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[scriver]

What a great display of loyalty and solidarity between the EU and it's weaker members.

[Helgoland]

A global empire has nothing to do with Europe. In fact, Europe exists outside reality. Not to mention OUR political leaders are lovers of peace and of the working class, and definitely not deceptive. Nor are they in a rush to join NATO, which is definitely not run by the US.

Enough irony to give me poisoning.

Interesting how its possible to consider the very nations that share EU and its monetary union membership with us our allies in that context but minions of evil warmongering USA as NATO members. Not that its atypical around here...

I'm sorry, what? Is this a serious comment trying to relate to what I've actually written here? I'm not a friend of the EU, nor the monetary union, if that's what anyone thinks.

Not what he said. Like, not at all. He's talking about the individual nations, not the EU as an organization.

The SNP has told the UK that they can take their nukes back either whole or in pieces, and Owlbread's more peace left than they are.

I am afraid so, the only people in my immediate family who have been politically active were involved with CND at one time so I have similar views.

But why? Serious question by the way - I just can't wrap my head around pacifism, and I only rarely get to talk to a pacifist who has even only slightly thought-through views on the matter.

[Guardian G.I.]

Meanwhile, the USA is going to send weapons to Ukraine soon. Only a few bureaucratic procedures remain, but they won't take long.

[lijacote]

A global empire has nothing to do with Europe. In fact, Europe exists outside reality. Not to mention OUR political leaders are lovers of peace and of the working class, and definitely not deceptive. Nor are they in a rush to join NATO, which is definitely not run by the US.

Enough irony to give me poisoning.

Interesting how its possible to consider the very nations that share EU and its monetary union membership with us our allies in that context but minions of evil warmongering USA as NATO members. Not that its atypical around here...

I'm sorry, what? Is this a serious comment trying to relate to what I've actually written here? I'm not a friend of the EU, nor the monetary union, if that's what anyone thinks.

Not what he said. Like, not at all. He's talking about the individual nations, not the EU as an organization.

The SNP has told the UK that they can take their nukes back either whole or in pieces, and Owlbread's more peace left than they are.

I am afraid so, the only people in my immediate family who have been politically active were involved with CND at one time so I have similar views.

But why? Serious question by the way - I just can't wrap my head around pacifism, and I only rarely get to talk to a pacifist who has even only slightly thought-through views on the matter.

Alright. I'll admit, like I did in my previous post, that I don't quite understand. I have not treated individual nations in that manner at all, and if it is so that there's a tendency to do that here, I have nothing to do with it. Nations are not unambiguous entities with uniform interests, rather, they are divided internally. In serving imperial interests, they are the enemy of the international working class. In consisting of the working class, they are allies. That is my perspective, anyway, and I don't intend to say that it is the universal opinion.

[Helgoland]

Fuck, my bad - I didnt see your original post. Nothing to see here, citizen, just move along...

I have to ask though - why do you fixate so much on the working class? And how do you define it?

[lijacote]

Fuck, my bad - I didnt see your original post. Nothing to see here, citizen, just move along...

I have to ask though - why do you fixate so much on the working class? And how do you define it?

I fixate on the working class because it is the revolutionary class. As to why it's the revolutionary class, we have to define it (and class) first, and I am not sure I am more capable of doing that than many, many other Marxists on the Web.

Classes are defined by their position in the mode of production. For example, the bourgeoisie are defined by their ownership of the means of production, of capital. The working class is defined by their reproduction (or survival) in capitalism through their labour: they must sell their labour in order to live. This might seem like a trivial definition, but I think it might be useful, considering that people (apparently) talk a lot about class by using completely different metrics for what counts as working class.

In summary: the class without private property, the class who reproduces via labour is capable of politics wildly different from the politics of the bourgeoisie, whose pressing concern is with the endless embiggening of their particular hoard of all wealth. Capital must always grow, and that leads to very serious issues. From climate catastrophe to the Greek crisis to the wider banking issues to neoliberal politics... and empire. Simply put, we have no need of these things. We have no need for these middle men, for these exploiters, these bourgeoisie. Much like the feudal class was mostly overthrown, if not entirely, the bourgeoisie are next.

I am sure my answer is far from perfectly formulated, and far from being a superbly convincing text. My definition of the working class, for one, is very abridged, but I dare not talk more of it.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

We have no need for these middle men, for these exploiters, these bourgeoisie. Much like the feudal class was mostly overthrown, if not entirely, the bourgeoisie are next.

Oh! Communist! Now we need an ISIS supporter and real Neo-Nazi!

[Sheb]

That definition of working class always seemed outdated to me. After all, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company is making his money by selling his labour too. On the other hand, a self-employed plumber own his means of production.

[lijacote]

That definition of working class always seemed outdated to me. After all, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company is making his money by selling his labour too. On the other hand, a self-employed plumber own his means of production.

He's managing the labour of others, not producing surplus value of his own, and he, in all likelihood, probably owns enough stuff to easily get by without wage labour.

A self-employed plumber could be classified as petit-bourgeois, since they own their own means of production, and exploit themselves. Artisans are similar, as are many artists. They are not simply working class, though they too get by with their labour. The lines aren't perfectly clear, least of all with my application of Marxism.

We have no need for these middle men, for these exploiters, these bourgeoisie. Much like the feudal class was mostly overthrown, if not entirely, the bourgeoisie are next.

Oh! Communist! Now we need an ISIS supporter and real Neo-Nazi!

No, we do not.

[Helgoland]

Ninja: Sheb voiced my concerns more succinctly, and I guess you already answered some of them. I should write shorter posts...

Hm, I'm fairly certain that following your description the working class is not well-defined. I see two issues:

- What do you consider labor? Labor with your hands, labor with your intellect, labor in producing art, labor in bringing producer and consumer together (commonly known as 'trading'), labor in bringing lender and borrower together (commonly known as 'banking')? Not talking about the fat cats at Goldman Sachs here, just the guy who gives you a credit when you want to build a house...

- What about people who own means of production, but have to work to survive anyway? For example take a carpenter who's invested in some stocks (this should count as 'ownership of means of production', I guess) but still has to work to live day-to-day. Or even just a carpenter who owns the tools he's working with! Then you get a lot of other borderline cases: The apprentice who works in that carpenter's shop. Or the carpenter who works in his brother's shop. Anyone who has invested a bit of money would have to be counted as bourgeois...
And then there's the people who don't own means of production but ought to be counted as bourgeois as well: Picasso, for example, got rich through the work he did, and to my knowledge didn't own any factories. But he was filthy rich when he died...

[Sheb]

Well, Picasso owned his hands and brushes, didn't he? :p

But yeah, there are so many cases that I doubt the importance of the old Marxists definitions. It also ignore other distinctions that I think are fundamental, like the shifting boundary between people that harness technology to boost their productivity and incomes, and people who are replaced by technology.

By and large, I think the rather crude but effective distinction on income levels is the best.

[Helgoland]

I also ignore other distinctions that I think are fundamental

By and large, I think the rather crude but effective distinction on income levels is the best.

Well, I don't think it's 'best', but it's certainly more useful than the Marxist definitions for the purposes the Marxist definitions are usually used for. There are other distinctions - race, religion, ethnicity, education, urban vs. rural etc - that are important as well, and not captured by distinguishing along income levels. But to analyse their effect on society we can just adopt different measures.

TL;DR: It's not about 'best overall', it's about 'best for a given purpose'.

[Sheb]

Agreed with you (But then everyone know I'm just an alt. account you use to praise yourself), although income level is probably the one distinction that is more often useful in these discussions, which what I meant by "the best". Part of the issue I have with your position lijacote is that you seems to try to fit a situation in the Marxist class structure when other definitions would probably serve your purpose better.

[lijacote]

From asking my reasons for fixating (I did not previously voice any objection to this term, but I am considering it, seeing the direction this is taking) on the working class to criticising me for not laying out the entire map of class relations. Doubtless, were I to tap into my deeply lacking knowledge to try and answer all this, there would be a repeat accusation of veering from the topic. I do not intend this as a defensive accusation, I am only trying to dodge having to do this in this thread. I was asked earlier to put up a socialism thread, and I think I'd much rather do this here. It would not be so easy to dismiss class analysis so easy there as it is seemingly here.

Not to leave this as a simple deflection, I must more explicitly say that class delineation is not as easy as separating black from white. From workers with ownership through shares to employee-owned companies (what's it called now, Pendragon, that giant of this category?) to questions of managing being a source of surplus value or not - it is not trivial. Tomes have been dedicated to this by people much more capable than I am, which I can not stress enough. The fact that it is not neat does not, however, prevent us from trying to form a general understanding of where people fall based on their relation to production, to ownership of the means of production. The fact that an employee can own does not make a Marxist class analysis useless or outdated.

In the process of production, human beings work not only upon nature, but also upon one another. They produce only by working together in a specified manner and reciprocally exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations to one another, and only within these social connections and relations does their influence upon nature operate – i.e., does production take place.

These social relations between the producers, and the conditions under which they exchange their activities and share in the total act of production, will naturally vary according to the character of the means of production.

Here's where I snatched it from. The glossary of Marxists.org -- they also explicitly reject the kind of class definition that Sheb offers while I am writing this post.

The notion of class, as it is used by Marxists, differs radically from the notion of class as used in bourgeois social theory. According to modern capitalist thinking, class is an abstract universal defined by the common attributes of its members (i.e., all who make less than $20,000 a year constitute a "lower" class); categories and conceptions that have an existence prior to and independent of the people who make up the class.

For dialectical materialism however, the notion of class includes the development of collective consciousness in a class – arising from the material basis of having in common relations to the labour process and the means of production.

As to the specific question of what is labour - I would not make a distinction between intellectual labour and manual labour for the purpose of deciding who is working class. A teacher is working class just as much as a longshoreman is, at least in this distinction, which I think is the same distinction that Karl Marx makes in his Capital, based on what little I've managed to read so far. To quote some more,

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity. A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.

Objective and subjective class on Wikipedia - objectively, the proletariat definitely exists. The subjective proletariat has been eroded, it has vanished from consciousness far and wide. This does not eradicate the objective class.

Charlie Post addressing the question and claim that the proletariat has been replaced by a "precariat"

To what extent does income level help us in analysing the similarity between a worker in Finland and a worker in Cambodia? They are both alienated from their labour, even while the Finnish worker probably makes a lot more money. Does income level mean that the worker becomes separate from class relations? It does not. Income level is one factor, but it does not make class.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The SNP has told the UK that they can take their nukes back either whole or in pieces, and Owlbread's more peace left than they are.

I am afraid so, the only people in my immediate family who have been politically active were involved with CND at one time so I have similar views.

But why? Serious question by the way - I just can't wrap my head around pacifism, and I only rarely get to talk to a pacifist who has even only slightly thought-through views on the matter.

As I've said before, I'm not a pacifist, but I've been tempted that way before so I'll try to make the argument: Deterrence theory is wrong and doesn't actually keep us safe, just the opposite. Having nukes around increases the probability that nukes will be used, and having opposing countries with nukes increases that even further. Over an arbitrary timescale, can happen effectively equals will happen, and because the impact is the destruction of civilization at best and the extinction of humanity at worst, we have no reason to put it off to the future. Further, because it could happen at any time we have the most incentive to disarm asap.

We see that deterrence doesn't make sense because of the times it has failed before. Even setting aside the human tendency for "fuck you, let it all burn" responses to appeals to force, near misses such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and Stanislav Petrov were averted more by the prevalence of human reason than the fear of mutual destruction. We also see that nations with no defense against nukes, even pariah states, don't get nuked. The vast majority of people abhor the idea of using nukes, and the only situation where nukes were used as weapons continues to form the basis of a severe back-and-forth argument the better part of a century after the fact.

Disarmament is possible because we've already done a lot of it. The US and then-USSR massively reduced their stockpiles, as have most members of the nuclear club. Hell, for all that is said about them, China "only" has a few hundred nukes and about a fifth of them are disassembled.

All taken together, we can disarm, we should disarm, and we have disarmed. Further, we should take this opportunity to make anti-war culture dominant in society, which alongside trying to advance the products of the age of reason will do more to keep us safe than any nukes or power tripping cops could.