On Nov 28, 2009, at 4:45 PM, brad bauerly wrote:
> ...The working class as I define it is not merely the 'working
> class' of popular discourse but the sum of all who don't own the
> means of production...
"ownership" is determined by class, not vice-versa. Capitalists as such do not "own" means of production--there is usually nothing among means of production about which a capitalist can say "this is my own" in the way many workers can say that about their tools or houses and all of them can say about their bodies and their skills. Capitalists typically own "*capital*," stocks and bonds and money, all representing their shares in the collective class property in the means of production and their title to participate in appropriation of the surplus-value collectively produced by exploitation of the working class. Ownership of means of production is typical of the petit bourgeois and small farmer, members of classes that (often unknown to themselves) are already largely proletarianized.
> ...,or better yet, everyone who has surplus extracted from them
> because of specific property relationships...
That has long, long, ceased to be the case for most workers. The big majority of the working class is comprised of workers who perform labor that is "necessary but nonproductive" (Marx) and thus produce no surplus value although they have to sell their labor power to live; and therefore they work under qualitatively the same alienated conditions as do productive workers.
> ... I am usually the guy at the party arguing that we need to figure
> out how to
> organize the investment bank traders and middle management types...
These two categories do not belong together. "investment bank traders" are parasites, playing no role in the production or realization of value. Their function is in the redivision of surplus value among the capitalist class, their bonuses come directly out of surplus value (or, if their losses have made their firms insolvent, out of government "bailout" subsidies). They are capitalists just as much as the top executives. "middle management," the Dilberts of this world, are squarely within the nonproductive majority of the working class. But there is nothing to suggest that they sense any sort of solidarity with each other, or will ever be organizable.
Shane Mage
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos