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Michael Meeropol wrote
Mike Zweig of STONY BROOK has sponsored conferences on the reality of
the AMERICAN WORKING CLASS for years -- he would be a perfect place to
start.
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Louis Proyect wrote
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Olin_Wright
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On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 2:50 PM, Mark Lause via Marxism
<[email protected]> wrote:
Anybody have some recommendations on theoretical or practical work
defining class in our contemporary U.S. setting
Cheers,
ML
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I participate in a study group which for a brief time last year went
into the concept of class. I didn't find much out there that's current,
other than critiques of other, past analyses. That's in spite of the
current naked nature of the class war being waged by capital.
There's Eric Wright and Michael Zweig, as you point out both at it for
years, and I have problems with Wright.
Eric Olin Wright conflates Weberian categories, ideal types, with Marx'
core identification of class which is centered around the relationship
of any collection of workers, or employers, or undefined categories, to
relations of production. Anything that strays from Marx's concept to me
cannot be relied on to provide a basis on which to construct further a
unified field theory of productive activity and actual class
composition, nor can it point out the class fractions and divisions
which can be relied on to go all the way with you in thoroughgoing class
warfare.
Zweig is good on the necessity for groups such as civil rights,
anti-war, and women’s struggles to obtain or maintain close connections
with labor (defined through its trade union organizations or how?), on
how considerations of class dynamics have "been driven from economics as
an academic discipline, how the decline of union power has contributed
to the decline in living standards that workers experience, "and how
public policy in the United States has been shaped by class power to the
detriment of working people, how obvious, growing inequality reveals the
presence of class differences [although what's so different from the
late 19th century?], "the incongruous alliance between the corporate
elite and, especially, although not exclusively, white working-class
people—an odd mating which defines the conservative populism of the
Republican Party," the nebulous recognition of women's relations and
race differences to the concept of class, that "trade unionism [more
ineffectual in the global context all the time, especially given its
ongoing post-WW2-originated policy of production-related wage
increase/decrease - "concession bargaining," the General Motors
reorganization, for example] - must supplant or supplement what we have
up to now taken for granted. ... the nature of both the 21st century
domestic economy and the international one to which it is now
intricately tethered [which] marginalize the normal workplace-based
forms of collective bargaining," nationalism, chauvinism and the
execrable role played by US unions in foreign policy - Venezuela for
example, and "the troubled relationship between the new immigrants and
the African American community."
Then there's the many surveys on class, which rely on answers to
questions about income, lifestyle, location of habitation, educational
level, how people see themselves (important in a subjective sense and in
realization of where we are historically, but not in the sense of an
objective analysis of actual class relations), "their sense of space in
the world,” according to sociologist Jane Van Galen, etc. -- then
there's discussions of culture, religion, and other aspects of life –
social capital -- all of whichconceal much more than they purport to
reveal about class.
As E.P. Thompson in his introduction to /The Making of the English
Working Class
<http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=407102>/
pointed out,
//
[Class is] an historical phenomenon. . . something which in fact happens
(and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships. And class
happens when some [people], as a result of common experiences (inherited
or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as
between themselves, and as against other [people] whose interests are
different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is
largely determined by the productive relations into which [people] are
born — or enter involuntarily.
In other words, that class relations are necessarily antagonistic, are
based on conflicting interests and feelings, and that people are
implicated in class experience involuntarily, which they enter into from
their position with respect to relations of production.
As to discussions of Wright's work and on how to go about analyzing
class, three in particular I found in my archive page for the study
group are worth passing on, the Bertell Ollman article in particular;
and I'd be interested in what anyone else has to offer:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1163/156916303321780537
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/class_consciousness.php
http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2006/0906pollin.html
There's also the two volumes of Socialist Register - 2014 Registering
Class, and 2015, Transforming Classes.
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