On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 6:31 PM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > And, even though Marx gave a lot of attention to factory workers > (which for some reason were salient during the Industrial Revolution), > that doesn’t mean that all of the one that fit his categories work in > narrowly-defined “factories.” A McDonalds’ or and office can just as > much be a factory as a machine shop. The key thing is the use of the > division of labor and/or machinery under the control of the > capitalists. No blue collar is required. No dark satanic mill is > required.
The point is that Marx's categories (the most important one being capital/labor) are clearest and most unambiguous in the old factory system of the 19th century. Over time there has been a lot of blurring of these categories and hybrids and ambiguous cases of various sorts are everywhere. This certainly does not mean that the capital/labor distinction is not relevant or useful (it most certainly is), but it is only a part of the overall picture. When we have a really impressive hammer in our hand, it is sorely tempting to look at every problem in the world as a nail and all that.. -raghu. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
