Please excuse me if I ask you to cover ground you have already covered - I just found this board tonight, and there is no way I can catch up with everything that has been written. However, I find this debate quite interesting. Quite a bit of what has been written here, on both sides, seems a bit muddled to me. Perhaps it is only because I misunderstand you? Please feel free to clarify.
: OK, one more attempt to try and persuade Joel that my understandings of Class hold up.
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: Firstly, I think the whole 'classification' debate is something of a sideline, playing on teh homophnous quality of 'class'a nd 'classification'. I did think about making a post replacing the word 'class' with teh word 'fish' to referr to teh same refferent, but I opted against that.
This is a good example. Granted I am missing some background, but are you seriously arguing that 'class' (I assume you are using this in basically the same sense as Marx) is something other than a means of classification?
: However I do want to try and distinguish teh two. Classification is an attempt to create identifiable sets, by reference to common attributes.
Quite correct. Classification is both an art and a science, and many excellent analogies may be made to cartography.
No map perfectly reflects every aspect of the territory it describes - if it did it would be superfluous! Mapmaking involves deciding what features of the territory are important for the purpose of the map, selection of those features and rejection of all other features. It is the rejection of the vast majority of natural features which allows one to make a map which is useful - which is much smaller than the territory it describes (what good would a 1:1 map of New York be? How would you carry it? :') yet nonetheless contains the information needed for a certain task. Maps are never completely accurate even in describing the features selected either, for instance a road map doesn't try to accurately reflect every curve in the road, nor do they typically show altitude gradients. In some cases they go so far as to simply draw a straight line between two points and put a number to the side showing the mileage. Such a map is extremely useful for the purpose it was intended for.
Similiarly, any classification scheme (including Marx's) selects certain features important for the purpose it is intended to serve, abstracts those features, and eliminates all the rest.
Marx's classification of people into two groups, the proletariat and the capitalist, seen in this light, is neither *wrong* nor *right* it simply is what it is. It is a classification based on the relation of people to the means of production. The capitalist owns the means of production, the proletariat does not.
There are many other ways to classify people, and none of them are existentially *wrong* or *right* - they simply are. They cannot be judged in a vaccum, one must first have a reason to seek a classification scheme, and then judge each scheme by whether or not it is suited to your purpose.
Just as a road map is of little use to a pilot, Marx's scheme is of little use to the geneticist. This does not mean that the road map is flawed, only that it was not designed for the purposes of pilots. Nor does it mean there is something wrong with Marx's class system in and of itself, simply that it is not designed for the geneticist.
And just as the pilot may, indeed, find that the road map contains some information he may find useful, so the geneticist may find some unexpected correlations based on Marxian economic classes. Nonetheless, the pilot would be ill advised to throw out his charts and rely on the road map primarily, nor would the geneticist be smart to throw out the classifications developed for genetic research and rely entirely on Marx's scheme.
Can we agree so far? If not, why not?
: Class, in society, is the process by people are assigned to teh productive system, and is more an experiential category, than a classification- one may attempt to classify classes, through rdferrence to some shared similarity or disimilairty (bob knows, tehre are many different ways of trying to calssify social class), but that doesn't detract from teh underlying fact taht classes may exist beyond classification.
First, what precisely do you mean by "assigned?" Who does the assigning you are talking about? I am not sure if we disagree or not, because I am not sure what you mean when you say this.
Second, I would not deny that Marx's classification is, in some way, "experiential." Certainly it is derived from experience. But so are many other classification schemes. For instance, classification by skin colour, eye colour, height, shape, etc. are all experiential, and indeed far more basically experiential (and less abstracted) than Marx's scheme. Which is neither here nor there, as best I can tell.
: I hope this demonstrates how I concieve class- a capitalist is guaranteed in his existence by the ownership of capital, he may vary his relations to his workers, but the underlying logic remains..
I found it somewhat confusing. I still am not quite certain exactly what you are trying to say. Perhaps after reading your response I will understand your position more clearly.
Regards,
Tell
