History and Struggle

No wonder I’ve been having such difficulties trying to put education into a Marxian class framework. According to Wolff and Resnick, “Only the processes of surplus labor appropriation and distribution refer to class, while ‘nonclass,’ by definition, encompasses all of the other processes of social life. Marxian theory inquires whether and under what specific historical circumstances some of these nonclass processes provide conditions of existence for the capitalist fundamental class process” (203). For Wolff and Resnick, one must produce commodities (the market-sold products of labor) in order to be a part of the class process. The students in the writing classroom, as Susan Miller contends in her account of composition-as-carnival, are historically constructed as preeconomic. This is an assumption that runs entirely contrary to what I’m trying to do.

There are mitigating factors to be found, however. For one thing, and as I’ve kind of concluded on my own, “Any individual can occupy more than one class position and thereby receive multiple kinds of class incomes” (Wolff and Resnick 206). And, furthermore, another confirmation in their contention that “This Marxian theory stands opposed to any theorization of incomes or of income distribution which divides people into ‘classes’ according the size of their incomes” (208). The subtext here is much like what Curtiss was getting at: wealth and income don’t matter; “If you have to sell your labor power. . . you are a worker” (Leung, “Where is the Middle Class?”). Executive VPs get fired, too. Hell, CEOs get fired. But wait: OK, here’s where I get hung up: a capitalist is one who appropriates surplus labor via its commodification into wages. By definition, other people work for her. She controls the means of production, and workers have to sell their labor to her. But just how much did, say, Jack Welch own and control as the CEO of General Electric? Well, that’s a weird question, because he was both Chairman and CEO, right? OK, so what about Gil Amelio, the CEO Apple Computers fired? How much difference would Marx say ownership of corporate stock makes in owning a company? Part of the difficulty, I think, is that in our changing economy, certain well-paid hi-tech “laborers” also take on the functions of management as many solely management positions are phased out and they’re also sometimes being paid — i.e., selling their necessary and surplus labor — in company stock, in control of the means of production. So, in that, they’re simultaneously a part of the fundamental class process, the subsumed class process, and nonclass processes. And they’re in deeply insecure job positions, as are we all.

I recently stumbled across a reference to “stratification theory,” which sees difference among class formations without seeing struggle. It’s the class version of the blindly happy and uncritical “We can all get along; thank goodness racism isn’t a problem anymore, and we all know all cultures are equally great” school of multiculturalism. I believe there is class struggle, and that’s why class presents such a problem for education. My example of the hi-tech laborer/manager/owner above points to the necessary insecurity that comes with such struggle.

As I said, our hypothetical hi-tech laborer’s insecurity is partly a product of the changes in our economy. Class formations change with the times. Marx, as a historian, knew this quite well, so perhaps it’s the rigidity of Wolff and Resnick’s class definitions that I feel to be constrictive: the definitions don’t adequately address the multiplicity of class phenomena that I see in the wired writing classroom, especially when they dismiss all of those phenomena as “nonclass processes”. I’m looking at the field of computers and composition in the context of a particular moment in history; a moment when our understandings of class are affected by the sputters of an economic engine that’s still trying to operate on too lean a mix while we crank it again and again; by our concerns with how we are classed by consumption as well as production; by the explosion of for-profit and distance education; by a drawn-down and overdeployed military; by the wounds of globalization; by our continuing blind stumble in the post-9/11 ethical free-fall; by the academy after the culture wars and their backlash; by the increasing wealth gap; by the economic reaction of monetarists against Keynesianism; by the reversals and re-reversals of tax laws; by the burst and slow second smaller simmer of the dot-com economy; by, in English Studies, the beginnings of an increased attention (in College English and CCC) to how class works.

Rather than looking at static, ahistorical, cookie-cutter definitions of class, then, I can use Bourdieu’s definition of class to see dynamic constellations of classes and class allegiances, in the way cultural, economic, and political factors interrelate, in the ways in which people with different levels of participation in the fundamental, distributed, and nonclass processes can still consider themselves somehow allied (as with, perhaps, the cop and the steelworker with their relative places in the fundamental and subsumed class processes can still drink Pabst Blue Ribbon together at a bar and talk about investing in corporate stocks and bonds to provide for their retirements). As Raymond Williams points out, Marx uses class as not only an economic category of identity, but also as a definition of a specific historical formation (Keywords 68).

History and Struggle

4 thoughts on “History and Struggle

  • July 24, 2003 at 12:12 pm
    Permalink

    This is an interesting discussion, thanks for sharing it: I’m writing a piece for KairosNews on the Web as a space for writing that makes use of Negri and Hardt’s notion of “immaterial labor.” You might be interested in Negri’s essay Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo. Also, Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed on overcoming class division in the teacher-student relationship.

  • July 24, 2003 at 12:33 pm
    Permalink

    In regards to economic power and category identification, isn’t a fundamental key to today’s “hi-tech laborer’s insecurity” commodification? At one point blue-collar labor was merely a fungible, something one could add or remove like any other bulk component (Add x number of hours to WIP to calculate finished widgets); now, knowledge workers are commodified, little more than numbers (Add X number of developers to Y number of projects and products to get Z yield or ROI over T time). Further, the educational process which creates these new commodities is a commodity itself; one can shop around for education, but education is becoming increasingly undifferentiated, more similar from place of certification to place of certification. Education adds value to a human fungible, but it’s still a human commodity, a swappable head. Much of social life reinforces the level of commodification as well (ex: a project manager who’s never traveled for personal reasons is a slightly less valuable commodity as s/he will need greater resources to become successful at business travel).

    As I see it from my rather naive point of view, class stratification is based on commodity/ differentiated commodity/ non-commodity/ differentiated non-commodity. (I know I certainly feel like a white-collar differentiated commodity, just another prairie dog to add to the cube farm.)

  • July 24, 2003 at 12:34 pm
    Permalink

    Villager, thanks for the references. I’m familiar, as many compositionists are, with Freire; as appealing as his work is, and as informed as I consider my own pedagogy to be by composition’s version of critical pedagogy (you might check out the huge swipe taken against critical pedagogy in Sharon O’Dair’s recent College English essay [PDF link]), the frequently-acknowledged fact of the matter (by Freire and others) is that there are many elements of his pedagogy that simply cannot transfer to the American university. I’ll definitely check out the Hardt and Negri — thanks!

  • July 25, 2003 at 5:18 pm
    Permalink

    The question about stock ownership as a mitigating (or mediating?) factor for people who otherwise work for their livings is a good one, although I think that actual facts of stock compensation for those who aren’t members of senior management have been obscured.

    Warning: Anecdotal Evidence and arguments from impressions ahead!

    In my experience, out and out stock grants as compensation are extremely rare. Option grants are much more common, and these are given as part of bonus, i.e., year-end discretionary compensation. Furthermore, the options are not tradable, although their expiration date may be much greater than tradable options–perhaps as much as 5 or 10 years if you stay with the company. Even so, that much time may not make up for options with a bad strike price: a friend who was working for a small software firm in the midwest that was bought by Cisco received what seemed like a generous option grant after his first year with Cisco. The exercise price was Cisco’s current price, and based on the way Cisco had been going up, up, up, he figured he’d have a hefty downpayment on a nice house in about two years.

    He received the grant in early ’00; the strike price was in the 60s. You can see what happened to his house downpayment here. 

    On the other hand, you have somebody like Larry Ellison of Oracle, who seems to be manipulating his company’s stock price to allow him to exercise his option grants in his favor. To be fair to Ellison (the pain! the pain!), many other firms regularly buy back their own stock or perform similar market operations to support share prices. I remember (but can’t find) a story of Ellison having the strike price of an option grant changed so he could exercise it in his favor. Nice work if you can get it.

    One has–or at least I have–an intuitive sense that this is chicanery and should not be allowed. But it’s surplus value extraction only indirectly, if it all. Still it shows that senior management can make claims on their firms revenues–the the securitizations thereof– that those further down the org chart can’t.

Comments are closed.