[Marxism] DISILLUSIONED WITH MARXMAILers!

[Haines Brown]

Nick, I'm not impressed by your reply.

> Yes I actively try to avoid talking to any of the 1200 people who
> work at my workplace. Oh, that's right, it's a university, so
> they're all middle class, "my bad".

In fact, a university population consists of both petite bourgeoisie
and working class. I'll assume for the sake of discussion that you are
an instructor and so fall within the former class in objective
terms. That you didn't think to mention this class distinction at your 
workplace worries me.

Why do I assume you are objectively petite bourgeois? Because the
petite bourgeoisie possess small means of production such as a
license, highly developed individual skill, small business, etc. that
allows the producer to avoid having to sell his labor power as merely
a factor of production. He provides a service or good largely on his
own. Professionals (in the traditional sense), such as college
professors, have been classified as petite bourgeois since the 13th
century.

However, this is only the objective side of the matter. The petite
bourgeoisie are usually thought of today as torn between the working
class on one side and the capitalists on the other, and as a result
their class location fails to define their most probable ideological
position. They are continually at risk of being absorbed into one or
the other of these two classes; some college professors will identify
with the working class and others (often subconsciously) with the
capitalists. We generally consider this choice to be definitive of
their class position (that is, objective factors determine one's most
probable ideology, but which ideology you end up adopting is up to
you).

So your conclusion that you are part of the working class may be
right, but I suspect not how you arrived at that conclusion. You may
well identity with the working class, but at the same time you should
be aware that in objective terms your class position is
ambivalent. That is why people consider their petite bourgeois allies
as a bit unreliable although they can certainly be valuable.

> [Not at all offended, just amazed as such misunderstandings of what
> the working class is - just as grossly wrong as most liberal
> intellectuals are, in fact].

If you had a clear understanding of class (in terms of a working-class
outlook), you would know that "middle class" is a life-style or income
range, not a social class.

And why the jibe at intellectuals? If you are a college professor, you
are a professional intellectual. That is, your job is to teach and to
intellectualize. That's a wonderful position to be in, and it is of
great value if a professor does these things well, just as playing the
violin well is a wonderful position to be in and of great value to
society. I see nothing wrong with intellectuals if they are good at
it. There's nothing inherently bad about the petite bourgeoisie or
even the capitalists as people, for the issue is the capitalist
system, not its Träger.

And I also don't think much of your tossing in the word "liberal"
here. What does it mean? Take a look at the Wikipedia. Liberalism is
clearly a petite bourgeois ideology, borne of the European
Enlightenment, and therefore would naturally be appealing to the
professoriat. They generally hold to Enlightenment values because
those values were the creation of largely the petite bourgeoisie in
the first place.

However, within the capitalist order, the values associated with
liberalism are also generally accepted by capitalists and the working
class. What liberal or Enlightenment value would you care to jettison?
Human rights? Equality of opportunity? The rule of law?  Liberalism is
capitalism at its best. While a critique and alternative to liberalism
is certainly possible, if we stay within the capitalist framework the
alternatives to liberalism are imperialism and fascism.

What we seek is an outlook that is post liberal (i.e., post modern)
and offers a positive alternative to liberalism. In this so-called
"post-modernist age", it has become fashionable to criticize
Enlightenment/liberal values, although in literary circles it has
tended to result in intellectual pathologies. However, post-modernism
in natural science has since the 80s and 90s opened the way to a fresh
new outlook that seems a very healthy move. Arguably Marxism is also
post-modern in this sense. That is, is a sense, Marxism arose as a
critique of posivism and offers an outlook that may have been
incipient, but strikes us today as being post-modern (offering a a
process theory, a theory of probabilistsic causal powers, a systems
theory, a scientific realism, etc.)  

The result of all this is naturally ambiguous, as we would expect from
any emergent situation, but as capitalism enters its death throws we
are finding ourselves in possession of alternatives to its
liberalism. My (irresponsible) prediction is that Marxism (and the
working class) is about to enjoy a global renaissance. My point here,
however, is that liberalism is a progressive outlook in relation to
capitalism, but is reactionary in relation to a possible post-modern
alternative to capitalism.

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM