Help me figure out what I mean by "social class"

[koganbot]

Help me write my next column figure out what I mean by the phrase "social class"!

--What do people mean when they say "class"?
--What do I mean when I say "class"?
--What should I mean when I say "class"?

I do not necessarily mind that my own and other people's use of the term is vague and inconsistent and contrary, but I do think I should be more specific about the various different species that my inconsistency and contrariness suggest and my vagueness covers up.

--Mapping one way of classifying stuff (stuff?) onto another. E.g., mapping musical genre ("rock 'n' roll") onto a group of people ("teenagers" or "working-class" or, um, black people? white people? Southerners? urban dwellers? hicks?)
--Do people belong to classes, or are classes just roles they play? Or some mixture? "White person" is supposedly a role I play 24/7, whether I want to or not, but is this true? What about roles I was playing ten years ago: "technical editor"? "Support staff"? "Office temp"? Twenty years ago I'd divided punks up into two broad categories: "office-temp punks" and "bike-messenger punks" (obv. each was a synecdoche (??) (er, metaphor) for a bunch of similar ways of earning money).
--You know, power and stuff: people who pay wages and earn profits as opposed to people who are paid wages and are told what to do. But actual roles don't divide up so easily. Anyway, most people are in the latter category (the category "are told what to do"), but the Get-Tolders, being the vast majority of human beings, divide up into classes themselves.
--Etc.
--Do you know any good books or articles I should read on this subject - not just that discuss "class" but that notice that the term is problematic?

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I really LIKE class in the loaded sense. You'll only be fighting Marxists if the Marxists are stubborn and refuse to see the multiplicity of the word, which might be common in theory but probably not a major concern in the column (the potential K-punk bomb will happily explode itself elsewhere).

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes i didn't actually mean fighting actual real marxists, i meant fighting ppl who aren't marxists but hear it that way first (bcz it is a dominant sense) and misread your point, so that step two will always be "no actually i meant..."

all you need to defuse the actual real marxists is to say the magic word GRAMSCI at them!

(fact: gramsci was a hunchback dwarf! sadly his first name was not samwise)

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Surely he should have been called Gramsci Son Of Groin or something?

[koganbot]

I deliberately chose "class" rather than "category," the loadedness of "class" being my very reason, "conflict" being a hoped-for connotation. Don't think that "What's Wrong With Pretty Girls?" would have been nearly as powerful if I had not used the word "class."

While browsing the stacks found a Marxist who was saying that "middle class" is a huge problem for people like him, and that his easy way out had been to say that the middle classes were playing and forced into multiple rules in relation to domination (both dominated and dominating). The reason he wasn't satisfied with his own previous solution was that domination does not necessarily entail antagonistic class interests (e.g., a parent can dominate a child while not being averse to the child's interests), and it loses the central characteristic of Marx's class analysis, which is exploitation. Of course, I, not being a Marxist, don't buy the idea that capitalism is necessarily exploitative. But I do feel an affinity to the idea that interests are often antagonistic, and that sometimes groups are antagonistic not only because of conflicting interests but because they like conflict anyway.

[koganbot]

multiple rules = multiple roles

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

ok so marxist usage sez "classes = conflict; all conflict = conflict of class interests"; yr sayin "classes = conflict; some conflict = a social value in itself"

maybe you're right and you need to get to the statement -- and exploration -- of incommensurability

ps there are lots of stupid marxists in the world but marx wasn't one of em