******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
On Mon, 22 May 2017 at 3:32 am, Richard Sprout via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > ***************************************************************** > > > > https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/whos-afraid-of-the-white-working-class-on-joan-c-williamss-white-working-class-overcoming-class-cluelessness-in-america/ This is a pretty good response to the simple-minded anecdotal assertions of the right-wing "white-working class vs educated elite" crowd, who cause so much confusion about Brexit, current polls in the UK, voting patterns in Australia for both the Greens and One Nation, etc. But it's got a few inadequacies. David Roediger, here anyway, doesn't add a lot of clarity about what class is and how class can be used in empirical analysis of politics. He alludes briefly to a Marxist definition but then seems to take up an income definition after criticising Williams for the same. But in Australia and I assume the US skilled members of the most militant unions — builders, electricians and miners — can easily earn over $100K, while many shop-keepers, farmers and contractors struggle on much less (and lower to middle managers no more). He rightly criticises an education definition, a definition which made a bit more sense 50 years ago (at least in terms of association rather than causation) but is totally outdated now with the capitalists' demand to get more and more education - improved labour power - into workers, at no expense to them. I.e. the "credentialism" affecting many jobs, like e.g. my partner's occupation of midwifery, which once required a 2-year diploma but now has an entry level of a 4 year degree, or commonly a nursing degree plus a post-grad diploma, and to get very far required extra post-grad courses and very commonly a masters through a career. But David seems to see education as inadequate in explaining class in terms of the low-to-median sort of income of the higher-educated. That's relevant but more so is the much decreased control over work and lack of ownership of any means of production of the higher-educated: they're much more like any other proles than they were 50 years ago (it's absurd that some people still use 50-year-old terms like "new middle class" as if the processes are "new" or haven't changed, like describing the 1965 class structure as if it were the same as in 1915). It's also unfortunately symptomatic of the lack of understanding of how class can be studied empirically that David suggests it's hard to do any better relating class to voting with the available data. It is hard if you rely on immediate and easily available aggregate poll data or district election results. But there's the American National Election Studies, which has plenty of data to categorise a representative sample of individuals by whether they own a business and employ people or not, and whether they have any managerial control at work or not, and to what extent, as well as income, education, ethnic background, attitudes to various questions, political participation and voting patterns, including a longitudinal panel. This would allow a pretty good approximation to a Marxist categorisation — differentiating people by ownership and control over the means of production, i.e. workers as non-managerial employees, small and medium business people and managers — and how this structure affects attitudes and voting along with other factors (it'd lack the dynamism of complexity of actual class relations but would be a lot better than Williams et al.). I don't know if the US individual-level data is a bit complicated to get like the Australian Election Study or freely available like the British Election Study, and to use it would require some skill in stats and a stats package, but an academic studying these areas should at least know about it and studies using it. An overall problem for social science seems to be than those doing serious quantitative work mostly aren't Marxists and Marxists as a whole aren't very good or very interested in serious quantitative work, Erik Wright being a bit of an eclectic exception (personally I missed the fast-disappearing tenure boat for working on what I'm actually interested in and have ended up, apart from a couple of articles, mainly being a stats prole on other peoples' projects on changing patterns in education and evaluating an NGO's social programs — the drastically decreased level of funding and tenure in any radical research probably exacerbating the overall problem). For some Marxists there's wilful misunderstand of contemporary class structure that suits certain schemas. For Socialist Alternative (Australia) highly-educated employees are workers when they go on strike but middle-class when they vote for the Greens. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
