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

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

what about using a different term of classification for
(i) the types of type we are that some have no choice in
(ii) the types of type we are that all have choice in ???

(marx eg specifically distinguished between the working class, which was an analytical category, and the proletariat, which is alert to its situation and engaged in its transformation -- ie a political category) (other marxists have been much less clear about the implications of this distinction)

plainly lots of categories and identities are transient -- but "being poor" may not be one of them, however much you want it to be

the relationship between what's voluntary and what's not is totally part of frank's project, of course: "does the music choose me? how and why?" has animated several if not all of his columns to date

so if there are class types -- economic? racial? -- which can't be changed just by yr own (individual) choice, which can only be changed at "yr" behest by "yr" participation in political activity (which if it succeeds in changing the shape of society may succeed in changing the shape of the meanings of its seemingly fixed classes/categories), hoiw does this factor into yr decisions about which identity-attractions you will pursue, and which shake off?

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

haha diff. btwn (i) + (ii) the mystery of western culture (but you WOULD think someone would've come up with good words for them: like 'natural' and 'conventional' eh?)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yeah but economic class ISN'T "natural", it's conventional also, it's just that the conventions are hardwired into a structure (the structure changes, tho it's it's a moot point so far if it can "be changed", at least into something where economic class isn't still an imposition imposed by the structure)

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

i didn't say economic class was natural! and yes that is the tricky thing about conventions.