Social Class East

December 4th, 2007 Posted in Social Class

Social class is a dynamic concept. The relationship of the class groupings involves the distribution of available economic value. This is always a latent front that can become active with conscious awareness of self and group interests.

Any changes in the social order reflect back to the conceptual understanding. After the successful Russian Revolution the leading elements of the Communist Party became a self-interested dictatorial cadre. Leon Trotsky and Milovan Djilas (”The New Class*) and George Orwell (all insiders of different socialist movements and moments) identified the pattern as a use of bureaucratic position to substitute a new exploiting class for the overthrown ownership group.

In the capitalist west a similar group emerges in cadre positions in business, government, and in special groups of manipulators, propagandists and lobbyists who take over some of the advantage from the attenuating ownership class.

In general those enacting the cadre functions of coordination, planning, decision are always falling away from their assigned responsibilities toward self-interest.

The constant imperative value of our civilization to reduce cadre extortion is an ever receding goal.

The critique of excessive, even criminal, advantage takes surprisingly different forms. Intellectuals of the democratic way constantly seek out blocks to impose on high flying cadres–term limits, civil rights, recall elections, impeachment, voter legislative initiatives. limits on cartels, laws against restraint of trade. Among Maoists in China the critique took a violent form with the Cultural Revolution. Students and workers were mobilized by a small element within the ruling cadre to move (with the active support of the retired iconic leader) against the established bureaucrats and assorted other elders. In religion this critique has taken a prophetic form. The cadre falling away from old and hallowed values is identified and the move to overthrow both ruling group and its unsatisfactory new way follows.

The cadre (and we are here talking about the leaders of the new social class taking over the economic advantage) usually acts to counter or avoid these negations of its position and this can all be thought of as part of the class conflict.

In general, a sociology suspicious of any and all cadres couldn’t be all bad.

^^^^^

The usually understated side of the social class issue is the part played by the consumer. Ultimately the economic cycle comes down to the relationship of maker and user. In an ideal exchange system these two categories are an exact match. We all do both. It becomes group members producing for their own consumption.

This appears most obvious when we think of our economic life in small bands of hunters and gatherers. Every morning we begin the search for food and attend to our immediate needs for shelter. In the evening we gather round and share out the catch, consume it, and so to bed. A few of us receive special consideration, mothers with young infants and children, the ill and disabled, the weakening elderly, but even these categories contribute what they can. We presume no room for laggards and dead heads. Seems simple enough.

We are thinking of an economy and social order without surplus. Food and shelter to sustain life is the base line. Any production above this mark is surplus.

Two more examples of surplus:

1) From Eugene O’Neill’s play (later a movie) “The Hairy Ape:” In the bowels of a transatlantic steamer a stoker shovels coal into a furnace to produce steam for the turbines that turn the screws that push the ship forward. In the process the stoker is carried across the ocean. He is powering his own way. But there is enough motion generated to carry hundreds (even thousands) of passengers as well. They travel on his surplus. (We are not trying to track down and credit the workers who made the ship and its machinery or those who dug and transported the coal or the administrators who planned and coordinated or the other sailors working the ship, They also contributed to the surplus.)

2) Street people homeless and afloat in the city spend their days attending to survival needs. Any unused surplus is stored in a steel market cart and kept close for possible future use. The surplus remains with its collector.

We can get some rough idea of the surplus by multiplying the official amount of the income poverty line per person by the number of persons in the society. This amount will keep us all alive and modestly kicking. Then we subtract this from the gross national product, the amount of goods and services we make and this difference would be a rough measure of the surplus. (Of course the realty is more complex since we trade off-shore.) The poverty line is very low compared to even our average income. I don’t know how much the surplus is but we all know it will be a huge amount.

The next question: The social order that describes the distribution and use of the surplus. It is complex and arcane but to some extent it involves the social class advantage we have been discussing.

The surplus is augmented whenever there is a transfer of value as in payments of taxes, fees, prices, interest, rent, loot, bribes, fares, gratuities, dues, discounts and so on. Major sectors of society involved are government, business, crime, banking.

The surplus is accumulated and measured in money. This permits the piling up of wealth and investment well beyond the underlying value of the goods upon which it is supposedly based. As Durkheim noted there is a limit on how much you can eat but none on money. That is the irony of Ben Jonson’s play “Volpone.” The hero eats his gold even unto death.

But we will hold off further consideration of money, surplus and all that for future posts.

Until that day…