Lamanov
6th July 2007, 17:34
I entered a discussion recently and I was asked "how many classes are there in Bosnian society" [my country]. This was my responce, so I thought it might come in handy to anyone, not only people who live here. Here it goes:
How many classes are there in Bosnian society?
For the sake of argument, I'll have to remind you how Bosnia in its essential being as a society is no different then most of the planet. Of course, it has its specific elements, like any other, so that fact might cause confusion. Depending on the perspective, some people tend to mix concept of a 'class' with other expressions used to characterise or classify different 'layers' of existing society.
Anyway, there are two basic classes, as they are determined from the standpoint of the capital - labor relation, the essential relation of capitalist society:
1.) capitalist class (people who are primary 'agents of capital'; they as such set in motion the circulation of capital, and as they do that they purchase labor power; throughout history it was shown how it's not necessary that agents of capital have to be private personas, because states themselves - just like corporations, shareholders, etc. - can takeover capital accumulation and control it as private 'bourgeois' do; they vary from small capitalists who own, for exaple, coffee shops which run on 5-9 workers, to big capitalists and companies who employ hundreds and thousands of people; they might 'make' fairly different amounts of money, but, in relation to labor, they have one and the same intrest: keeping the workers at work, capital at motion, market at open)
2.) working class (for all of you who might think that working class is necessarily a group of people with blue caps or yellow helmets and dirty jumpsuits, worker is actually anyone who has to sell his/her labor power in order to survive; those who are unable to do that because they are out of work - unemployed - they themselves are an integral part of the working class because from the standpoint of capital, they are just another commodity which by their own increasing of ''supply'' they decrease the price of that commodity [labor power]; working class includes former workers [on pensions] and future workers [students]); this class includes both 'blue' and 'white collar' - division introduced by the constant shift towards the extraction of relative surplus value in the last century; this division is purely technical and it reflects labor division and its impact on society as a whole, but it does not change how any of these 'parts' of one and the same class stand in relation to capital and its agents)
3.) between these two classes there exists a 'space' filled with certain varieties of people who do not fit into this classic schema, but they are, as an integral part of society, under the control of existing forces created by the submission of latter (workers) to the former (capitalists) - to be exact, under the control of capital; first of all, there are peasants, a 'layer' of society which directly escapes labor - capital relation because it is not forced to live in direct submission to capital exploitation, but it itself in order to satisfy its needs has to put its energy and time to 'compete' on the market (not it the 'classic' sense; it actually has to sell a part of its own use values in order to recieve back a part of use values it cannot itself produce), and thus, it is compelled to put itself under the forces of exchange - i.e. market; peasants in Bosnia comprise about half of the population, but in central, west, north and southwest Europe, that number is below 15%; peasants are constantly decreasing, and small farm production is constantly replaced by 'industrial' farms that recquire - of course - capitalists and workers who work for them; after this, there is a variety of 'labor aristocracy', 'upper middle class', small part of the population who are themselves sellers on labor market, but who are a part of the 'management' (managers), and since their skills are fairly priced, they tend to defend the existing system established at work; of course, they are rewarded for that, but remember they are still a small part; there is also a small number of people that live off a small rent, but they don't exploit labor power;
As you can see, the difference between the new and the old proletariat is the fact that the new proletariat might dress itself and smell like the bourgeois class, that it might endulge the same cultural 'heights', that it might even 'look rich', 'feel' like it, that it might look 'differentiated' and thus appear to postmodernist 'thinkers' as a 'whole bunch of classes', but it remains that both old and new were and are a basic class of producers who have nothing to do but to sell their labor power and reproduce themselves as commodities, not only on the labor market, but through their whole existing life colonized by capital.
"Absolute poverity of given society might go down, but the relative poverity remains as such" (K. Marx, Paris Manuscripts, 1844 - paraphrase).
How many classes are there in Bosnian society?
For the sake of argument, I'll have to remind you how Bosnia in its essential being as a society is no different then most of the planet. Of course, it has its specific elements, like any other, so that fact might cause confusion. Depending on the perspective, some people tend to mix concept of a 'class' with other expressions used to characterise or classify different 'layers' of existing society.
Anyway, there are two basic classes, as they are determined from the standpoint of the capital - labor relation, the essential relation of capitalist society:
1.) capitalist class (people who are primary 'agents of capital'; they as such set in motion the circulation of capital, and as they do that they purchase labor power; throughout history it was shown how it's not necessary that agents of capital have to be private personas, because states themselves - just like corporations, shareholders, etc. - can takeover capital accumulation and control it as private 'bourgeois' do; they vary from small capitalists who own, for exaple, coffee shops which run on 5-9 workers, to big capitalists and companies who employ hundreds and thousands of people; they might 'make' fairly different amounts of money, but, in relation to labor, they have one and the same intrest: keeping the workers at work, capital at motion, market at open)
2.) working class (for all of you who might think that working class is necessarily a group of people with blue caps or yellow helmets and dirty jumpsuits, worker is actually anyone who has to sell his/her labor power in order to survive; those who are unable to do that because they are out of work - unemployed - they themselves are an integral part of the working class because from the standpoint of capital, they are just another commodity which by their own increasing of ''supply'' they decrease the price of that commodity [labor power]; working class includes former workers [on pensions] and future workers [students]); this class includes both 'blue' and 'white collar' - division introduced by the constant shift towards the extraction of relative surplus value in the last century; this division is purely technical and it reflects labor division and its impact on society as a whole, but it does not change how any of these 'parts' of one and the same class stand in relation to capital and its agents)
3.) between these two classes there exists a 'space' filled with certain varieties of people who do not fit into this classic schema, but they are, as an integral part of society, under the control of existing forces created by the submission of latter (workers) to the former (capitalists) - to be exact, under the control of capital; first of all, there are peasants, a 'layer' of society which directly escapes labor - capital relation because it is not forced to live in direct submission to capital exploitation, but it itself in order to satisfy its needs has to put its energy and time to 'compete' on the market (not it the 'classic' sense; it actually has to sell a part of its own use values in order to recieve back a part of use values it cannot itself produce), and thus, it is compelled to put itself under the forces of exchange - i.e. market; peasants in Bosnia comprise about half of the population, but in central, west, north and southwest Europe, that number is below 15%; peasants are constantly decreasing, and small farm production is constantly replaced by 'industrial' farms that recquire - of course - capitalists and workers who work for them; after this, there is a variety of 'labor aristocracy', 'upper middle class', small part of the population who are themselves sellers on labor market, but who are a part of the 'management' (managers), and since their skills are fairly priced, they tend to defend the existing system established at work; of course, they are rewarded for that, but remember they are still a small part; there is also a small number of people that live off a small rent, but they don't exploit labor power;
As you can see, the difference between the new and the old proletariat is the fact that the new proletariat might dress itself and smell like the bourgeois class, that it might endulge the same cultural 'heights', that it might even 'look rich', 'feel' like it, that it might look 'differentiated' and thus appear to postmodernist 'thinkers' as a 'whole bunch of classes', but it remains that both old and new were and are a basic class of producers who have nothing to do but to sell their labor power and reproduce themselves as commodities, not only on the labor market, but through their whole existing life colonized by capital.
"Absolute poverity of given society might go down, but the relative poverity remains as such" (K. Marx, Paris Manuscripts, 1844 - paraphrase).