"Modernism", "Elitism", and "The Working Classes"

[Richard Barrett]

(with a wider sense of responsibility than just "protecting and promoting the interests of capital" (thank you very much ) )

No doubt! But this is a question of class relations and not of the opinions and actions of individuals.

[Richard Barrett]

I'd add to this a Chomsky quote - “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."

Very well put, professor.

[Serial_Apologist]

Januszczak's 4-part series on American art, Big Sky, Big Dreams, Big Art: Made in the USA offers an adjunct to this discussion. I have started a separate thread on it.

[teamsaint]

Things that don't get discussed nearly enough, in the BBC, Guardian, or anywhere else, and which aren't being properly addressed by government :

Arms sales, to both acceptable and unacceptable regimes, and their role in conflict round the globe.

Housing being less affordable for young people that previous generations.


Cutting back of acceptable pension provision.

Falling real wages in huge swathes of the economy.

The influence of drugs companies on policy in the NHS.

Add your own. It all looks rather cosy to me.

And one might consider the role that rising incomes at the top end of the public sector ( BBC included ) have had over time in keeping a rather unsatisfactory status quo.


As a PS, the Guardian's treatment of Corbyn is a disgrace for a supposedly liberal newspaper.

[ahinton]

... do you think that's still true?

I feel that any 'ruling ideas' which influence this Zeitgeist are more the product of the Fourth Estate, and the advertising folk and other clercs supporting Capital. Yes, this may be the 'class which has the means of material production at its disposal', but they seem to me to be a different set of people from the Ruling Class if understood as government/administration/judiciary/'establishment'. Of course there are overlaps and noxious connexions - but I think often the 'establishment' ruling class and Capital have very different 'ideas' in the sense of the quote.

I don't know, but I do question this very concept of the "ruling class", just as I do the "working class" or some of those "isms", at least as they are generally understood; they seem to me to purport to depict certain individuals as all possessing broadly identical outlooks, powers, aims and the rest in ways that strike me as over-simplistic - it's one manifestation of the pigeon-hole mentality. Of whoever this "ruling class" might be thought to consist, it will not likely be precisely the same to person A as as it will to person B; you mention "government/administration/judiciary/'establishment'" as an example of it but it would not at all surprise me to hear others using the term to denote quite different sets of people (and there would almost certainly be even greater divergence of opinion as to who comprises the 'establishment'). That said, I would at least have assumed there to be broad agreement that the "establishment ruling class" (whatever that might be and of whomsoever it supposedly consists) comprises people whereas "Capital" describes assets - but what do I know? ("stuff all or less", I daresay some might reply)...

[ahinton]

Things that don't get discussed nearly enough, in the BBC, Guardian, or anywhere else, and which aren't being properly addressed by government :

Arms sales, to both acceptable and unacceptable regimes, and their role in conflict round the globe.

Housing being less affordable for young people that previous generations.


Cutting back of acceptable pension provision.

Falling real wages in huge swathes of the economy.

The influence of drugs companies on policy in the NHS.

One at a time.

Arms sales; fully agreed.

Affordability of housing is less for almost everyone than once it was - not just young people.

Increasing numbers of people cannot afford to save (adequately) for their pensions and, in any case, pension provision is subject to the vagaries of the market.

Wages; agreed.

Pharma? Well, the problem here is that the state owned and run NHS is dependent on the private market for drugs, equipment and the rest and, given the size of some of the drug companies, such influence, unwelcome as it is, would seem hard to avoid; the state can own and operate a health service but has very limited control over the private sector from which it procures.

[teamsaint]

One at a time.

Arms sales; fully agreed.

Affordability of housing is less for almost everyone than once it was - not just young people.

Increasing numbers of people cannot afford to save (adequately) for their pensions and, in any case, pension provision is subject to the vagaries of the market.

Wages; agreed.

Pharma? Well, the problem here is that the state owned and run NHS is dependent on the private market for drugs, equipment and the rest and, given the size of some of the drug companies, such influence, unwelcome as it is, would seem hard to avoid; the state can own and operate a health service but has very limited control over the private sector from which it procures.

On the NHS, yes the drugs companies are bound to have a significant influence.But it that influence needs much more transparency.

[Serial_Apologist]

Not sure about 'political lockstep'. Perhaps bicoz my working life was inside the 'state', the 'establishment', it felt different. Yes, the state and capital are in a sense a dyadic cluster, a gruesome two-headed hydra - but for those inside there was a real sense of 'them and us' - we the goodies (with a wider sense of responsibility than just "protecting and promoting the interests of capital" (thank you very much ) ) often in opposition to observed capital interests of which we were well aware.

.

In the capitalist era states were forged to look after the interests of capital realisation and accumulation while keeping the mass of the rest of populations "on board" by resort to legitimisation, where conditions allowed, or repression when military force against foreign ruling class interests was used to resolve rights issues of exploitation, which of course made working people into fodder for slaughter. There were peace movements, but in reality it was the increasing globalisation of capital, and concomitant difficulties of assigning national interest to capital accumulation and profit, that rendered inter-capitalist war redundant during the bulk of the post-WW2 period. Nation states and their governments were downgraded in favour of power blocs, and this was seen as a guarantor of peace as long as Communism could be kept at bay. Huge profits would be the reward for national arms producers. By the 1960s centrist political theorists all talked of the insignificance of national governments in controlling the markets, this being positively spun as vital to sharing wealth and satisfying the expanding needs of consumerism. The mass media in its selectively blind servility to mythology maintained the ideology of nationalism in terms of a geographical distancing that was used to justify transferring the burden of systemically endemic problems to Third World peoples while promulgating or perpetuating cultural differences at home - all of this in readiness for a time when the system would collapse under a combination of unaccountable complexity in its own operations and an evermore rapid turnover of cycles of scarcity and overproduction, brought about by the indiscriminate but hyper-profitable introduction of new technology. See, the ruling class was never that confident regarding the long-term legitimacy of its system. It might well not be coincidental that all the unsolved accumulated problems from the boom years - crime, health and social care, unsustainable and often dangerous products, ecological sustainability - have come to light at a point where the capacity for community protest and action to yield change has been so undermined by collective morale bombardment by fact and fiction, or effectively reduced to last chance resort, that people are being rendered putty in the quest of those in charge who want to turn the clocks back to believe any old myth so long as it pre-empts a long-term solution which challenges the power and authority of those who continue to prosper and shield themselves from the consequences of their decisions.

[Serial_Apologist]

I don't know, but I do question this very concept of the "ruling class", just as I do the "working class" or some of those "isms", at least as they are generally understood; they seem to me to purport to depict certain individuals as all possessing broadly identical outlooks, powers, aims and the rest in ways that strike me as over-simplistic - it's one manifestation of the pigeon-hole mentality.

The ruling class could be defined as those possessing broadly identical outlooks when their power is challenged, but are at each other's throats battling to maintain profitability for the rest of the time. Brecht and Eisler presented that rather well in "The Roundheads and the Pointed Heads". Of course, they get others to do most of their dirty work, but unlesss you're blind they're all there at the top of the top company boards of directors of banks, development and production companies and can mostly be located proudly in Who's Who.

Of whoever this "ruling class" might be thought to consist, it will not likely be precisely the same to person A as as it will to person B; you mention "government/administration/judiciary/'establishment'" as an example of it but it would not at all surprise me to hear others using the term to denote quite different sets of people (and there would almost certainly be even greater divergence of opinion as to who comprises the 'establishment').

That could be said about anything or anybody.

That said, I would at least have assumed there to be broad agreement that the "establishment ruling class" (whatever that might be and of whomsoever it supposedly consists) comprises people whereas "Capital" describes assets - but what do I know? ("stuff all or less", I daresay some might reply)...

[greenilex]

The trouble is that my nearly-sis in law comes from a grace and favour family, emphatically all you describe, and yet she has spent her life slaving away as a nurse in her local community...women really don’t fit in to Marx mould, which is not to invalidate it.

[ahinton]

The ruling class could be defined as those possessing broadly identical outlooks when their power is challenged, but are at each other's throats battling to maintain profitability for the rest of the time. Brecht and Eisler presented that rather well in "The Roundheads and the Pointed Heads". Of course, they get others to do most of their dirty work, but unlesss you're blind they're all there at the top of the top company boards of directors of banks, development and production companies and can mostly be located proudly in Who's Who.

Indeed - and this is why I have reservations about the inclusion of the term "class" here; it could be anyone capable of getting themselves into some kind of positions of power.

That could be said about anything or anybody.

Quite!

[french frank]

The ruling class could be defined as those possessing broadly identical outlooks when their power is challenged, but are at each other's throats battling to maintain profitability for the rest of the time.

That's interesting. So the 'ruling class' is defined in terms of specific 'capitalist' activity? I'd always (vaguely!) imagined it to be defined by social class, personal wealth and involvement in government of the state, in so far as the three tend to go together, in the UK at least.

[jean]

...women really don’t fit in to Marx mould, which is not to invalidate it.

Isn't it, though?

[Richard Barrett]

So the 'ruling class' is defined in terms of specific 'capitalist' activity?

Classes in Marxist thinking are and have always been primarily defined by their relationship to the means of production.

I don't see any way in which women somehow don't "fit in" to the economic system as described by Marx. The emancipation of women has been a central strand running through Marxist thought from the start.

[jean]

I don't see any way in which women somehow don't "fit in" to the economic system as described by Marx.

For the sort of reason the greenilex suggests above.

The emancipation of women has been a central strand running through Marxist thought from the start.

What I don't think Marxism has ever properly confronted is that women have frequently been oppressed by men of their own class.

Back in the 70s and 80s there socialist feminists who had reservation about Marxism. If I had time I'd dust off my copies of Sheila Rowbotham and Michele Barrett

.