Question about Marxist Analysis of Class Consciousness

[Neto]

I tend to have an understanding of this that will appear very simplistic, and maybe it is. You all tell me.
I think that it all comes back to the same basic idea as is referred to as "Limited Good" in anthropological descriptions of folk societies, and in some tribal societies. I think you are familiar with this idea, but in short, it assumes that there is only so much "good" in the world, and in this case, this refers to wealth. So the fact that Mr. Musk has so much of it means that he has deprived you personally of your share. The only way to fix this is for the 'poor' to take their rightful share back from those who have more than their rightful share.

The thing is, some things are truly limited (hours in a day, the amount of fresh water in my town, untapped reserves of fossil fuels). Not that all these have been fully utilized, but there are hard limits. Other things are unlimited, or nearly so (new ideas, stories, imagination). Our economy is a complicated mix of the two.

To what degree is "wealth" in one or the other of these categories?

[Falco Underhill]

I wonder if this is a signal to Elon Musk from Freddie deBoer saying, in effect, if you play ball with us, if you support with your $$$$ some of the proper activist organizations, some of our movements, whether directly or indirectly, we'll stop threatening potential advertisers to your business, because in that case, you're not just giving back to your class, but helping us along, thus being a good contributer to the cause. It's a shakedown. (This may partly answer my own question, "how does the left take hold of Giant Coorperations?")

I have recently been reading other left wing articles in a similar light. On one level there's a message to democratic constituents, to the average Joe who supports the democratic party, that radical leftists have gone too far for the good of the party, but on another level, and unbeknownst to the average reader, it's a signal to the radical leftists how to correct their mistakes to further tighten their grip on the party.

One such article in the Atlantic warns democrats that they are losing Latino/Hispanic voters because they don't care about woke ideology, in general don't go into higher education and hear that stuff. They're mostly just working class folks who aren't interested in government handouts, and are "freaked out" by far left rhetoric about race and climate change, etc.

So on the surface, this appears to be an admonition to stop being woke ideologues or you're going to continue to lose votes. Democrats, however, got the signal you wouldn't get from a surface reading: that is: we need to get Hispanics and Latinos into higher education so they can be brainwashed into woke ideology just like everyone else, otherwise, we're going to lose their support!

Unsurprisingly, Democrats have recently gotten a bill passed to give large amounts of government funding to organizations that would benefit the Latino/Hispanic community by ensuring their entry into higher education "in order to close the gap of economic disparity" between them and other minority groups, such as blacks, for whom college funding programs already exist.

How sweet of them, eh?

[wesleyb]

I tend to have an understanding of this that will appear very simplistic, and maybe it is. You all tell me.
I think that it all comes back to the same basic idea as is referred to as "Limited Good" in anthropological descriptions of folk societies, and in some tribal societies. I think you are familiar with this idea, but in short, it assumes that there is only so much "good" in the world, and in this case, this refers to wealth. So the fact that Mr. Musk has so much of it means that he has deprived you personally of your share. The only way to fix this is for the 'poor' to take their rightful share back from those who have more than their rightful share.

The thing is, some things are truly limited (hours in a day, the amount of fresh water in my town, untapped reserves of fossil fuels). Not that all these have been fully utilized, but there are hard limits. Other things are unlimited, or nearly so (new ideas, stories, imagination). Our economy is a complicated mix of the two.

To what degree is "wealth" in one or the other of these categories?

I suppose it depends on how you define wealth, but if you define it as "money" or "assets", then at any given moment it is strictly limited. Of course it has the potential of expanding or contracting over time.

[HondurasKeiser]

To the extent that the moneyed class "oppress us" they do so by using their wealth to manipulate the political and economic system in their favor. They don't oppress us simply by their existence. If they sat quietly away and enjoyed their money without engaging in influencing politics and society to a greater extent than the average non-rich person then no one would much care.

Is that the Marxist analysis though? That is to say, 'people behaving badly, with a lot of money/power to do so, are just violating fairness and notions of justice in an outsized way'; doesn't seem to be a novel concept and plenty of other frameworks of justice recognize and denounce this (the OT for instance). Marx though, wants to suggest that monied people, simply by living their "bougey" lives are oppressing us...that seems to be the novel turn in Marxian thought.

Put another way, I think Marx would reject your thought because it leaves room for "good" Owners/Capitalists i.e. "as long as they don't use their money to manipulate the system, then they're 'good'" is not Marxism.

[HondurasKeiser]

I understand the class consciousness concept taught by Marx and I understand at a basic level the concept of
1. Bourgeoisie/Owner-Class = Bad
&
2. Proletariat/Worker-Class = Good

The introduction to the Communist Manifesto says this:

The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

Yes, I understand his history of the Oppressor/Oppressed dialectic...what I want to understand is how I am oppressed by rich people living their lives?

[Josh]

To the extent that the moneyed class "oppress us" they do so by using their wealth to manipulate the political and economic system in their favor. They don't oppress us simply by their existence. If they sat quietly away and enjoyed their money without engaging in influencing politics and society to a greater extent than the average non-rich person then no one would much care.

Is that the Marxist analysis though? That is to say, 'people behaving badly, with a lot of money/power to do so, are just violating fairness and notions of justice in an outsized way'; doesn't seem to be a novel concept and plenty of other frameworks of justice recognize and denounce this (the OT for instance). Marx though, wants to suggest that monied people, simply by living their "bougey" lives are oppressing us...that seems to be the novel turn in Marxian thought.

Put another way, I think Marx would reject your thought because it leaves room for "good" Owners/Capitalists i.e. "as long as they don't use their money to manipulate the system, then they're 'good'" is not Marxism.

My opinion as an armchair Marxist (mostly informed by attending Trotskyist book clubsm etc.) is that Ken's analysis was not a Marxist analysis.

Indeed, things like market socialism or 中国特色社会主义 ("socialism with Chinese characteristics") are sharply criticised by orthodox Marxists and Trotskyists because they make allowances for "good" capitalism. The Marxist dialectic is that the very ownership of capital leads to oppression (which was in line with philosophical output of other German philosophers at the time, and then was revitalised in the 1980s when Foucault basically said all relationships have an oppressor-oppressed dynamic).

[HondurasKeiser]

Getting back on topic,

P.S. - I don't want this to be a rancorous debate about Communists/Marxists/Socialists or Capitalist Fat Cats...I'm just curious about this point of Marxist thinking.

Marxist thinking is a bit stunted in that it has no framework to view good vs evil outside of a class struggle specifically between a labouring class and an owning class - which is understandable, since that seemed to be all the world he lived in had. Burnham's The Managerial Revolution describes a new class which sprouted in the 20th century: the "managerial" class, who did not own the means of production, but worked for the owners, and seemingly are able to exercise more power than the owners themselves could. They very much started to replace the owner-worker dialetic with owner-as-oppressor with the new paradigm of manager-as-oppressor.

And new classes have since emerged. One of the more interesting classes we have in the present era is that of people who are not owners nor labourers - they do not work - they live off of government largess. They are paid (at gunpoint) by labourers who do work. Marx completely missed this phenomenon emerging.

In short, the Marxist analysis is simply laughably simple, and the old school of socialists treats early Communist writers (your Trotskyites or classical Marxists) almost as some sort of gospel, and thus is unable to deal with anything that has happened in the 20th century. Attempts to actually implement socialism have resulted in "socialism in one country", or "socialism with Chinese characteristics", or "the Juche idea".

I am familiar with Burnham's "Managerial Revolution" and I agree that Marx failed to anticipate the rise of the modern middle class. From a Marxian perspective though, inasmuch as they are wage-slaves though, couldn't most if not all of the managers be lumped into the oppressed class albeit as well-paid oppressed that experience false consciousness? See their striving towards upper class/Owner-class cultivation and respectability without ever attaining something like true wealth/power/ability to run the system, "Bourgeois Morality" for example.

[Ken]

To the extent that the moneyed class "oppress us" they do so by using their wealth to manipulate the political and economic system in their favor. They don't oppress us simply by their existence. If they sat quietly away and enjoyed their money without engaging in influencing politics and society to a greater extent than the average non-rich person then no one would much care.

Is that the Marxist analysis though? That is to say, 'people behaving badly, with a lot of money/power to do so, are just violating fairness and notions of justice in an outsized way'; doesn't seem to be a novel concept and plenty of other frameworks of justice recognize and denounce this (the OT for instance). Marx though, wants to suggest that monied people, simply by living their "bougey" lives are oppressing us...that seems to be the novel turn in Marxian thought.

Put another way, I think Marx would reject your thought because it leaves room for "good" Owners/Capitalists i.e. "as long as they don't use their money to manipulate the system, then they're 'good'" is not Marxism.

I think Marx would say that the wealthy industrialist class or "bourgeoisie" by DEFINITION achieve their wealth through exploitation. In Marxist terms they are expropriating the productive output of the workers. So in a simple Marxist analysis the "bourgeoisie" cannot exist without exploitation. If they weren't exploiting the proletariat then they wouldn't be getting rich.

I think a more sophisticated non-Marxist analysis dismisses that notion and recognizes that wealth can also be created by creativity, ideas, organization, etc. that don't necessarily involve exploitation. Elon Musk might have built part of his empire through exploitation of his workers. But it was mostly built by coming up with new ideas and ways of doing business that were better than the competition. In effect, Elon Musk was doing more exploitation of legacy inefficiencies and obsolete ways of doing business on the part of Ford and GM than he was exploiting his own workers.

It isn't a question of "good" or "bad". It is a question of who and what is being exploited. In our modern knowledge economy, people mostly get wealthy by doing better than the competition, not by exploiting their own workers.

Where Marxism fails is that it fails to recognize the intellectual and organizational input of the owners of businesses. You can put a group of blue collar auto workers into a building on their own and they aren't likely to come up with a Tesla on their own. They might be able to build one with supervision and instruction, but they won't be able to come up with a Tesla on their own. Same with an iPhone or any other modern piece of technology. That might have been different in Marx's day when workers were doing simpler things like weaving fabric or forging steel or whatever.

[Falco Underhill]

Addendum:

The Atlantic article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ty/671851/

H.R.7454 - Hispanic Educational Resources and Empowerment Act of 2022

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-con ... xt?r=3&s=1

So, H.R. 7454 passed the House in April 2022. My guess is the Atlantic article (Nov. 4 2022) serves as a reminder why it's so important to get this bill through the Senate.

Just me thinking here.

[Neto]

I would suggest that most business owners do, to widely varying degrees, "exploit" their workers. But how much of this is "just", in consideration of their own investment in the work, albeit often totally non-labor related? (That is, monetary investment. But how did they get those funds?) How can a 'fair' profit for the one putting up the capital be determined?

But the question here is well beyond an employer's "exploitation" of his own employees (profiting off of the labor of those who work for him), going on to the perceived exploitation of ALL poor (or all employees, whether they work for this particular business man or not). In Marxism (at least as it was encountered by my people in Ukraine) was not concerned with whether a given wealthy person (a Kulak) had any relationship at all to a given person of the working class. All Kulaks were judged guilty of exploiting all workers, whether the Kulak was the owner of a factory or a farm, and whether the worker was a factory worker or a farm hand. These individual Kulaks were guilty because they were a part of the system which exploited the poorer. (You didn't actually have to own very much land in order to be judged a Kulak. It was less than 10 acres, as I recall.)