pantryslut

You get very different reactions talking about that kind of thing in Ireland, in the UK, and in what bits of the US I've been in a position to have such conversations in [ Manhattan, Berkeley, and Minneapolis ]

From:

wild-irises.livejournal.com

What he said. I was also going to say, "Oh, that reaction is a class thing," (which I believe, by the way).

From:

wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com

I suspect that class has been obscured by racism, regional differences, and the rural/suburban/urban divide, as well as by Americans' curious conviction that we're all middle-class, or could be, if we wanted.

From:

redbird

I suspect that "We're all middle class" is like the idea that racism will be solved by everyone taking on the attributes of the dominant race/ethnicity.

From:

trick.livejournal.com

Class has sunk into a tangle of semantics and political correctness.

Americans are convinced we're all middle-class because anything less than that and you have the aforementioned subdivisions. The more you can be compartmentalized and filed away under "what a shame" or "society has problems" or "welfare recipient", the less you exist.

Those subdivisions don't exist in the same way once you get to the $40,000+/year salary range* because, well, as

redbird said, racism will be solved by everyone taking on the attributes of the dominant race/ethnicity. So you lose those numbers and that identity as well.

*this number varies depending on location. Here, that's considered middle-middle class.

From:

tgeller.livejournal.com

When do you ever hear Americans mention class? I never do, although most of my friends would consider themselves "progressive".

From:

Actually, I find that dykes seem to talk about class not infrequently. This may merit a separate post.

From:

hmm.... i have some ideas about why that may be the case. i'd love to see it.

From:

(the separate post, that is.)

From:

felicks.livejournal.com

America has no class system! What are you talking about you commie pinko?!

From:

wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com

DENNIS: We're living in a dictatorship: a self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--

WOMAN: Oh, there you go bringing class into it again.

The whole scene is here. (http://www.mwscomp.com/movies/grail/grail-03.htm)

I do think and talk in terms of class -- although it is considerably more complicated in the US than just the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat.

From:

I think it's considerably more complicated most places, tbh; I have a sneaking feeling it may be fractally so. I cannot quite bring myself to trust a dialectic based on whether the workers or the managers control the means of production, as in my line of work, I am the means of production.

From:

I think "fractally" is overcomplicating the situation; and I think identifying the use of the word "class" with a specifically Marxist dialectic is oversimplifying things.

From:

Well, OK, not technically fractally, it will bottom out eventually because humans are discrete, but I will posit that the closer one looks at what one has identified as a class, the more likely one is to find internal stratifications; and possibly fractally in the sense that some forms of human organisation feel to me to be working on the application at different levels in a given hierarchy of similar principles applying to people relative to their place with reference to the observer, rather than primarily based on absolute position. [ Have you read Designing Freedom ? ]

And I did not intend to stipulate that everyone using the word "class" specifies a Marxist dialectic, merely that it is a not-too-uncommon way of viewing class structures with what feels to me to be that specific flaw.

From:

I have not read Designing Freedom.

I feel like what you're saying deliberately ignores the fact that we find a way to talk about people in groups all the time, even though if you look at a specific individual, their alliance or associate with any given group may be partial, or possess internl stratifications, and so on. Pixels,even in millions of colors, still resolve into a picture.

From:

I have not read Designing Freedom.

It was a paradigm shift for me, in terms of perspectives on political thought; I think of Stafford Beer's insights in that alongside Jane Jacobs on cities as the most significant new political ideas in the twentieth century.

I feel like what you're saying deliberately ignores the fact that we find a way to talk about people in groups all the time, even though if you look at a specific individual, their alliance or associate with any given group may be partial, or possess internl stratifications, and so on. Pixels,even in millions of colors, still resolve into a picture.

Oh, agreed entirely; I hope I didn't come across as rejecting the possiblity of talking about people in groups, it seems an absolutely inevitable thing to have to do. It does seem to me, though, that the degree of approximation involved in many ways of talking about people in groups has the potential to have negative side effects many of which can be seen more clearly if the talking is done in the explicit context of a particular scale, and it also seems to me that political dialogue in the West in general is lacking in scale-sensitivity and ways to talk about shifting scale. I know I'm twitchy at the meta-level of how one talks about such issues, and I apologise if I came across as disdainful or unduly defensive.

From:

I guess ultimately my feeling is, we're not going to get better about talking about it if we don't talk about it. Yes, I think that much talk about class -- and gender, and other groups -- is simplistic, but from my perspective that's a consequence of how little we talk about it. So I find your twitchiness...understandable, but not valuable in the initial stages of *starting* a dialogue. And I find overemphasis on granularity to be awkward, too. People I know do it all the time with gender -- "everybody has their own gender!" -- a statement which is both true, and useless for the kinds of things I'm interested (sometimes) in talking about.

It's probably a philosophical thing as well. I am interested in patterns. I always have been. This is not to say that I am not also interested in the little pebble in the stream and how it disrupts those patterns sometimes; in the tension between big patterns and their irreducible constituent components. But other people are more interested in the individual first, at a different level of examination than I am. Which is fine, too.

From:

And I find overemphasis on granularity to be awkward, too. People I know do it all the time with gender -- "everybody has their own gender!" -- a statement which is both true, and useless for the kinds of things I'm interested (sometimes) in talking about.

see also: "but race doesn't actually exist -- it's just a social construct!" "we all live in a capitalist society, there's no way around it." "i'm not gay, i'm not straight, i'm just me."

From:

redbird

To the extent that you are the means of production, it is nontrivial whether you make your own decisions about what to work on, and who derives the profits from what you produce.

From:

wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com

As a writer, I may be the means of production -- but it was only when I owned and ran my own small press that I also had some control over the sale and distribution of the product.

From:

imnotandrei.livejournal.com

Because everyone knows that classes are well-defined, while sets and types are more obscure. (Sorry, been arguing mathematical logic with the office's other resident intellectual a bit this morning.)

And because we're all well-programmed with regards to race and gender issues, so we know how to make the appropriate noises, clucking and shaking our heads when we're supposed to, while with class it's more complicated, and people feel like they didn't get the memo, completely missing the fact that there isn't *a* memo.

From:

Just as an alternate perspective on that last; I spent the first twenty years of my life in what was essentially a Caucasian monoculture, and I feel helplessly at sea in discussions of race issues. If there was a memo there I missed it.

From:

imnotandrei.livejournal.com

Just as an alternate perspective on that last; I spent the first twenty years of my life in what was essentially a Caucasian monoculture, and I feel helplessly at sea in discussions of race issues. If there was a memo there I missed it.

I was in much the same sort of place -- I got the memo rather forcefully later in life. I think that the media environment in the U.S. tends to consider the memo more in race/gender issues, but people can certainly miss it at any age. :)

From:

i think you're right on the money (no pun intended) with the idea of a missed memo. the operative assumption in this country, and in much of the west at this point, is that gender/race/religion shouldn't interfere at all with your clamoring about in a system that by its very definition insists that there are haves and have-nots. in my opinion, that assumption is very, very flawed, but pointing that out to even some of the most liberal folks makes them uncomfortable and embarrassed.

From:

cheekytubemouse.livejournal.com

Sherilyn just observed over lunch that I've been using the term "monied" a lot more since I started this job six months ago. I'm sure part of it has to do with the fact that I pay several of my boss' personal bills, including credit cards and car payments, but I'm not sure I like the fact that the word has become such a regular part of my vocabulary.

From:

manomano.livejournal.com

You just need to hang out with younger people. We know it's all about classes. And objects. The whole procedural thing is just a backdrop.

From:

Do youmean "younger people" or "geeks"? :)

From:

manomano.livejournal.com

I'm not sure I get your distinction. Are you implying that there are other people objects besides Geeks?

From:

imnotandrei.livejournal.com

...so now you're going back to objectification? How un-feminist of you!

From:

manomano.livejournal.com

Well, I was once told very loudly and repeatedly that calling myself a feminist was anti-feminist because, allegedly, I am male. So, I guess I can't be a feminist, I can only be "pro-feminist". So I guess that means I can objectify someone. On the other hand, someone once spent a long time trying to convince me that Gay men treated each other as sexual subjects, as in subject of a sentance not some sort of Royal SM thing. But I digress..

From:

mayhaps because i spend too much time around white liberals who are seeking to relieve themselves of guilt about their skin privilege and around people of color who have been drinking the kool-aid and actually believe we're living in a post-race era, in these conversations i often hear people either haul out the marx when race comes up or start preaching self-sufficiency booker t. washington/louis farrakhan-stylee. so i hear a lot of "it's not about race! it's about class" even when it isn't.

the reality is that these concepts are all interconnected, but it is possible to address them separately, though some people seem downright afraid to.

From:

It's weird, isn't it, how "it's not about race, it's about class" has gotten twisted around -- at least that's what it looks like to me. That gal on Slate being a prime example.

From:

i remember in college, when i worked in a student organization designing and facilitating anti-oppression workshops. the last workshop in every series of seven was on classism, and it had a different format than all the others. we made the assumptions that

1) for each oppression, there was an included group, an excluded group, and sometimes a middle group

and that

2) the excluded group around any oppression experienced a de facto silencing and should be given the right to speak to their experiences.

in our classism workshops, there was no "speak out" from the poor/working class folks. the rationale was that class is more fluid than other identities, and that there's a lot of pain (mostly in the form of embarrassment) for the owning class that it was just as useful to allow them to speak to the larger group. i was never sure how i felt about that last bit.

From: