Is "working class" a coherent category?

Question

For that matter, was it ever? Class theorists seem eager to stuff all sorts of post-modern occupations into the category created to describe modern era economic conditions.

Comments

Meh. I really didn't ask quite what I was trying to get at with this question. Largely it seems to me that the rhetoric of "the working class" is ineffectual in contemporary US society because so few people identify with it. Another part is that contemporary social classes are so atomized and stratified that "working class" sounds to a lot of people to mean factory workers. From what I can tell this is due partially to the focus of Marx and successors on the industrial sectors of the economy. When the agricultural sector was addressed square peg agricultural workers were forced into the round hole of the "working class," but perhaps I am laying bare my ignorance here.

Answer 1

The working class does not own property—i.e., capital—but their labor is necessary for the production of property. However, the process of accumulating capital spurs on production even more and confronts each new generation of dispossessed peoples with the problem of *owning nothing* while having a means to live something like life if only they contribute to more accumulation of... profits; property; political reforms; social mores. Etcetera. Even most of the things that these people may buy throughout their life times and come to understand as "property" very well may be within the bounds of the legal rights of their *actual* owners. The working class isn't necessarily owned, but their access to very particular means of *being human* are very much owned. So its the same difference, really. They are simultaneously alienated from the productive means while also serving as the platform from which those means continue to operate (even in a heavily robotic and automated labor process, "human-capital" is still necessary for industry to exist). I'm not entirely sure what is "incoherent" about that? I'm simplifying some, but I don't want to write out a whole essay about a subject (the working class) that I've encountered more than enough times; both in theory and my daily life. So it's really up to you provide more info and get any sort of discussion going.

Maybe it would be better if you hashed out what you mean by "postmodern occupations"? Like... video game testers? Lowly office workers who are given access to a micro-share of stock on the market? Dog walkers? ???

Comments

Many would like to postulate that there has been some kind of fundamental shift in capitalism's relations and processes since the advent of industrialism, but I would dispute this. It is very easy for people to mistake shifts in capitalism's affects on us as individuals as a change in the system altogether. Take, for instance, the latest crisis of financial capital. It would seem many radicals in North America, especially in the outset of the crisis, hypothesized that it was a "crisis in the heart of capitalism" or that it would lead to some kind of calamitous result for the capitalist relation; and they continue to do so. However, I believe all that is happening is that as accumulated capital goes through a period of destruction (a precedent of the capitalist system) those who were most reliant on what had been afforded to them by what had previously been rendered as productive means experience even deeper suffering and personal crises. The working class's belly and home are entirely dependent on capital's ability to ensure stability in the wage-relation (it can't, but that's besides the point I'm trying to make).

So now you see the ruling class making all of their moves in their employment practices. More desperate and poor people + untenable employment sectors = easy access to temp labor, more hostile fire & hire practices, and the expansion of the service labor sector. Capitalists are making record profits while millions are experiencing the downfall of what America had once cherished as its "middle class"; Greece may be on the precipice of a civil war; Mexico's most productive employment sector is the drug trade, and thousands are suffering even worse for it; Spanish metropolises are veritably falling apart around people's ears... So are "postmodern era economic conditions" fundamentally different from when categories like "working class", "proletariat", "wage-labor", etc., were first coined? Maybe. But the relations established by the capitalist production process have barely changed at all. An existence defined by catastrophe is one of the most fundamental aspects of capitalistic economic conditions and that certainly has not changed at all. Wage-labor is still wage-labor. Unions still launch industrial action and then tell everyone to go back to work when the noise has died down. Capitalists are still capitalists. The ruling ideas of the day are still the ideas of the ruling class. The commodity fetishism still presents the proletarian's activity as way more of a problem than simply "not being given the full economic value of one's labor". So on and so forth. /end of rant

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By "post-modern occupation" I meant things like you alluded to and more. Let us discard that term, I regret coining it. More generally there are occupations I just can't easily fit into the capitalist/proletariat dichotomy: plastic surgeons, consultants, academics, journalists, engineers. Are these bourgeois? Petit-bourgeois? If the goal is a classless society, is all of this speculation and categorization antithetical to our aims?

"An existence defined by catastrophe is one of the most fundamental aspects of capitalistic economic conditions and that certainly has not changed at all. "

No doubt.

"Many would like to postulate that there has been some kind of fundamental shift in capitalism's relations and processes since the advent of industrialism"

This makes no sense to me, as capitalism and industrialism are almost entirely coterminous, with some state communist exceptions.