I know we have our Marxist definition and all that, but it seems to be a really pervasive 
, everywhere I go. Some people I’ve talked to think for instance, all scientists are silver spooned and never worked a day in their life because they don’t do construction, or whatever.
How do you argue with people like this? Can you?
It has to depend on the person and where they are coming from. The concept of what is “real” labor and “real” work has no actual definition but it often comes from gendered body-destroying labor stereotypes that are perpetuated by the ruling class and its functionaries as a tool of division - and the false consciousness of the “better-thans” it normally serves.
Is this someone that works a manual labor job and feels stiffed? I’d focus on the boss or financiers being the people picking their pocket.
Is this person petty bourgeois and complaining about their clients? You probably have no chance, these people are constantly whining like victims despite underpaying their staff. You’d have to teach them political economy from scratch or find a totally different angle and hope that they eventually become conscious through a different pipeline.
Are they an unemployed college dropout looking to get a “real” career and generally expressing frustration with their life? I would redirect their ire to the fed-induced unemployment rate that they create to ensure it is always a buyer’s market for labor and they don’t really care what a “real job” is, just whether you are desperate enough to take what you can get.
Are they a big nerd? I would just directly correct them and say this idea is spread by big business interests ans laundered as “working class” an point them to Citations Needes.
Your scientist example reminded me of a Dead Kennedys song literally about this called Well Paid Scientist
You’re a well paid scientist
You only talk in facts
You know you’re always right
'Cause you know how to prove it, step by step
A PhD to show you’re smart
With textbook formulas
But you’re used up
Just like a factory hand
Something is wrong here
You won’t find in on a shelf
You’re well-paid, you’re well-trained
You’re tied to a rack
Company cocktails, gotta go
Say the right thing don’t fidget, jockey for position
Be polite in the pyramid you hate
Sip that scotch, get that raise, this ain’t no party at all
Something is wrong here
You won’t find in on a shelf
You’re well-paid, you’re well-trained
You’re tied to a rack
Cringe and tense up, grind your teeth
And wipe your sweaty palms
Close your windows driving past the
lowlife company bar
They’re making fun of you
Ha!
Ah, even you
You’ve gotta punch the clock, why don’t you punch your boss?
Ah, even you
You just punch the clock, too scared to punch your boss
When will you crack?
When will you crack?
When will you…
Open your eyes, open your eyes, open your eyes?
Pull up to your sterile home, you’re drained
Bite the heads off of your kids
Chew them well, they taste like you, just slam the door
Assigned here 'cause your company owns the land
All your colleagues live here too
Private guards in golf carts keep you safe at home?
Something is wrong here
You won’t find in on a shelf
You’re well-paid, you’re well-trained
You’re tied to a rack
When will you crack?
When will you crack?
When will you crack?
When will you crack?
The dark shattered underbelly of the
American dream
Avoid it like the plague
It stares you from your bathroom mirror
Drown!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Here’s one. I’ve worked as a “scientist” in an industrial lab. I spent 10+ hours a day moving heavy boxes of samples (20-30kg) solo, standing up the whole time, washing my own glassware, and exposed to often shocking OHS issues. I often worked with hazardous materials in unknown quantity that could blow up the glassware without warning even with all safeguards in placed. I’ve taken more than one lab shower because of this.
All while also having the precision to perform proper testing and the knowledge to interpret the results. Day after day, year after year.
Oh and I did it for a low salary too, so no overtime pay for frequent late work.
Oh and I did it for a low salary too, so no overtime pay for frequent late work.
Clearly you’re a trillionaire who controls the media!
just keep hammering them with questions and don’t let them slip about with vagueries or cliches until they agree that the working classes can only be defined in contrast to the owning class.
For example: wtf is a “scientist”? A sociologist is a scientist who might do dozens of interviews to solve a problem. A biologist might trek into a swamp many times to collect water samples. A chemist might be dealing with extremely hazardous chemicals, far more dangerous than anything most workers deal with. This is all work by any means, and at most these people are petite bourgeois, but the vagueness of some “scientist” allows it to mean some dude in a lab coat with a clipboard that jerks off all day for a six figure salary. Don’t let them be intellectually lazy. Make them say that if a scientist works for someone else, they are by definition a worker.
I think it’s also worth noting that there are plenty of contradictions within the “working class” and that the “Proletariat” (which is the class of most interest to Marxists) is not synonymous with “working class”.
Yeah in the cushier of my scientist jobs I regularly broke 15,000 steps a day, worked with cancer causing chemicals on the regular, and had to move heavy shit around all the time. Also animals that bite. In the less cushy one I was in a corn field in the Florida summer for several hours a day.
But I bet you were easily clearing 40k+ a year like some kind of robber baron.
$34k
Then the corn one was when I was a student so only part time for a whole $12 an hour. In the summer though that part time was basically full time.
I love bursting people’s bubble about how much scientists make, especially when they act like we’re some kind of ivory tower elites.
Even the scientists who are established spend all their time begging for grant money (unpaid time) to be able to pay themselves and other people at a rate that averages out to be often below minimum wage
I think arguing isn’t the best way forward. I think helping them think through their thoughts is a better approach.
Chances are good that what they’re really trying to draw a distinction between is the working class and the professional managerial class, but without the proper framework Starbucks servers and postal workers get swept up in the mix.
In my experience it is also rhetorically helpful to establish common ground, that you also stand in opposition to the PMC.
I’ll leave this Graeber quote that I posted last week as it’s been rattling around in my brain since I read it:
The ultimate bad guys in contrast are the intelligentsia. Most working-class conservatives, for instance, don’t have much use for corporate executives, but they usually don’t feel especially passionate about their dislike for them. Their true hatred is directed at the “liberal elite” (this divides into various branches: the “Hollywood elite,” the “journalistic elite,” “university elite,” “fancy lawyers,” or “the medical establishment”)—that is, the sort of people who live in big coastal cities, watch public television or public radio, or even more, who might be involved in producing or appearing in same. It seems to me there are two perceptions that lie behind this resentment: (1) the perception that members of this elite see ordinary working people as a bunch of knuckle-dragging cavemen, and (2) the perception that these elites constitute an increasingly closed caste; one which the children of the working class would actually have far more difficulty breaking into than the class of actual capitalists.
It also seems to me that both these perceptions are largely accurate.
…
Conservative voters, I would suggest, tend to resent intellectuals more than they resent rich people, because they can imagine a scenario in which they or their children might become rich, but cannot possibly imagine one in which they could ever become a member of the cultural elite. If you think about it that’s not an unreasonable assessment. A truck driver’s daughter from Nebraska might not have very much chance of becoming a millionaire—America now has the lowest social mobility in the developed world—but it could happen. There’s virtually no way that same daughter will ever become an international human rights lawyer, or drama critic for the New York Times. Even if she could get into the right schools, there would certainly be no possible way for her to then go on to live in New York or San Francisco for the requisite years of unpaid internships. Even if the son of glazier got a toehold in a well-positioned bullshit job, he would likely, like Eric, be unable or unwilling to transform it into a platform for the obligatory networking. There are a thousand invisible barriers.
- David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs
remains great on this.He also notes that caring labor is often what really is brought to the table in any job, especially with so much automation. Thus, even if the barista’s “manual” labor is inconsequential, the caring labor remains incredibly important.
An example he brings up is ticket takers in the London underground. Their job is primarily done now by kiosk and such, so they are a glorified security guard in some ways. However, their real job is to help the disabled, those who are lost, perhaps in distress, etc. Even if the metro functions fine without someone in the station, the system becomes crueler and unable to account for the contingencies of real humans.
However, caring work is devalued because of sexism.
Basically, read the last two chapters of bullshit jobs to create solidarity between the caring work of bartenders, baristas, and other service workers and the last vestiges of manual labor.
I mean the “PMC” are, by definition, not bourgeoisie.
Does an an occupational or physical therapist who is on their feet all day working with people hands on, but also in a management position, making 75k, renting, and not owning anything still qualify as PMC?
The usage of PMC always struck me as odd because it’s so vague. Like yeah, obviously the doctor or lawyer making 400k is definitely part of it, but what I described above fits the definition, and I would consider them as working class.
I think that’s a vagarie (sp??) of English. To me, a PMC is a person whose primary profession is being a manager, not a professional who manages. In my experience people in the latter category have ‘people management duties’ or are ‘line managers’ but that isn’t their job title. I don’t know if it’s a distinction without a difference though. In my understanding PMCs as their own entity only really become a thing in sufficiently large organisations. I should read graeber lol
The dominant “center left” parties in all western democracies that I can think of have become parties staffed and supported primarily by those making 100k+ due to their credentials. Like it or not is a group that is dominant in occupying media and cultural space, defining western hegemony for the rest of us - which is why they’re so thoroughly despised. They have an anti-Midas effect of turning any policy they champion to shit because nobody trusts them.
If you want to have any hope of organizing an alternative to neoliberalism you need to incorporate this group into your theory, because the world doesn’t only see things split into workers and owners just because Marx did and to win you need to be able to talk to the world.
Whether you want to use the term PMC is less important I don’t really care take it or leave it.
Yeah you make some good points
I don’t get it. If you’re like, at best, one month, one week, or even one day away from homelessness if you don’t get paid a following time, working for a wage or salary, you’re working class…
The easiest way, especially if who you’re talking to is in a licensed trade, is to bring up pay. Electricians even at the journeyman level make more than the vast majority of scientists will ever make – union or not. Next bring up student loan payments and how that further reduces the salary of scientists.
Once you break the idea that the hated “class” is doing it for money or that they came from money, you can start to broach how they make money, and that usually makes it click that they’re just workers.
This approach is harder to do with extremely highly paid professions like doctors, but usually bring up the number of hours and the amount of stress related death can help that.
If it makes you feel better, people with soft hands and work desk jobs generally also think the same and it’s equally impossible to convince them that they’re working class so in a way, the blue collar guys are kinda right in that they largely would be class traitors
If it makes you feel better, people with soft hands and work desk jobs generally also think the same and it’s equally impossible to convince them that they’re working class so in a way, the blue collar guys are kinda right in that they largely would be class traitors
it does not make me feel better
I ask them if they get a wage aka sell their labor. Then follow that with: “If you lost your job, how long would you be able to pay for your living costs?”
So it’s essentially just the if you work for a living, you are a worker.
I think it helps that I work with people who are all living examples of what happens when people can’t sell their labor. I can always tell the libs that most of them are two paychecks away from that same position.
Idk, I was a regular warehouse/factory worker for less than 2 years, and when I quit, I was able to cover my living costs for over a year.
If I had worked for 6 years and bought a house, and then another 2 years to fully cover baseline living expenses for at least the next 10 years of not working, would I no longer be a worker at that point?
Must be some very favourable conditions if that is the case. From where I am from, most people could not do a month unless they have savings beyond the wage. So this resonates with the people I am around well enough.
I switch the framing up and simplify it. Often people see it as an income to sweat ratio, and not overall assets and how far you can make assets go.
I can’t hide the fact that I do white collar work today pays alright. But I explain that sooner or later my money is going to run out of I stop working, and no matter how much extra I do, even if I managed to crack six figures one day, I still can’t stop working. Whereas the ruling class is a small minority of people who can stop working completely, and they will only grow in wealth. They will never die from want or need. Meanwhile, you and I [the person I’m addressing] know that we can’t stop working… Because of the implication
(the implication is work or die).It’s a such a glaringly obvious fact that everyone recognizes as a fundamental truth. People might push back by asking about welfare or disability - you can’t get these things from voluntarily not working, and it’s not a cushy living. Ruling class people can engage in nothing but leisure and many of them are at the level that they couldn’t spend all their wealth in their lifetime.
I cap this off with some good eye contact and spell it out “They live in a wholly different reality than we do”.
If they get that, you can take some deeper dives.
A noogie
Do they think barbers are working class?
Scientists are kinda hard case, they are state’s “venture” capital (low chance of high reward) worker, with relatively unpredictable results. Private scientists are absolutely workers, government’s ones also have some leeway due to patents/“starting their own firm”™
But then again, they aren’t paid shit unless they are big boss
Scientists employed by the government (or by anyone else) don’t reap the profits of their research. They’re just another worker on the grindstone, usually without full control over what they research and how.
The scientist one is so weird to me, as a scientist, because there I see no other way to describe us than working class, aside from professors specifically.
I get paid shit, own nothing, and it’s not even a cushy do nothing email job, I do a lot of physical labor. It may not be construction worker level of physical labor, but I regularly get over 15,000 steps a day walking around the facility, I constantly have to move heavy shit around, deal with dangerous chemicals, clean gross messes, shit like that, and all of that was worse when I worked in an agriculture lab where half the time it was literally just working in a corn field.
Scientists still sell their labour for some form of compensation/wage even when employed by the government. It’s not like they own any means of production which they can let others work on and extract the surplus value they produce.
I mean in casual conversation i assume people are talking non-marxist, cultural signifiers, definitions, so gotta meet them where they are at. E.g. shit salary, need to rent, shit healthcare, shit job security
Scientists are kinda hard case, they are state’s “venture” capital (low chance of high reward) worker
Do mean that, very rarely, they can get lucky with a product/new science thing and potentially make some good cash from a firm/create their own?
From state point of view investments in science are small and very wide, sometimes (most of the times) you get knowledge that bugs do be like that, but sometimes you get atom bomb or genetically modified organisms.
People financing science can’t know where this shit will come from, so state usually casts wide net across all fields and hope for the best.
The funded organizations also will give funding to the best projects. Does that mean most interesting? Most likely to succeed? Biggest potential commercial/industrial application? It obviously depends.
