Comments Elsewhere

Me: (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?)

Wilde: Yes. Individuals, in general, act for their own self-interest.

Which individuals did you have in mind? The only person discussed in this post who is picked out as an individual, as far as I can tell, is Megan McArdle. The analysis you offer seems to pick everyone else out on the basis of the interests presumedly shared by the members of five groups of people, differentiated from one another by socioeconomic factors: the MTA management, the TWU Local 100, poor commuters who use MTA busses and trains, well-off commuters who use MTA busses and trains, and folks who would be willing to accept scab work from the MTA management if it were offered. That seems like echt-class analysis. If it doesn’t seem that way to you, I wonder what you think class analysis does look like.

Schuele suggested that the debate here has at least as much to do with miscommunication as with substantive disagreement. So, let’s number off claims for convenience:

[1] The group created is a product of individual interests. [2] Different competing groups are often of the same socioeconomic status, background, income level, and professions, often bidding on the same govt special privilege. [3] The distinctions between different groups are small. [4] Memberships between different competing groups can change easily as it becomes more rewarding for individuals to seek new allies. [5] New groups can be created by members of already existing groups. … [6] Economic action occurs at the level of the individual, not the group, not the class.

Which of claims (1)-(6) do you think make for a disagreement between you and someone who thinks class analysis is a fruitful way to understand the transit strike (and significant patches of socio-economic life elsewhere)? Further, if there’s more than one claim here that you take to cut against class analysis if true, do those separate claims cut it against it independently of each other, or only in conjunction with one another?