Multiple class positions?

[synthesis]

Say I'm Lester Freeman in The Wire. I'm a homicide detective. That's my class position.

But say I also carve little miniature dollhouse figures, sometimes at work, and make more money doing that than I do by being a cop.

So am I half-petit-bourgeois, half-whatever-it-is-we-call-cops now? Can people occupy multiple class positions?

[Widerstand]

Hm. What would a person that employs others (owns a small business) but is also employed be? A worker and a bourgeois?

This is tricky, really. Especially when you consider that cops and most bureaucrats are essentially proletarian by their role in production, but bourgeois by their function in society and in relation to that mode (they serve to uphold it).

[graymouser]

First: cops are not workers in uniform. They are part of the bourgeois state and, by definition, themselves organically disconnected from the working class and welded to the bourgeoisie. Soldiers, particularly when there is a draft, are essentially workers armed by the state and can be won to the revolution in some circumstances. Cops are not, they are the mailed fist of the bourgeoisie and should not be considered part of the working class.

Anyway, the Marxist definition of class is primarily about the relationship to the means of production. If you have the means to make a living outside of a job, you are sociologically part of the petty bourgeoisie.

[syndicat]

class is a power relation between groups. it's a relation of domination, as of capital over wage-workers. in the case of capitalists, this relation of domination is due to the capitalists' monpoly over access to, and use of, the means of production. but there is also a class whose domination over workers isn't due to ownership of means of production, but due to control over decision-making and information and expertise in organizations that run workplaces, such as corporations or the state. think of middle managers, judges, industrial engineers, corporate lawyers etc.

so you have to ask yourself what control does the person have over other workers, how do they obtain their income, things like that. cops are no more a part of the working class than supervisors and other middle managers. they're part of the whole bureaucracy over monitoring and control over the working class.

but, yes, people can have conflicted or "contradictory" class positions. there are two brothers, Palestinian immigrants, who own the tiny bodega at the end of my block. one is also a city bus driver, the other a mechanic at a tire store. Their working class jobs are their main source of income. they do hire one person to clerk in the store part of the time. but I think their position is predominantly working class, and this is how they personally understand their situation.

people are part of families and the families make up the class...so children of workers are part of the working class. but sometimes families are class mixed. Say a woman is a clerical worker but her husband is a lawyer or owns a business. if the man's income and situation is dominant as far as their family is concerned, then they're mainly not working class.

also people of the dominating class can work working class jobs for a time when their life is in transition. think of a student from an affluent family who works as a cashier in a deli while she's in college. it's a working class job, but she's likely to be destined for some job in the managerial/professional section of society, or may inherit wealth from her family.

[blake 3:17]

In terms of class consiousness, the big question is which class a person WANTS to be. Or what class position their family members are on or want to be in.

This is the really tough one.

[Kléber]

Response to the OP:
Virtually all workers engage in some kind of petty-bourgeois activity. In oppressed countries and communities it is common for the poorest workers to spend their free time setting up a portable vendor stand or just hawking various items on the street. This actually happens more often in areas with high unemployment where people are desperate for any sort of income.

If your personal business doesn't make you enough money to live on and you must sell your surplus-value to the capitalists, you are still a worker in spite of the fact that every Sunday you go out and sell cigarettes, jewelry or something. Otherwise we throwing millions or billions of people out of the working class on a technicality. (If Bill Gates got a job at McDonald's just to prove that wrong, it wouldn't count, because he has enough money to choose not to work and still live decently.)


First: cops are not workers in uniform.
The armed forces sometimes fill a police role in other countries and traditionally have in the US in times of social crisis. Is a cop shooting a worker in the US really any worse than a soldier shooting a worker in Iraq? Is Adrian Schoolcraft's refusal to be a hired thug of capitalism less genuine than Ehren Watada's? Picking terminological hairs is all fun and nice, but by drawing the cop/soldier distinction so sharply, does this mean in practice you are saying it's a violation of principle to do covert revolutionary work among the police, but not in the army? The Bolsheviks did both.

Or are you saying we should be active against police brutality at home but ignore imperialist war crimes abroad? Who knows, maybe it is true that the average police officer is more reactionary than the average army soldier, but Lenin and Trotsky had success infiltrating and propagandizing among the police so it would be silly to rule it out on religious grounds.


They are part of the bourgeois state and, by definition, themselves organically disconnected from the working class and welded to the bourgeoisie.It's not that simple or otherwise the army is also disconnected. I mean the soldiers actually cloistered away in bases, they don't live and work in the same areas as everybody else.


Soldiers, particularly when there is a draft, are essentially workers armed by the state and can be won to the revolution in some circumstances. Cops are not, they are the mailed fist of the bourgeoisie and should not be considered part of the working class.In the Spanish Civil War, the army was mostly pro-fascist, but the police were mostly pro-Republican because the soldiers had been isolated and subjected to propaganda by their right-wing officers, whereas the police had been in the cities and witnessed the mass workers' movement in defense of the Republic. The Republican Assault Guards (SWAT equivalent) were the best-trained and -equipped anti-fascist units in the early days of the war. There are many other examples of rank-and-file police abandoning their employer, the bourgeois state, and even supporting the workers, from the October Revolution to the Tiananmen Square Incident.

[syndicat]

In the Spanish Civil War, the army was mostly pro-fascist, but the police were mostly pro-Republican because the soldiers had been isolated and subjected to propaganda by their right-wing officers, whereas the police had been in the cities and witnessed the mass workers' movement in defense of the Republic.

not quite correct. there were two national police forces in Spain, the Civil Guard and the Republican Assault Guard. the Civil Guard had sided with the military in a miltiary takeover in 1923. when the liberal and social-democratic politicians got back in office in 1931, they created the Republican Assault Guard as a paramilitary force for the purpose of defense of republican institutions, since they didn't trust the Civil Guard.

About 40 percent of the police rank and file overall sided with the worker defense groups in fighting the army in July 1936. this was mainly the Assault Guard rank and file, not the civil guard. And they typically did so only once they saw the worker defense groups go into action. Otherwise they played a waiting game to see what the outcome would be.

in the case of the Russian revolution, the several thousand tsarist police in St Petersburg in 1917 abandoned their uniforms and went into hiding after the military garrison mutiny in Feb 1917. otherwise they were liikely to be lynched.

[Kléber]

Thanks for filling in the details, I should have been more clear. Still the 40% figure is for the whole country whereas a majority of police in urban areas opposed the military insurrection IIRC, and yes of course the police will never organize and lead a revolutionary or anti-fascist struggle, some or most of them just might follow the proletariat if it appears to be the strongest class, as Assault Guards went from repressing workers in 1934 to siding with them in 1936.

[synthesis]

First, I was really, really hoping this wouldn't turn into a debate about the class position of cops, but I guess, given my phrasing of the OP, it was inevitable that would come up. Moving on...

Kleber, you said:


Virtually all workers engage in some kind of petty-bourgeois activity. In oppressed countries and communities it is common for the poorest workers to spend their free time setting up a portable vendor stand or just hawking various items on the street. This actually happens more often in areas with high unemployment where people are desperate for any sort of income.

Which is definitely something I've thought a lot about; I'm curious if that was also in response to:


Anyway, the Marxist definition of class is primarily about the relationship to the means of production. If you have the means to make a living outside of a job, you are sociologically part of the petty bourgeoisie.

So obviously the missing link here is the issue of necessity. Right?

[Reznov]

Quick side question, if any of the Bourgeoisie positions you mentioned (Like cops) decided to quit and join the Revolution (Assuming it does start to happen) would he be accepted?

[KC]

Quick side question, if any of the Bourgeoisie positions you mentioned (Like cops) decided to quit and join the Revolution (Assuming it does start to happen) would he be accepted?

Class relations are just as much about political relations as they are about economic ones. That is why class is determined by not only relation to the means of production but also relation to other classes.