WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE 'WORKING CLASS' THESE DAYS:

Molly has just read an interesting article on the Anarkismo site by Working Class United, an Australian anarcho-communist group. The article, unfortunately, is more hope than fact. What it shows is the bankruptcy of traditional left wing "class analysis" , a collection of something that is more akin to moral exhortation than to logical thought. A collection borrowed pretty well lock stock and barrel from Marxism. The basic point of the article is that there is still one working class in developed countries and that the "real interests" of this class don't depend upon education nor upon wages or salary received for work. The author "hopes" more than proves that the mobility of capital will lead people in developed countries to develop solidarity with the more "industrial" workers of the developing world because they "have the same enemy". The author criticizes the idea that many (most ???) workers are now "middle class" in developed societies. Yet the problem is that he continues to hold at least in part to this definition developed by academic sociology to explain some things while thinking that it explains other things that it was never meant to explain.

There is a basic dichotomy between the "functionalist" view of class, of which classical Marxism is an example, and the "remuneration" view developed by academic sociology. Marx had a much more restrictive view of the opposition to capitalism than the movement that has taken his name in vain over the last century and a half. Molly has read Capital, all three volumes, and the idea there is stated over and over that the class destined to overthrow capitalism is not some "working class" but rather the "proletariat". This was a class in Marx's schemata that had nothing to sell but its labour power and produced commodities that embodied that metaphysical concept that were sold on a free market. Marx's Hegelian dream depended upon his failed predictions that 1)free markets would eventually prevail as the most efficient form of capitalism, 2)that other classes such as the petit-bourgeois (of which Marx had only a crude and often inconsistent idea) would decline in numbers and power and that 3)capitalism was inevitably headed towards a centralization (of which he approved) that would divide the world neatly between a tiny elite and an overwhelming majority that were "proletarians".

Marx expended great effort to "prove" that workers in the retail industry or in the service industry produced no "surplus value" and hence were not "proletarian". He was wrong, but at least he was consistent. The way that the left went after his demise was away from his restrictive but at least logical categories into a politics of emotional appeal. This is the sort of thing I see written all over the essay by Working Class United. They "hope" that they can make an emotional appeal to better off workers while avoiding some very hard questions. The appeal is easy if you believe in simple academic class analysis as an unexamined add-on to Marxism without Marx, without examining how the two ways of thought are utterly different.

Molly sees little value in academic class analysis as a tool for prediction. Income levels don't even predict any number of "cultural attitudes" that they pretend to, much as one might think they do. Not that such ways of looking at things are totally valueless. They can indeed predict spending trends on certain items very accurately. they can predict a "small number" of social attitudes with a large margin of error. Molly is especially emphatic in taking income levels into account when she does her usual school-marm lectures to would be anarchists who think that "marginalism" is a useful way to spend their limited time on Earth. Especially when they go off the deep end in trying to find some criminal alternative to the "working class". The magic secret to the great dilemma that has haunted the left for the past few decades is that there is indeed no alternative to the "working class as revolutionary subject". A collection of "right thinking people" is not an alternative. Neither is the "lumpen proletariat" whether the object of worship be domestic criminals or some fantasy version of people in the "Third World".

Molly sees present day anarchist practice as a struggle for an alliance of classes, each with their own goals. Molly's anarchism is definitely not revolutionary. It aims for gradual reforms by continued practice by intelligent people who hold anarchist goals as desirable. In terms of "class analysis" Molly finds the alternatives presented both by academic leftists and by leftist organizations as 1)incredibly crude and overstated and 2)avoiding the "hard questions".

For well over two decades Molly has held firm to her own definition of "class". Not that I haven't changed my opinions about certain details of this view over the years, but I haven't changed my opinions about the basic way to "classify" people into classes. Molly holds very much to the functional definition of class of which Marx was a crude expositor. Selling your labour power without any control over the conditions of work is indeed a crucial dividing point, even though the "class struggle" modifies this in ways that Marx could not admit. Molly is all in favour of this sort of reform that returns power over part of one's life to ordinary workers.

But there are other dividing points that are just as crucial. One is the nature of the product that the worker produces. If the product is "social control" how do you classify the worker in such an organization- social control almost by definition has to be produced by organizations rather than a free market ? By inherited prejudice leftists opposes police officers and prison guards. But other people such as teachers and social workers produce exactly the same product by different industrial processes. Holding yard apes in temporary prisons for most of a year is indeed "social control". Teachers may argue that they also provide "education", but Molly would argue that such a thing is merely accidental "industrial waste" that is a byproduct of the real efforts of the industry, a justification that loses its sheen with every advance in information technology.

Here is where adhering to the conservative leftist view (in opposition to Marx's view) has real political consequences. If you cannot see that people's "class positions" are governed by what they produce- as well as their opportunities for class advancement that differ from sector to sector- the you cannot see some obvious things or plan for a future. If you cannot see that most of the developed world's "leftism" has a more than slightly obvious component of self interest on the part of those who manage "social control" enterprises then you are "disarmed" in opposing such schemes when they are proposed as "solutions". The best you can do is make an emotional plea that has no background. This assumes that you are disinterested in the first place.

Disinterested !!!!! Any anarchism that hopes to eventually appeal to a majority has to both be and appear to be "disinterested". If anarchism clings to the class interests of leftism it will be seen as merely a more militant version of something that has already been thoroughly discredited. There is much more about Molly's view of how to view "class" in the modern world that I could say. What I will close on is the fact that the essay mentioned avoids the main questions. What is the difference between "order givers" and "order takers" ? What does it say about "class" if the workers' product is one thing rather than another ?

Much to think about, and perhaps in the end more politically effective than trying to build illusions of similarity.