Class (Economic)

Multiple Economies & Classes

preterite Class (Economic)

I think my tiredness after reading papers wasn’t just tiredness — someone tonight remarked on how there’s a bug going around, and I’ve been feeling kinda lousy these last few days, which is partly why I didn’t post last night, and why tonight’s will be short. Low-key tiredness and floaty-headedness and I don’t feel like doin nothin cept sleepin.

Anyway. On August 22, I wrote about how Gibson-Graham attempts to understand capitalism “as fragmented and contradictory, stitched together as a patchwork of a million smaller interrelated economies and exploitative processes” such as “the state economy of taxes and services which interacts with the corporate economy of products and investments which interacts with the cultural economy of ideas and fashions which interacts with the social economy of relationships and communications, all of them and more subdividable into even smaller economies of exploitative and nonexploitative processes, commodities and noncommodities, goods and services and gifts and ideas and so on”, and that “These small spaces are where change takes place.” But see, with all that economic stuff, I kinda left out the other thing.
Read more

More Spleen for Kingston!

preterite Class (Economic)

Kingston writes that “If classes are real, you should be able to identify their ‘members’ and show that these people have distinctive experiences. I argue that you can meaningfully talk about, say, ‘working-class culture’ only if significant numbers of people, defined by some criteria as ‘members’ of the working class, actually do share particular cultural orientations. Similarly, it’s reasonable to say something like ‘the capitalist class pursued its interests’ only if identifiable ‘members’ of this class actually did something in concert” (23). Let’s examine this homogenizing argument a little more closely: what if, for example, we replace “classes” with “sexes” (not “genders”: I’m trying to keep my example as reductive as Kingston’s argument) and “the working class” with “women”. Do “significant numbers” of women, defined by chromosomes or plumbing, “share particular cultural orientations”, even if we consider only American culture, to the point where we see “women” as a unified whole? Can we come up with a list of “womanly” cultural characteristics that exists as anything other than stereotype?
Read more

Spleen and the Classless Society

preterite Class (Economic)

Paul Kingston, in The Classless Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), offers as his thesis the argument “that groups of people having a common economic position — what are commonly designated as ‘classes’ — do not significantly share distinct, life-defining experiences” (1). Yeah. I think you can already figure I’m gonna have some problems with this guy. I’m looking forward to seeing how he disregards “worrying about how you’re going to make rent each month” as a “life-defining experience”. To attempt to be a little more fair, Kingston says that the “use of class language is not analytically rigorous or precise,” and “the reality of economic inequality, even substantial degrees of it, does not necessarily imply the existence of classes” (2). So my biggest difficulty with him is in his suggestion that economic inequality is the only index of class. The Tutor, with his questions about Roger Clinton and Elvis, knew far better, as do most Americans (but not, apparently, Mr. Kingston): class is more than just money.
Read more

Finishing Wolff and Resnick

preterite Class (Economic), Class (Marxian), Class (Meta), Education

Some useful clarifications from the last bit of Wolff and Resnick. I wondered recently who the capitalists were; here’s my answer: “In modern capitalist enterprises, called ‘corporations’ for historical reasons, the role of capitalist is played by a group numbering typically between 9 and 20 individuals: the board of directors” (211). Interesting that our universities have similar boards who meet on a similar quarterly basis, but the objection might be that the university (at least the public institution where I am, and where many composition programs are: as pointed out before, elite private institutions often don’t have first-year writing requirements) isn’t yet a corporation harvesting surplus labor. But I think there’s still something to be said for the construction of education as commodity, especially give the insightful discussions about instructor exploitation (streamlining the workplace, harvesting surplus value from academic or so-called “immaterial” labor) at Invisible Adjunct.
Read more

Tastes Individual and Social

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic)

So I’ve been looking some at cultural tastes as markers of class. In my original taxonomy, I had lumped tastes and values together, but that may be inaccurate: tastes are linked to products, and so have an economic component, while I think values are less so. Wealth and income seem to me to be more material than tastes, and tastes more material than values. But I’m engaging in Cartesian dualism when I think this way, the same sort of dualism Wolff and Resnick pick up on when they point out that “In neoclassical theory, the achievement of a correspondence between producers’ selfish maximization of their own profits and consumers’ selfish maximization of their own preferences is also the achievement of a perfect harmony between physical and human nature, between scarcity and choice” (95).

On the material side, wages are the reward for or return on labor, and profits are the reward for or return on capital. But it seems odd to me how this inanimate entity of capital — whether in the shape of a factory or a check from a VC angel — can “produce” something. According to Wolff and Resnick, for the neoclassicals, “Wages and profits represent a balance between ‘scarcity’ . . . and ‘tastes’ . . . each individual gets back from society a quantum of wealth exactly proportionate to what each has contributed to society” (80). As I’ve noted before, I think this theory clearly doesn’t reflect reality, although it’s a wonderful way for the rich to feel good about themselves. In the free and open space of markets, the “sites of social interaction between existing owners and prospective buyers of wealth” (89) where “Individuals may offer and demand as much as they please of what they privately own and desire whether it be labor, capital, or commodities” (88), cash is instant karma.

There’s also the issue that while we historically valorize those individuals who hold the power of distinction, who have unique and individual taste and commodify their dissent because they know they’re different and they want us to know it too (such is the message of the foolish pedagogy enacted by Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society). But classes, by definition, are groups of people, and tastes have no meaning as markers of distinction except within a social network. Consider what Resnick and Wolff have to say in their description of what some critics of neoclassical economic theory say: “since neoclassical theory assumes that individuals are integral parts of society, the preferences of each must be affected by the complex economic and noneconomic actions of all the others. In a sense, that is precisely the basis on which such critics define the term ‘social’: to be a social being is to negate the possibility of having one’s choices ‘autonomously’ formed in society” (97).

Class Mobility in the University

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Education

Minor change of plans today, in that I’m not in Adams Morgan but NoVa, King Street and St. Asaph; I’m meeting Jennifer in a couple hours here in Old Town for dinner. Lots of white shoppers carrying Gap and Banana Republic bags (the latter, being made of cream-colored paper rather than blue plastic, we all know to be more prestigious), wearing Claiborne or sometimes the now-less-ubiquitous ‘Crombie. Hot, muggy day.

My minor insight yesterday, however obvious it may have been, led me to think about how the interaction between economic and cultural understandings of class plays out in the university context. I made some overly facile distinctions about the concerns of the upper classes being less directly linked to the material, which I think are inaccurate, or at least not generally true.
Read more

Cultural and Material Binaries

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic)

I’m a corporate stooge. A capitalist tool. But I’m staying on Capitol Hill and this Starbucks is a lot closer (3rd and Pennsylvania SE) than any of the free wireless hotspots I was able to find. I’ll see if I can get over to Tryst in Adams Morgan tomorrow; right now, Starbucks is pretty busy and I’ve got myself a window seat on busy Pennsylvania Avenue, so it’s pretty tempting not to type and just do some people-watching instead. Lots of pedestrian traffic, people heading to the day’s doings on the Mall, Marines from the 8th & I Street Barracks on their morning run, young Hill staffers with their t-shirts from out-of-state universities.

I’ve been thinking about the place of the quotidian in this weblog, given that I’ve constructed this as a research weblog, and given the tagline over at Hector Rottweiler Jr’s Weblog (which I unfortunately haven’t had time to look at today, since my connection here is crap). I get impatient with exclusively personal online journaling; the sites where the author tells the Web, “Here’s what I did today and here’s what happened to me LOL and here’s who I called and here’s what I did next LOL and here’s what I like and please buy me something from my Amazon wishlist and here’s what else I did. . .” and so on, although I’m sure they have their merits for their intended audiences. So I’m really uncomfortable that I might be perceived as engaging in similar navel-gazing self-indulgent blather.

However. I’ve been coming back again and again to the problems of presuming or suggesting that one has concerns that somehow don’t connect to the material world. I know I’m prone, in my intellectual habits, to give myself over quite easily to the easy abstractions of Theory without attempting to work out their real-world consequences. So maybe I’ll take license to continue to include stuff here that might be perceived as not exclusively academic by stating my strong agreement with the feminist axiom that the personal is political, and suggesting the corollary that the theoretical must be material.

We know, of course, that such binaries can be dangerously reductive, and that’s kind of what I’m on to today. I’ve been going on about cultural and economic markers of class and opposing them to one another, when the fact of the matter is that they’re never truly exclusive.
Read more

Mobility and Falling

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Class (Marxian), Class (Other)

I haven’t left town yet — another hour or two before I get on the road — so I thought I’d get in one last post, since what I wrote yesterday was rather unfocused. (Although I have to say I was mightily proud of that godawful pun.) A few days ago, I cited Wolff and Resnick’s distinctions about the foundational assumptions of neoclassical and Marxian economic theories. Chris’s insightful comments on that post indicate to me that I need to think a little more about how those foundational assumptions affect students’ reasons for going to college. On the one hand, the Marxian focus on exploitation would lead me to view college as preparing students to take their proper places within the exploitative hierarchy, with the vocational and liberal education models putting students into the same relative places because class hierarchies in the base and the superstructure are roughly isomorphic. (No, I have absolutely zero support for this assertion. Fire away.) This is an understanding of class that simply feels much too monolithic to me. On the other hand, the neoclassical understanding of the student who always acts rationally and in her own best interests, in order to maximize the utility she receives from her work and life, feels far too rationalist and idealistic for me. People don’t always act in their own best interests, or even think about what they’re doing all the time.

So why do people go to college?
Read more

Whose Class, Whose Terms?

preterite Class (Economic), Class (Marxian), Economics

The temperature’s plummeted in the past hour. Still and humid nineties down to cool and breezy seventies. The leaves of the trees have all turned up their pale undersides. It’s going to rain.

Wolff and Resnick, as their title (Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical) might indicate, usefully contrast Marxian and neoclassical theories of economics. Neoclassical theory, of which Hazlitt and Mankiw are exponents, “emphasizes individual behavior, which, it argues, is motivated by rational self-interest. The economy, as neoclassical economists theorize it, is the aggregate end product of individuals maximizing their own material self-interest.” On the other hand, “Marxian theory emphasizes social structure more than individual behavior,” to the point where “The economy, Marxists theorize, is the place in society where exploitation occurs and exerts its powerful influence over the rest of social life” (7). I suspect that most students would be highly unwilling to claim a Marxian view, not only because of its unpopularity in contemporary American culture, but also because the ideology of going to college is one of self-interest, and because students believe that they are acting in their own best interests by going to college. I’d be a jerk and a fool to argue.

I’m asking about student perceptions because Charlie’s questions of whether or not students would claim certain terms and models as their own seems to me both important and difficult, and because various recent discussions of the uses of language make me ask: who is this research for?

It’s for your committee, Mike. That’s all you need to think about.

Do I believe that?
Read more

What Class are Teachers?

preterite Class (Economic), Class (Marxian), Teaching

There’s an insightful discussion of the academic labor market over at the consistently excellent Invisible Adjunct. Reading the posts there led me to ask whether I should rethink the way I’ve circumscribed my examination of class to focus on students: after all, if I’m going to argue that class structures are enacted, negotiated, altered, or reproduced in the college writing classroom, teachers are certainly components of those class structures. As instructors, teachers may be reasonably expected to foster a student’s class mobility, while at the same time standing as a member of a class to which the student does not belong.
Read more