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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?
no subject
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)
no subject
"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)
no subject
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