Class, Experience, Work

"It is counterproductive to identify individuals as members of this class or that class, in the manner of Madame Defarge in Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859). We need to recognize that the real substance of the class structure of capitalist society is the subordination of life to work and the resistance to it—and that the degree to which individuals act as agents of each of these tendencies varies enormously. This includes how we parse and understand our own actions. Self-reflection on how work is imposed on us, and on the ways and degrees to which we impose work on others and on ourselves, can not only reveal the forces that plague our lives but also help free us from them. Becoming conscious of these forces and analyzing them with care can both sharpen and facilitate our struggles, including our efforts to escape the conditioned, internalized self-discipline to impose work on ourselves. Once we recognize the little internal, capitalist devil urging us to get to work, and the equally internal but often long suppressed spirit of autonomy urging us to act on our own and with our friends, it is easier to resist the proddings of the former and follow the calls of the latter. Yes, I think it’s an “us versus them” world, even when Pogo is right that “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Being clear about these pressures that impoverish our lives and poison our relationships with each other can help us figure out how to both resist and get beyond them." - Harry Cleaver, Rupturing the Dialectic, pp.11-12

Work and class...

From The Problem with Work, available at libcom.org 

"The difference between the concepts [work and class]* is perhaps most starkly posed when work understood as a process is compared to class conceived in terms of an outcome that is, as a category (whether explained by reference to ownership, wealth, income, occupation, or forms of belonging) designed to map patterns of economic inequality...

... Iris Young once argued in favor of substituting the Marxist category of division of labor for class as a primary analytic of Marxist feminism. In this classic contribution to second-wave Marxist feminism, Young describes at least two advantages of this methodological shift. First, the division of labor has at once a broader reach than class and allows a more differentiated application. Not only can it be used to register multiple divisions of labor by class as well as by gender, race, and nation, but it can, as Young explains, also expose "specific cleavages and contradictions within a class" (1981, 51; emphasis added) not just along the lines of gender, race, and nation, but also, potentially, of occupation and income...

 ...Like the division of labor, the category of work seems to me at once more capacious and more finely tuned than the category of class. After all, work, including its absence, is both important to and differently experienced within and across lines of class, gender, race, and nation. In this sense, the politics of and against work has the potential to expand the terrain of class struggle to include actors well beyond that classic figure of traditional class politics, the industrial proletariat. Consider too the second advantage noted by Young: "The category of division of labor can not only refer to a set of phenomena broader than that of class, but also more concrete." Unlike class, by her account, the division of labor "refers specifically to the activity of labor itself, and the specific social and institutional relations of that activity' proceeding thus "at the more concrete level of particular relations of interaction and interdependence in a society" (51). By this measure, whereas class addresses the outcome of laboring activity, the division of labor points toward the activity itself...

...Here too there are similarities between Young's interest in the category of division of labor and my focus on work: after all, work, including the dearth of it, is the way that capitalist valorization bears most directly and most intensively on more and more people's lives. This politics of work could be conceived as a way to link the everyday and sometimes every-night experiences of work its spaces, relations and temporalities; its physical, affective, and cognitive practices; its pains and pleasures to the political problematic of their present modes and codes of organization and relations of rule. Although the category of class remains analytically powerful, I would argue that its political utility is more negligible. The problem is that while the oppositional class category of the industrial period the "working class" may accurately describe most people's relation to waged labor even in a postindustrial economy, it is increasingly less likely to match their self descriptions. The category of the middle class has absorbed so many of our subjective investments that it is difficult to see how the working class can serve as a viable rallying point in the United States today. A politics of work, on the other hand, takes aim at an activity rather than an identity, and a central component of daily life rather than an outcome...

...So in the end, I am not saying that we should stop thinking about class, but rather that focusing on work is one politically promising way of approaching class because it is so expansive, because it is such a significant part of everyday life, because it is something we do rather than a category to which we are assigned, and because for all these reasons it can be raised as a political issue. By this account, work is a point of entry into the field of class analysis through which we might be better able to make class processes more visible, legible, and broadly relevant and, in the process, perhaps provoke class formations yet to come."

 *work here is understood as including unwaged and reproductive work.

Capitalist-Patriarchy?

I thought I would share 'Capitalist-Patriarchy', another section from Maria Mies' excellent book Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women and the International Division of Labour (I transcribed an earlier segment on exploitation/oppression here). 

In the book, she lays out the argument outlined below: that capitalism is the latest manifestation of patriarchy, and to see them as separate systems is problematic.

"The reader will have observed that I am using the concept capitalist-patriarchy to denote the system which maintains women's exploitation and oppression.

There have been discussions in the feminist movement whether it is correct to call the system of male dominance under which women suffer today in most societies a patriarchal system. 'Patriarchy' literally means the rule of fathers. But today's male dominance goes beyond 'the rule of fathers', it includes the rule of husbands, of male bosses, of ruling men in most societal institutions, in politics and economics, in short, what has been called 'the men's league' or 'men's house'.

In spite of these reservations, I continue to use the term patriarchy. My reasons are the following: the concept 'patriarchy' was re-discovered by the new feminist movement as a struggle concept, because the movement needed a term by which the totality of oppressive and exploitative relations which affect women, could be expressed as well as their systemic character. Moreover, the term 'patriarchy' denotes the historical and societal dimension of women's exploitation and oppression, and is thus less open to biologistic interpretations, in contrast, for example, to the concept of 'male dominance'. Historically, patriarchal systems were developed at a particular time, by particular peoples in particular geographical regions. They are not universal, timeless systems which have always existed. (Sometimes feminists refer to the patriarchal system as one which existed since time immemorial, but this interpretation is not corroborated by historical, archeological and anthropological research.) The fact that patriarchy today is an almost universal system which has affected and transformed most pre-patriarchal societies has to be explained by the main mechanisms which are used to expand this system, namely robbery, warfare and conquest (see chapter 2).

I also prefer the term patriarchy to others because it enables us to link our present struggles to a past, and thus can also give us hope that there will be a future. If patriarchy had a specific beginning in history, it can also have an end.

Whereas the concept patriarchy denotes the historical depth of women's exploitation and oppression, the concept capitalism is expressive of the contemporary manifestation, or the latest development of this system. Women's problems today cannot be explained by merely referring to the old forms of patriarchal dominance. Nor can they be explained if one accepts the position that patriarchy is a 'pre-capitalist' system of social relations which has been destroyed and superseded, together with 'feudalism', by capitalist relations, because women's exploitation and oppression cannot be explained by the functioning of capitalism alone, at least not capitalism as it is commonly understood. It is my thesis that capitalism cannot function without patriarchy, that the goal of this system, namely the never-ending process of capital accumulation, cannot be achieved unless patriarchal man-woman relations are maintained or newly created...

... Patriarchy thus constitutes the most invisible underground of the visible capitalist system. As capitalism is necessarily patriarchal it would be misleading to talk of two separate systems, as some feminists do. I agree with Chhaya Datar, who has criticized this dualistic approach, that to talk of two systems leaves the problem of how they are related to each other unsolved. Moreover, the way some feminist authors try to locate women's oppression and exploitation in these two systems is just a replica of the old capitalist social division of labour: women's oppression in the private sphere of the family or in 'reproduction' is assigned to 'patriarchy', patriarchy being seen as part of the superstructure, and their exploitation as workers in the office and factory is assigned to capitalism. Such a two-system theory is not capable, in my view, to transcend the paradigm developed in the course of capitalist development with its specific social and sexual divisions of labour. In the foregoing, we have seen, however, that this transcendence is the specifically new and revolutionary thrust of the feminist movement. If feminism follows this path and does not lose sight of its main political goals—namely, to abolish women's exploitation and oppression—it will have to transcend or overcome capitalist-patriarchy as one intrinsically interconnected system. In other words, feminism has to struggle against capitalist-patriarchal relations, beginning with the man-woman relation, to the relation of human beings to nature, to the relation between metropoles and colonies. It cannot hope to reach its goal by only concentrating on one of these relations, because they are interrelated."   

"...and we might cut you in half"

From here: http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=1854

Quote of the Week

"So off we went to Atlanta. There was a curious object stuck by means of a suction cup to the glove compartment in front of me, I remember. Coming out of the cup and aimed at my breastbone was what looked like about a foot of green garden hose. At the end of the shaft was a white plastic wheel the size of a dinner plate. Once we got going, the wheel began to hypnotize me, bobbing up and down when we went over bumps, swaying this way and then that way as we went around curves.
So I asked about it. It was a toy steering wheel, it turned out. Lawes had a seven-year-old son he sometimes took with him on trips. The little boy could pretend to be driving the limousine with the plastic wheel. There had been no such toy when my own son was little. Then again, he wouldn't have enjoyed it much. Even at seven, young Walter hated to go anywhere with his mother and me.
I said it was a clever toy.
Lawes said it could be an exciting one too, especially of the person with the real steering wheel was drunk and having close shaves with oncoming trucks and sideswiping parked cars and so on. He said that the President of the United States ought to be given a wheel like that at his inauguration, to remind him and everybody else that all he could do was pretend to steer."

From Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut.

Quote of the Week

"Knowledge is power — but knowledge is useless without the social and economic power to acquire and apply it."

— Charles Weigl in the 2007 introduction to Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread.

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Quote of the Week

"The first thing we have to understand in order to understand capitalism is class. Class is not an economic category, as we are often led to believe. Class is determined by much more than how much money one makes.

In order to understand class, we have to first understand how we relate to the capitalist system through the work that we do. Does the work you do produce profit for someone? Do you receive only the equivalent of a small portion (if anything) of what you produce or enable to be produced? If you are a blue or white collar waged-worker, a student, an unemployed person, a homemaker, an artist, or a farmer the answer is most likely a resounding "YES!"

The second thing we have to understand in order to understand class is our power-relation to capitalism. Do you have the power to hire & fire people? Do you have the power to create and/or enforce laws, start wars, etc.? Do you have the power to impose wage-slavery? Do you own and control the means of production / reproduction? Do you have any real power over the people who do any of the above? If you are a blue or white collar waged-worker, a student, an unemployed person, a homemaker, an artist, or a farmer the answer is most likely a resounding "NO!".

Answering "yes" to the first question and "no" the second set of questions means that you are working class, a member of what is sometimes called the proletariat. It means that the majority of the fruits of your labor (whether that labor is producing and distributing commodities or reproducing the labor necessary for the production and distribution of commodities) are taken from you in exchange for a fraction (if anything) of what you deserve. It means that you have very little, if any, real social power over the capitalist system...

...Capitalism is the struggle that rages between two classes. The notion of middle class is invoked by the ruling class to obscure this struggle, but the middle class is a myth. There has been no middle class for a long time."

— from '(the) Mechanics for Disrepair: Globalization, Capitalism and Some Ideas on What to Do About It'.

Quote of the Week

"The pert file clerk across the hall lets me know of her disdain for unions. Her immediate boss, a young accountant, who describes himself as 'management', nods solemnly. They put in eight hours a day. When I ask them how their eight hour day came to be, their faces are pure Mondrian — the absence of any detail"

Oral historian Studs Turkel in 'The Great Divide'.

Quote of the week

"There is no question that at present the current university offers a unique combination of circumstances which allows some of its members to criticise the whole of society. It provides time, mobility, access to peers and information and a certain impunity — privileges not equality available to other segments of the population. But the university provides this freedom only to those who have already been deeply initiated into the consumer society and into the need for some kind of obligatory public schooling.

The modern university offers the privilege of dissent on those who have been tested and classified as potential money-makers or powerholders. Schools select at each successive level those who have, at earlier stages in the game, proved themselves good risks for the established order. Having a monopoly on both the resources for learning and the investiture of social roles, a university co-opts the discoverer and the potential dissenter."

— from Ivan Illich's landmark text 'Deschooling Society' (Penguin Books, Education Specials, 1971).

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Quote of the week

"Unfortunately, we have been brought up on parlor games, where the participants discuss whether or not they are 'for' or 'against' violence. Can you picture a similar discussion on whether we are for or against disease? Violence, class struggle, and disease are real. They do not go away through mystification... those who deny the reality of violence and class struggle — like those who deny the reality of disease — are not dealing with the real world."

— Blase Bonpore in 'Pacifism as Pathology' by Ward Churchill.

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