Re: Class
On Jun 19, 2007, at 10:56 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
Class cannot be defined or explained or recognized by the functions performed by its members, for a class consists not just of functioning adults.
A Class includes infants. It includes retired but active grandfathers. It includes grandmothers in nursing homes. It includes daughters and granddaughters. It includes second cousins existing on handouts from their relatives. It includes unmarried older sisters. In the case of ‘ruling’ classes past and present it includes a rather large
sprinkling of “high-class servants” — witness the palace servants who became
Kings of France; I suspect a slim strata of the professoriate (e.g. a
certain Henry Kissinger) should be included under this heading. It includes divorced spouses. Sons-in-Law; Daughters-in-Law. A whole complex
tangel of relationships few of which will be immediately visible, and there will be no way by description of formal position (C.E.O., Secretary of State; University President) to identify all or even most of the relations which constitute class power and the exercise of that
power. A University President with several daughters and sons-in-law is not the same as a University President unmarried or childless.Power-elite analysis is a sort of sophisticated and scholarly
version of conspiracy theory. In any case it is not class analysis.
How is this version of a class all that different from Marx’s famous
sack of potatoes passage?
Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple
addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form
a sack of potatoes.Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence
that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their
culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile
opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is
merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants,
and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national
bond, and no political organization among them, they do not
constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their
class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a
convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be
represented.
Historically, the wives of bourgeois men provided important social
services in the creation of the class and the projection of its power
(charity, parties). But the bourgeois men exercised their class power
through their positions in corporations, financial markets,
governments, foundations, parties, and interest groups. Today, the
gender lines have blurred, but the social roles are still crucial -
and they absolutely depend on institutional position. I don’t get how
the senescent grandmother or the dependent second cousin function in
any meaningful way as members of the class, except to suck off some
of its surplus.
The equivalence of power elite analysis and conspiracy theory is
rather odd. Conspiracy theory usually reduces the complexities of
class analysis to the machinations of a handful of dudes in a
soundproof room (whose deliberations the conspiracy theorists can
nonetheless reproduce in detail). Power elite analysis takes account
of conflict and imperfections, and analyzes the relative power of
institutions and of individuals’ roles in them. Unlike conspiracy
theory, which sees everything as proceeding smoothly from top to
bottom - like solid lines with arrows only at one end - power elite
analysis sees a lot of slippage, and has to make room for at least
some popular influence or constraint on elite power.
This does seem pretty consistent with your agentless view of politics
and history, though, Carrol.
Doug