: There are no class sets outside our mind's trial and error method of experimentation and classification.They are LIVED.
: Totally true and I have never faulted this view. But you have a faulty conception of the nature of the 'wage relation'. This relation is a sub-function of the social concept of 'consideration'. If party A has set x and party B has set y, which often are well beyond material sets, and they exchange considerations among the sets then this is waht is socially called 'consideration'. Tribal units require this of their individual members in realtion to customs, uniformity, and solidarity. Nothing will ever cancel the concept of consideration of which your specific definition of 'wage relation' is but a mere particular sub-set. Consumers and producers engage in consideration every time sets are exchanged between the two. Additionally, we can see that the consumer obtains an item at a price below where they value the item in relation to all the other decisions they could make in relation to the particular decision (Marx himself worked with preference charts). As capitalists raise prices they sell fewer goods but many still buy at the higher prices; their preferences haven't changed they just have to give up a larger value of 'other' decisions. And, no, I don't think it's sane to accuse consumers of exploiting capitalists.
1: Our entire way of life, as workers, depends upon our capacity to sell our labour, our homes, our food, our clothes, this ONE consideration rules over all the others for us.
2: We are required to sell ourselves, there is no social nor personal relation between oursleves and our employer, beyond the commodity exchange.
3:Such considerations usually come out of teh parties surplus, their reserve, however, we are not expoending from our reserve, we are selling the only thing of value with have- our labour power. As such, our homes, our clothes, our food, all depend upon this specific relation- hence its centrality and importance.
4:While peasants worked for a fuedal lord out of duty, and tribesman followed chiefs from social solidarity, the exchange of wage commdoities has no social dimension, no aspect of identity, beyond the sale of commodities, it is not a human relationship (specifically as we do not enter the relationship as humans, but as commodities).
: You continuously find ways of fitting every single party into the worker/capitalist paradigm when other classifications of social class produce superior analyses. This dualistic conformity tortuously distorts any potential analysis of social interests and relations.
How is your analysis superior? Your method is to isolate, and define, mine is to connect, and seek interrelations...
: But in the mean time you've missed the potentially infinite other relationships that contain similar natures but don't conform to your particular classification.
infinitely potential, but not real and existing. There are an almost infinite number of relations between batsmen and bowlers, but all of them are governed by teh batsman/bowler relationship.
: My point was that an ancestor-game of cricket was developed by someone, even though we can't finger taht specific person. Just the same someone first said "money" even though we don't know whom. No one ever said let's design society (well not until long after society had come to realize that it was society).
But Richard Arkwrigth clearly invented the factory System, Adam Smith clearly prvodied an ideology, and a plan for society, individual capitalists clearly planned and designed their own production methods- capitalism is a result of human consciousness and logic.
: And it simply doesn't. Rather, a myriad of different and ever-expanding array of social interests underly and govern society at a multitude of levels. Political economy has a positively vast body of evidence regarding the properties of rent-seeking within and through relationships well beyond the simple capitalist/worker paradigm.
And noticeably, capitalist don't like rentiers, and use the state to restrict them. And how do workers pay the rent?
: Or rather 'in an economic world how do individual politicians rationally maximize their utility.' What manners to different objects of which individuals may be included interact with one another.
utility for whom? define utility.
: All your analysis does, given the vast amounts of data certifying class interests well beyond and even transcending the 'wage relation', is tell us that each human being relies upon other human beings for sustenance. Not many, except a few individualist anarchists, maybe, would argue with this, though. It's pretty non-controversaial and doesn't bear any weight for evidence of 'alienation' or 'exploitation'.
Ah, I agree with the first part, but my analsysis shows that a certain group of human beigns rely on a specific relationship to a different group for their living. the evidence for exploitation is that a tiny few get very rich, and workers creating wealth they can never ever own. the alienation comes, as you have admitted, from humans being tret exactly like commodities on the labour market. Capitalists are not commodified.
