Comments Elsewhere

Me, to Wilde: Or, to put it another way: if you aren’t offering a class analysis of the transit strike, what level of analysis are you offering? Individual?

Berg: Interest group analysis?

And interest groups whose membership are are defined by their jobs, income levels, and level of control over terms of employment are usually called “classes,” or (more precisely) “socioeconomic classes.” Aren’t they?

Schuele: Jonathan seems to be saying that none of the typical conglomerations deemed “classes” have a unified self-interest, as is suggested by some.

I don’t know what you mean by “a unified self-interest.” There are lots of things that you might mean when you apply a predicate to a set. Is it supposed to mean (a) “a self-interest shared by each and every member of the class,” (b) “a self-interest mostly shared by members of the class” (with some kind of statistical meaning attached to “mostly”), (c) “a self-interest typically shared by members of the class (under normal conditions)”, (d) “a self-interest not necessarily shared by individual members of the class but somehow held by the class itself,” or something else?

I ask because if you mean (a), then I don’t know of any class theorists who have suggested that classes have “a unified self-interest” in that sense. (I think they typically mean something more like (c), although I suppose there may be some who, through various sorts of mystification, try to hold (d).) In any case, if you mean (b)-(d), then Wilde’s merely pointing out that there are members of the class who individually don’t share the class’s self-interest does not tell against the accuracy of class analysis, any more than poor Tibbles, who has been maimed and shaved, tells against the accuracy of a natural history documentary that says “Domestic cats have four legs and a soft coat of fur.”

If, on the other hand, you mean something more like claim (c), as I think Jonathan seems to, then the sort of exceptions you’d need to point out to even begin undermining the analysis have to be systematic exceptions to the alleged uniformity of self-interest. Which Jonathan does do, above. But the thing is that the systematic exceptions he points out are exceptions on the basis of factors that we usually take to differentiate between socioeconomic classes — jobs, pay, control over terms of employment, etc. — and in spite of his later protest that “It ain’t about big guys vs little guys” he explicitly says above that this is about bigger vs. littler guys: “Some little guys are bigger than other little guys. Any special benefit that any particular union garners for one set of little guys comes at the detriment not just from businesses, but also from other little guys.”

He seems to suggest toward the end that conscious organization, or perhaps access to the political means, better explain systematic differences of interest within the supposed “working class” than factors that mark out socioeconomic classes. But (1) the idea that either of those factors are independent of socioeconomic class is not at all obvious, and (2) neither saying “group X is better organized on behalf of its interests than group Y” or “group X has a greater ability to serve its interests through political pressure than group Y” explains what it is about group X and group Y that make for the difference in interests to be served in the first place. In the case that Jonathan seems to be discussing, the difference seems to be made on the basis of the socioeconomic factors I mentioned. (Specifically, the distinction between an “aristocracy of labor” and workers that are comparatively less well-off in terms of jobs, income, and organizational resources — a class distinction within the larger working class that has been discussed and fleshed out by many analysts who gladly make use of class analysis, and in regard to the history of labor organizing in particular.)

Kennedy: Say what? In a market unions can’t do anything “at the expense” of others since the only people who will do business with them are those that profit from doing business with them.

Well, I think there’s clearly a sense of “expense” and “detriment” in the English language, under which peaceful market competition can produce profits at the expense of, or be to the detriment of, third parties. (Businesspeople use it all the time — if Wal-Mart is eating K-Mart’s lunch, then there is some sense in which Wal-Mart’s competition is detrimental to K-Mart’s owners, or Wal-Mart’s greater profits are coming at the expense of K-Mart.) Of course, what I think you’re right to point out here is that these senses of “expense” and “detriment” aren’t senses in which profiting at someone’s expense, or doing something to their detriment, is in itself an objectionable thing to do.

To be fair, though, Jonathan et al. are operating from the presumption that unions are availing themselves of legal coercion in order to enforce their bargaining position, in ways that unorganized workers aren’t able to. (That’s true enough, but I think that the balance of political power in the late strike, given that it was against a government employer that had the power to throw union organizers in jail for continuing to strike, and publicly contemplated doing so, is clearly not in favor of the union.)