Marv and Charles are both circling the same unresolved question in Marxist theory: what does "working class" mean once wage labor stopped looking like a factory floor? Neither Edsall's stratification approach (income/education deciles) nor a purely rhetorical appeal to "labor power for sale" settles it on its own, because the second formulation, taken literally, is too broad to explain anything—it also covers surgeons and hedge fund quants who sell labor power for eye-watering sums and have every reason to defend the system that pays them.
The more useful marker is control: over one's labor process, over others' labor, and over the disposition of capital. By that test, DSA's base—teachers, nurses, adjuncts, caseworkers, and nonprofit staff—is working class almost by definition: salaried, supervised, non-owning, and increasingly deskilled or proletarianized by the same cost-cutting logic that hit manufacturing a generation earlier. Barbara Ehrenreich's old "professional-managerial class" framework tried to carve this stratum out as something structurally distinct from both capital and labor. That framework has aged badly — the credentialed salariat has been losing the relative autonomy and job security that once justified treating it as a separate layer, which is exactly the "precariat" phenomenon Edsall gestures at. I would want the empirical challenge regarding comparative Black membership figures for PLP vs. DSA sourced before relying on it, as organizational membership demographics from small left groups are notoriously undocumented, and I haven't seen a citable figure for either. Absent that, "which org's racial composition is closer to proportional" isn't something either side can currently prove. Where I would push back on Charles's second point is that the New Deal analogy does not stand or fall on whether relief programs alone ended the Depression. Marv's point was narrower—that a faction of capital backed reform in response to instability, not that reform was sufficient or self-generated. The Bonus March and CIO drives Charles cites are evidence for, not against, that reading: mass pressure from outside the electoral system is what made a reformist faction of the bourgeoisie useful to have in office. The real question for the DSA is whether an organization that has channeled almost all its energy into electoral work can generate that kind of outside pressure at all or only ever hopes to be the parliamentary wing of a movement it isn't building. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42380): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42380 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120177484/21656 -=-=- 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. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
