Now you are contradicting your claim about the usefulness of dividing
everyone into low, middle and high income. The class dynamics and
interactions are just too complex for such a simplistic view of class.
On 8/27/2016 9:54 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Yes, but we're talking about 2016 America and doctors make a huge amount of
money and have become part of corporate medicine. They've become technicians
who look at computer screens and not the traditional practitioner of the
healing arts. Abraham Verghese writes a lot about this. There are doctors
who barely touch their patients and who certainly don't know them as whole
human beings. Certainly, one can talk about the working class in terms of
the means of production, but it hardly describes the reality as people in
contemporary America perceive it when you say that the fast food worker and
the lawyer who is paid a salary by a law firm and the teacher in a public
school and the construction worker, are all members of the working class.
There are just too many differences in outlook, experience, remuneration,
and education to lump them all together.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of joe harcz Comcast
Sent: Saturday, August 27, 2016 7:59 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: what is the working class?
Roger and Marx did have a good definition though. In fact working class does
not exclude doctors, for example per se. They do labor of a certain sort and
do indeed alter nature in healing people through science and skill.
Income in the capitalist schema doesn't matter to Marxists, or other
schooled socialists in definitional terms.
In other words doctors would be considerred a part of the working class in a
socialist schema.
They probably wouldn't make the average income they do in capitalist
society, but they would still be working class.
----- Original Message -----
From: Alice Dampman Humel <mailto:alicedh@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, August 27, 2016 7:49 PM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: what is the working class?
I do not use the Marxist definition of working class. Not at all.
On Aug 27, 2016, at 7:35 PM, Miriam Vieni
<miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Alice, Roger and Carl use the Marxist definition of working
class with Carl
doing a bit of expanding. If we were on an email list with
no members who
were dedicated to the classic theory of working class, we
could talk about
all the complexities. Given that we're were we are, I'm
trying to avoid the
whole question, entirely.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Alice Dampman
Humel
Sent: Saturday, August 27, 2016 5:10 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: what is the working class?
to expand on my own message and questions:
who gets to decide whether one is working class?
If that surgeon, using his own definition of working class,
as Frank wishes
and claims the right to do, sees himself as working class,
does a third
party, including me, have the right to say he is not?
How much does the life one lives, the choices one makes to
do with the same
wages as the next person, factor into the working class
designation?
Does the factory worker who puts every penny he can into
buying a house in
the burbs cease to be working class when he and his family
move out of their
cramped, substandard apartment even though he still works in
the same
factory at the same job at the same wage? What about his
buddy who earns the
same money laboring at the same job but blows every paycheck
at the local
bar? Is he more working class? Is one answer, or are both
answers, yes or no
stereotyping and profiling?
If my questions indicate nothing else, they surely indicate
quite clearly
that this is a complex question that can't be left to each
person's personal
preference or to some rigid, two-line definition.
Where does that leave us? ?
That's what I mean when I say that in order to have any kind
of meaningful
conversation that included anything about the working class
On Aug 27, 2016, at 4:26 PM, Alice Dampman Humel
<alicedh@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
so if you're working class, you're not permitted to earn a
good
living?
. And Bob's arbitrary income and/or educational measuring
standards
seem completely irrelevant. I really doubt anyone has
investments that they
live from that give them such a modest return. There
wouldn't be such a
problem with that.but when those returns for no labor at all
are millions
and millions, it's an entirely different matter.
and Carl added the requirement that the working class person
must be
working to support the ruling class.
Many people seem to require a certain degree of suffering
and
hardship to qualify for the working class.
Roger quotes a definition that the labor must be directly
applied to
nature.
So it seems to me that everyone has their own personal spin
on it,
and, it also seems to me that many spins include a certain
amount of
exclusion of others and inclusion of the self based at least
in part on
those spins
On Aug 27, 2016, at 10:02 AM, Bob Hachey
<bhachey@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Hi all,
No doubt, trying to define what is the working class is not
going to be
easy. One could argue that it means earning less than a
certain income,
let's say $40,000.00. The flaw there is that one could be
earning such
income from investments and not working at all. Also,
picking a number for
the income is problematic at best.
Others might say that it means doing some sort of physical
labor. But some
folks like plumbers and electricians earn a pretty good
living doing
physical labor.
Still others might argue that it is based on one's education
level. But we
all know folks who are relatively well educated who don't
make much money
and we know other less educated types who earn more money.
By the way, I
hesitate to use the word earn because it implies that all
who get money
deserve what they get and that is certainly not true in
these days of
injustice and tremendous income inequality.
Perhaps the best way to look at this is to take the approach
that former
SCOTUS justice Potter took in trying to define what is
obscenity. He said
that he couldn't define it specifically but that he knew
what it was when he
saw it.
Bob Hachey
