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Effectronica posted:Classes aren't handed down by the hand of God at Mt. Sinai. We can define "working class" in Marxian terms, as people who make their living by wage and salaried labor under an employer, and suddenly all three of those people are part of a global working class. We can define it broader, and incorporate self-employed people that nevertheless make their living primarily by working under a contracting employer, and catch an even broader group of people. Hell, we can even define "working class" in terms of "makes majority of income by labor as opposed to collection of rents" and get a broad, broad base of people globally, though this might be counterproductive. This group seems so broad that any "shared identity" would depend more on the propaganda than common, immediate interests. And, at that point, you're constructing an identity from scratch, so you could do it based on pretty much anything. It's not clear that "class" is much easier than national identity, religious solidarity, or even just a common sense of humanity. Take Jackie Chan, a school district admin, and a guy who owns septic-tank cleaning service. It's not at all clear that Jackie Chan and the admin should feel the special bond. Sure, they both make money from salary. But, day-to-day, the admin will have a lot more in common with the small-business owner. Those two will be the ones impacted if global warming creates stronger hurricanes.
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Dec 11, 2015 19:09
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Effectronica posted:Well, I'm describing how the second wave of feminism operated, so I guess that "common, immediate interests" is bullshit. I agree that all classifications are artificial. They're bright lines that people use to make sense of a fuzzy reality. But "all models are wrong" doesn't mean that they're all equally wrong. The question is what common-experiences the category is intended to capture, and how well it goes about capturing them. If you're doing this for politics, it also matters how much you can do with the solidarity. I'm saying that "class" defined as broadly as you're doing, doesn't seem especially useful. I'll concede that it's a thing people could use to divide themselves. But so is everything else. I don't really see the comparison you're trying to draw with Feminism. Is it deeper than, "both things involved groups?" One obvious difference is that second-wave Feminism pointed to a whole bunch of immediate common interests. Women, across religious, ethnic, and class lines, could benefit from changed laws around domestic violence. They all had an interest in more equitable divorce & custody laws. They could all be sexually harassed by their peers in the workforce. Fighting for these common interests bound the category together. Once enough progress was made on the concrete policy stuff, the movement seemed to fracture. There were (and are) critiques along the lines of "Solidarity is for White Women." The idea is that people will pay lip service to the group. But, when it comes time to act, the energy was only there for things that help people's immediate self-interest. So, the elite pushed "Solidarity" when the efforts would help them, but seemed to care less when it came to stuff that was specifically for less-privileged women. It seems like your grouping would skip that first step; there just aren't that many laws that will benefit both a salaried VP of Marketing, and a Bangladeshi factory worker. If anything the Bangladeshi factory has a lot more common interest with the Bangladeshi shop-keeper.
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Dec 11, 2015 20:55
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Effectronica posted:Well, I'm describing how the second wave of feminism operated, so I guess that "common, immediate interests" is bullshit. Effectronica posted:There are a whole bunch of immediate common interests for all people who live off labor as opposed to rent on capital as well. If so, the question is how the "labor / capital income" line groups people who've got common policy goals. I'm saying that it's too broad to be particularly useful. Jackie Chan and the Bangladeshi factory worker both sell their time. But they don't have that many common interests. If we're talking about organizing around real commonalities of interest, I think we'd do better by just looking at total wealth and income levels, regardless of source. The guy making 10M/year has different interests than the Midwestern professional making 100k/year. The professional is, in turn, different than the rural factory worker who's pulling in $25k/year. Effectronica posted:Increasing the share of capital in national income and increasing the importance of inherited wealth hurts all of those people. Furthermore, all of the people involved are hurt by foreign asset accumulation by the rich countries as well- it depresses wages and salaries in the rich countries through offshoring, it deprives the ability of people in the poor countries to determine their destiny. These are two gigantic common interests. Do you have some specific shop in mind? If not, that's a weirdly specific assertion. What prevents a shopkeeper from making at least 50% of their income from their access to capital? You need to have stock in order to sell things. Or, for that matter, from hiring a couple people? More generally, these 'immediate' interests seem like they're just PR contortions. Like, sure, we can talk about "share of income for labor," just like we can talk about "share of income for women." But unless you've got a proposal that impacts both female VP of Marketing and female convenience store employees, you're in the "Solidarity is for White Women" trap. People can write articles about unfairness in the boardroom. That might move the "income for women" metric. But it's not like that will trickle down to the woman working split shifts at a Target. The metric is concealing the very real differences within the group. It's the same with "Share of Income for Labor." I'm sure that a VP of Marketing would be happy to appeal to 'Worker Solidarity' when he's opposing salary caps for executives. After all, it'll mean more income for workers. And isn't that what we care about?
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Dec 11, 2015 22:03
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Effectronica posted:The problem, though, is that you look at these things as programs aimed at some particular goal, rather than as an umbrella for a wide variety of goals. So, for example, you take the presumption that feminism ought not to exist because there are aspects of feminism that are not universal to all women. And you take this and apply it to the idea of "solidarity" among a Marxian or post-Marxian working class, concluding that it shouldn't exist because not all its aspects would be universal. I haven't presumed anything, or weighted in on the necessity for feminism. That's well outside the scope of this thread. You said that your idea for using a "solidarity" ethos to convince workers to help one another would play out like 2nd wave feminism. I said that 2nd wave feminism was politically successful when looking at specific policy proposals that helped women generally. The third wave exists partly because this 'solidarity' broke down when the movement turned to policy proposals were less universally applicable. Unless you disagree with my history, I think it's unclear what you invoked 2nd wave feminism.
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Dec 12, 2015 01:51
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