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).