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]

ps my getting stuck a bit unhelpfully on this issue is a good example of who/why "filibusters" (or incompletion of ideas) arise: i am caught up in this question bcz i am writin a big giant thinkpiece abt the use -- and dangers -- of avant-garde movements, which cluster round some technique or faith or obsession or THING (and its justification); the "broad" or "social" justification is that they are out-of-step, and it is valuable for ppl to be out of step -- which is a hindsight rationalisation of "where society ends up" when the conflict between the avant-garde and the mainstream is "resolved" (whether pragmatically or otherwise)... where society has moved to when the conflict is resolved is better than where it was when the conflict was raging, but this "where" that we've ended up in may only have very oblique connection to the shape of the justification the avant-garde gave for its obsessive crankiness

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

[koganbot]

I probably shouldn't have said "useless," since obviously people who have beliefs use them, and the question is to what effect. I haven't read much Lenin and Gramsci, but surely they're not saying that the ONLY conflict in WWI was that between economic classes. Or maybe they are, but I'd like to know what their argument is. It seems to me you don't have to be so pathologically extreme to be a Marxist; all you have to say is that the general evolution of society through history is directed by the relations among economic classes. You don't have to say that every single social conflict is entirely caused and can be entirely explained by conflict between classes. E.g., a Marxist can agree with me that the conflict back in high school between freaks and greasers really was a conflict between freaks and greasers and - though fraught with tensions having to do with economic class - that it can't be (and doesn't need to be) mapped directly or entirely onto the conflict between bourgeousie and proletariat. I still think the Marxist would have his work cut out for him in trying to show how the bourgy-prole conflict is the deeper underlying conflict and how the bourgy-prole rather than the greaser-freak-prep thing (it was at least a triad) is THE engine for societal change. But when you go for a detailed analysis of what's going on with greasers vs. freaks, I don't know that my analysis and his would be all that different.

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.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

to be clearer about this than the last time i posted on it (my "marx not stupid" post), i've completely changed my mind about all this being a bad reason for using the word "class" -- i agree with you (and dave), i think it's a GOOD reason to use the word class, bcz it means you GET the argument i'm referring to as ii. "ii. hunting for examples which overthrow the theory"

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)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

saying that economic conflict is the underlying cause of greaser-freak-prep isn't at all the same as saying greaser-freak-prep must somehow MAP ONTO bourgy-prole conflict -- nor would any (non-stupid) marxist claim this

"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)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

very vague loose handwavey version of marxist "explanation" of ww1: the economic system (viz free market capitalism) led to intense unstable conflict between bourgy and proles in industrialised nations as of the 1840s-50s; the solution was COLONIALISM -- the nations in question set up empires as smash-and-grab raids on the resources of the third world, thereby buying off and semi-co-opting the working classes in said nations, defusing the "contradition"; HOWEVER, by accident of geography and uneven development, these empires were not evenly spread among the various nations, and latecomers (mainly germany) had to seek THEIRS in territories great britain and france had earlier decided were HANDS-OFF (viz the balkans, belgium, russia, etc etc) --- the result was a catastrophic high-tech war BETWEEN the advanced nations, even though it wasn't apparently in anyone's interest (bourgy or prole) in those countries... except of course that the need for hugely intensifed technological war production (and the mass destruction) created vast and powerful new market opportunities

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