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Help me figure out what I mean by "social class"
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?
--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?
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(tho i guess you cd always just restate marxist claims in other terms and maybe it wd be good discipline to do so -- and maybe always say "economic class as marxists understand define it" when that's what you meant) (mutatis mutandis for weberians, tho i know bvgger all abt weber)
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The "Marxist" position you describe is pathologically extreme, and seems more like an article of faith than an idea that one can actually put to use. I mean, you could say that all social conflict is due to the activity of elementary physical particles (if you happen to believe that everything is due to the action of elementary particles) but there's nothing you can do with that idea. In any event, I don't see how a Marxist (or anyone else) could argue that Bloods vs. Crips is an expression of conflict between economic classes. But he could say that the battle of Bloods Vs. Crips occurs in a society in which there's a lot of economic class conflict, and that this overall societal class conflict influences and maybe even helps to shape Blood Vs. Crips. (But then he'd have to say what the influence is.)
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it is a "pathological extreme" but no more so than darwinism's argument that ALL evolution is by natural selection: it's the shaping claim of a discipline -- nor is it true i don't think that it's an intrinsically unusable claim, cz it leads to two kinds of activity...
i. show how apparently tricky cases (bloods vs crips; the evolution of the eye) fit the theory
ii. hunting for examples which overthrow the theory
the first world war took marxists by huge surprise: they had to explain why do the working classes of different nations accepted the call to kill one another when their interests wd clearly be to band together internationally and take arms against their economic overlords -- explanations that arose included lenin's theory of imperialism; gramsci's theory of hegemony
neither of these are useless (or even pathologically extreme) theories: they are both useful and useable tools for exploring how influence might work, and that's what they do (they also form the core structuring faiths of political movements and parties: and maybe give those movements and parties momentum against the consensus or unconscious drift of the rest of politics; this difference of direction may be of social value not bcz the faith is correct or well justified, but bcz the consensus is causing or obscuring unexplored harms -- the political friction being where those harms manifest visibly, or palpably, or whatever)
i like pragmatism's resistance to generalisation -- i think it's good for it to be resisted -- but without a pathology (the pathology of generaiising over-strongly) to resist it in turn, isn't the danger that you explain any particular situation's dynamics purely in terms of local conditions and drives, and don't see (bcz you decline to look for) wider pressures? if you accept that maybe not all evolution is by natural selection -- that there's maybe some other mechanism you don't know about yet -- doesn't it put you in a situation where you can just out problem cases on one side cz you don;t have the whatever to work on them yet (ok admittedly this doesn't happen in science cz it's not the culture, but it DOES happen in politics...) (you don't have the VOTES to work on them yet)
(viz assume bloods vs crips is a prblem that needs dealing with: it can be defused how? is it a problem of local negotiation, local punitive action, of stuff that can be enacted within the community it directly affects? or is the entire community under an outside stress which means whatever is done within it, a version of bloods vs crips will once more arise) (if it's a bit abstract thinking like this abt bloods vs crips, then think of of criminal warlordism eg in haiti? are there outside forces which cause it? (where yes, the chain of causality has to be explored...)
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so anyway, this is what i'm currently thinking about and what i want to use frank's questions for -- and (to frank's annoyance) i will drop out of the discussion not when frank's questions are answered, but when i get useful energy and shape for MY project
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I still don't know what you mean by "incommensurable," or, if you think there is something incommensurable (rather than just "somewhat different") between me and the Marxist, why this is a problem for me.
I also don't know what you mean by "pragmatist." For what it's worth, my philosophical ideas and my social ideas don't match up, since my philosophical ideas are basically a critique of philosophy that leaves philosophy dead; but the critique doesn't tell me either what social role philosophy plays (or played) or what my social ideas should be. I think that the fact I used the term "pathologically extreme" both for philosophy (in my book) and for the idea that all social conflict is economic conflict may have confused you into thinking I had a similar critique of each. But actually my attack on philosophy is something else. And if you want to learn what it is you'll have to stop abandoning conversations.
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ie it's only a problem for you if you're going to get tired of explaining to certain respondents that your usage doesn't easily dovetail with theirs; or until you ensure that YOUR usage is the dominant one
what i am meaning by pragmatism is (i think) the move you make to defuse words like "contradiction" and "dichotomy" -- i am arguing that with science and politics, words like this are deployed to flag up PROBLEMS WHICH MUST BE SOLVED (ie logically and therefore socially intolerable situations); and what you sometimes have done, when you argue that they're not really dichotomies or contradictions, is make a handwave gesture to the web of socials conditions which the alleged dichotomy" exists in, to demonstrate is NOT logically intolerable (and this slightly skates away from its social urgency) (which the word "contradiction" may indeed not well express but does highlight as a problem)
(ie i am associating pragmatism with "defusing the situation", and setting it against political strategies which by contrast "sharpen the contradictions" or intensify the situation)
i guess by incommensurable i mean something a bit more psychological than i perhaps ought to -- viz you occasionally step away from particular arguments w.particular betes noires on the grounds that yr opponent is "paranoid" or whatever, and that yr debate wd become "codependent", which i take to mean that their commitment to a given line is fanatical and closed, rather than formal, speculative and open
closed: the default commitment in terms of politics that will get changes made? (absolute stubbornness a pre-requisite of effectiveness)
open: the default commitment in terms of discussion, conversation, thought?
and you would be able to converse with the latter but perhaps not the former? in other words you are making a judgement that you (personally) are psychologically incommensurable with certain potential debate opponents, and that this reflects an incommensurability of "political philosophy" (which may indeed be rooted in stubborn unthought habit or character trait, and not anything "deep" at all)
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"would have his work cut out" -- of course what's always frustrating here is that oodles of this work have been done (whether successfully or convincingly or correctly is another matter) but we only ever ENCOUNTER it by plunging deep into the weeds of some very particular little niche of avant-garde scholarship (complete with ugly self-protective jargon viz "base vs superstructure" zzz; ugly self-protective behaviour etc etc)
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so the argument was that a nation could be in the grip of its markets and corporations -- and that these were pushing it into a situation where the interests of its PEOPLES (not just working class) were entirely secondary, which meant that the wars-as-they-occurred (between nations) occurred as an "expression" [the word i used above, which is not ideal at all] of the class conflict at the root of the story, yet appear to manifest in a way which (as you are saying) exactly FAILS to map onto conflicts of economic classes