Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not for the
>purpose of enabling man to wear the existing chain without fantasy or
>consolation, but to make him cast off the chain and cull the living
>flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he thinks,
>acts, and shapes his reality like a disillusioned man who has come to his
>senses, so that he revolves around himself and thereby around his real
>sun. Religion is only the illusory sun that revolves around man so long as
>he does not revolve around himself.
>
>It is, therefore, the task of history, after the otherworldly truth has
>disappeared, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate
>task of philosophy, which stands in the service of history, to expose
>human self-alienation in its unholy form after it has been unmasked in its
>holy form. Criticism of heaven thus is transformed into criticism of
>earth, criticism of religion into criticism of law, and criticism of
>theology into criticism of politics.
>
>The weapon of criticism, to be sure, cannot replace the criticism of
>weapons; material force must be overthrown by material force, but theory
>itself becomes a material force as soon as the masses grip it. Theory is
>capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it
>demonstrates ad hominem when it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp
>things by the root. But for man, the root is man himself. The clear proof
>of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its practical energy, is
>that it issues from the decisive, positive suspension of religion. The
>criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the highest being
>for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions
>in which man is a degraded, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being
>
>"Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Introduction"

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