The people who think everything is a group vs. group war naturally interpret everything as a move within that war, including non-participants' correct observation that it doesn't really exist outside of the minds of the small segment of paranoiacs choosing to engage it.
I'm ignoring the entire chess board, in fact, because the stuff that's going out outside of the chess game is much more important -- to me, and to most other people who aren't involved in the chess game.
The concept of "class struggle" epitomizes the "group vs. group war" mentality. It's a mental framework that combines ingroup/outgroup dynamics with a Manichean moral narrative, leading to literally every question being interpreted as a move in relation to an all-encompassing macro-level conflict.
This in turn leads to every problem being abstracted out of its context, and attributed to malice instead of error. Thinking this way completely hampers the ability of human beings to make incremental progress on anything at all via net-positive social engagement with each other.
The "class struggle" idea is of the most debilitating memetic diseases that's ever come about in human history.
Huh. Do you think the same thing about the concept of social/economic class as well? Or is it just rejecting that there is typically a struggle between them?
Basically, yeah. Classification in general is a subjective, value-laden activity. At the most granular resolution, everything is fundamentally sui generis -- putting things into classes requires making subjective judgments about what qualities and characteristics you're going to ignore in order to focus on the ones you care about.
Put simply, when you come up with a class/category taxonomy, you're drawing your own boundaries inside a continuum of variation, and where you draw them is something you're choosing based on the purposes you are pursuing and the assumptions you have made, not mapping out something that's intrinsic to the external world independently of you. "Category X includes object Y" is a property inherent to the definition of category X; it is not a quality inherent to object Y.
And when the things you're classifying are other people, and you're trying to develop a taxonomy that models their behavior, you have a situation where the entities you're analyzing are self-aware beings whose behavior is driven by the analytical models and taxonomies in their minds, not the ones in yours.
People who propose class theories as a usable model for understanding human intentions and behavior lump other people together according to their own criteria, even though those people can -- and often do -- make their own decisions according to completely different criteria. People do not see strangers as having common interests or values simply because a third set of strangers have reduced them to data points that fall into the same bar on a narrowly tailored histogram.
When put to the test, these class theories consistently fail to predict actual human behavior, and people with normative attachements to the theories then to hand-wave away these discrepancies: "false consciousness", "voting against their interests", etc.; these notions are layers of epicycles meant to sustain a speculative theory in the face of falsifying evidence.
Much better to do away with a priori class theories, and just analyze what actual people are actually saying and doing.
So you’re basically against the concept of classes and the act of classification. An interesting position to take in a hacker community but ok :)
However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.
Sure, every human being is unique and individual. But if you take a few million of them, patterns arise. Marketing people know and abuse this.
Also class struggle is not about an a priori theory. If you actually look at what people are doing, you can observe similar patterns too. You can see for instance that billionaires think and act in a specific way, which is widely different than, and against against the interests of, a common working person. There is a fundamental conflict of interest between a boss and their worker. You can observe this and they will actually say this if you ask them.
Yes some groups fail to act for their best interests because they are oppressed. A slave is obeying his master because it’s the best option for him under that circumstances. Maybe he’s not even aware of the possibility of other options. He may even say that his master is a very good individual and he’s proud to be his slave. None of these means that there is no conflict between those two classes, nor there are no classes.
> However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.
Of course there's a literature on it. Tribalism is one of humanity's most primitive traits. Being principled, reasoning, and being fair are the unusual things that develop and are developed by the most advanced civilisations. Just having different prices in shops based on who you are is normal. Having a set price for every customer is the advanced version, and less common.
> So you’re basically against the concept of classes and the act of classification.
No idea where you got that from. I think I was fairly clear in explaining that the concept of classes and the act of classification are value-laden and subjective things, that are applied for the sake of their utility in pursuing equally value-laden purposes. Very much within the "all models are wrong; some models are useful" understanding.
The point is that classes and classification are analytical tools we use for pursuing our own purposes within the world, not sources of empirical information about the world.
> However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.
How do you figure? Surely rejecting a fundamental axiom on which an entire ideological system is based would entail dismissing all subsequent literature predicated on that axiom. If you rejected the premise that the position of celestial objects determined the outcomes of events in human society, would you not dismiss the entire field of astrology on that basis?
> Sure, every human being is unique and individual. But if you take a few million of them, patterns arise. Marketing people know and abuse this.
And they make good use of it in trying to sell narrowly-tailored markets to narrowly-tailored market segments. If they tried to use it as a way of making normative judgments applicable to society as a whole, they'd be neck-deep in error to the same extent as the "class struggle" folks.
> If you actually look at what people are doing, you can observe similar patterns too.
If you actually look at what people are doing, you will almost invariably witness them pursuing their own particular individual interests according to their own particular values and assumptions, and not making their decisions in line with someone else's theoretical constructs.
> Yes some groups fail to act for their best interests because they are oppressed.
Groups do not act at all: first, categories and groups are two different things; second, only individuals act, often in relation to other individuals, and the categorization of those individuals together is itself a post-hoc analysis.
People generally do act in pursuit of their best interests: even if people are being oppressed, oppression itself is an external phenomenon -- it may constrain the range of feasible choices available to an individual, but it cannot usurp the agency of individuals in making choice between the options that remain available.
Naturally, these "acting against their own interests" claims are made by external observers looking at people actually making choices from whatever options are available, and concluding that of those available choices, they chose the one less compatible with their own interests.
In almost every such case, the observer drawing that conclusion has projected their own notion of what the other party's interest ought to be onto them, rather than attempted to ascertain what their interests actually are. No one is actually obligated to determine their own interests in compliance with someone else's taxonomies or values hierarchies -- everyone can and does do so according to their own.
>However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally.
You can, you just assert that everyone is a worker and a capitalist simultaneously and that these individual components exist independent of their classification and the assortment of people into groups of classes and that what you call class is just the mundane reflection of some of those components outweighing other components.
When I suggest a tax on holding cash, hardline communists will argue along this insane line of thinking "this will impact workers the most because they are holding most of their net worth in cash". Ah yes, the capitalist worker, fighting for his capitalist interests. Amazing. What was the class struggle about again? Blaming others and absolving yourself of your own responsibility to fix this mess of an economy? Great, you are the problem!
Any remotely sane person siding with workers would realize that workers have an asset known as their own body including the associated lifespan of that body and this is an asset that is producing a future income over time. This asset is illiquid and completely exempt from a money based tax, but if you were to introduce a true wealth tax on all physical capital, the government would not be in the wrong if it assessed the "net worth" of your body and taxed you accordingly. So the ideology of taxing property directly is inherently a tax on labor and therefore not much different from a capitalist taking a cut from your labor. Meanwhile the tax on holding money is purely a tax on a passthrough asset that nobody should hold significant quantities of to begin with. In a hypothetically perfectly optimized society, nobody pays that tax because the transient money supply is zero, that's very different from a tax that grows indefinitely.
If the categories here are truly a priori, then it seems strange to mistrust them? Maybe you mean a posteriori?
I think I get the angle here, but the whole thing about a single category/classification/abstraction against a continuum is that it doesn't need to speak to or predict the entire continuum, or to every quality and aspiration of one of its members. One set of things, "those items which have X", need not exclude their members from being in another set which might deal with Y and Z! The concept of a single class, whether we are talking Bertrand Russell or Marx, != complete "taxonomic" classification. As such, a social class is, yes, a lossy abstraction taken from the point of view of any given individual, but it's not like it's failing at being a good category because this is so. That's just, like, how concepts in general work?
I wonder what politics looks like following through with your argument? How do we conceive of things like the "public best interest" if any given classification is doomed to not capture people actually? What is the "public" here? Are there children? Seniors? Veterans?
> As such, a social class is, yes, a lossy abstraction taken from the point of view of any given individual, but it's not like it's failing at being a good category because this is so. That's just, like, how concepts in general work?
Sure. What I'm pointing out is that using the concept of social class as the lens through which you analyze all human social interaction, and draw conclusions about the entire fundamental organization of society, is a case of erroneously universalizing a lossy abstraction.
And when people obsess over social class to the point of characterizing every question, debate, or controversy in society as a manifestation of "class struggle", and criticize people for framing their relations with others in society through some lens other than social class, isn't that clearly what's happening? Isn't that what happened right here in this thread, and led to us having this very debate in the first place?
> I wonder what politics looks like following through with your argument? How do we conceive of things like the "public best interest" if any given classification is doomed to not capture people actually? What is the "public" here? Are there children? Seniors? Veterans?
Well, that's exactly the point. Maybe the answer is that the question doesn't pertain to "the public" as some unified aggregate, but is actually something that different subsets of the public need different approaches to. Maybe the best interest of "the public" aggregated into a singular entity is to to figure out how best to disaggregate the question.
If you are using whatever single concept to explain everything, you certainly aren't using it right! No reason to throw the baby out with the bath water though... Like, there is nothing intrinsic to the concept of social class (or, any class) which implies it needs to be used the way you are saying.
Don't we at the very least want to know who might, for whatever reason, not be able to support themselves day to day? So they don't like starve in their homes? Is there at least an answer for that? An aggregate which might past muster?
I do, although in my particular case, I'm on an individual plan and not part of a group plan. But I acknowledge your point that this is one of the few cases where aggregations are a relevant unit of analysis, since the point of insurance is to average out risk within a large set of people.
I will say, though, that this perfectly elucidates my point that classification is a purpose-driven, subjective undertaking -- the classifications used for risk pooling in the insurance industry have nothing at all to do with the model of social class advanced by various polemicists here and elsewhere, due to being devised by different people for different purposes.
Having read history and knowing a bit about labor conditions before workers fought for rights, I find it odd to find someone who rejects the idea that class struggles exist, or that those with riches don't try to protect their exclusive access to those riches more often than not.
Specific workers may have had to fight for rights against specific employers, and this certainly happened quite a bit in the past. Conflicts of interest and adversarial games (in the game theory sense) can and do take place in many varied social contexts.
To abstract all of this into some generalized notion of "class struggle" that presumes that that "workers" as a category are at all times locked into a zero-sum struggle against all "bosses" is not just empirically false, but is actually a notion that has at times been calcified into a dogma used to justify incredibly destructive and oppressive behavior.
The prioritization of categories over human beings in the attribution of moral agency is a profound error.
In my experience, these class warfare conspiracists see class warfare in everything. Everything in human society gets reduced down to one side is the oppressor and one side is the victim. And they’re always the victim.
EDIT since I can’t reply:
It’s true that capital and labor often have competing goals, but they also have alignment at times. And labor also has different goals from consumers, from other groups of labor, etc. Capital owners are also in fierce competition with each other! And many individuals in the world are playing multiple roles in the system at the same time! I’m a consumer, a capital owner, a CEO, a wage worker, etc, all at the same time. I also have a bunch of stakeholders that I answer to: customers, investors, employees, the government, etc.
So I object to the simplification of reducing a global system of ten billion humans with their own agency and circumstances, all collapsed down to one side vs another side, with the capital class in conspiratorial lockstep with each other, when the reality is much more complicated and interdependent.
I also object to the constant claims of conspiracy among capital holders. Capital holders are also in extremely fierce competition with each other, and they are in turn beholden to consumers / buyers, etc.
> I also object to the constant claims of conspiracy among capital holders. Capital holders are also in extremely fierce competition with each other, and they are in turn beholden to consumers / buyers, etc.
Cause we’ve never seen capital holders collude to keep wages down. Certainly never in the technology industry. It’s just pure competition as nature intended.[1]
Of course we see all kinds of illegal, anti-competitive, anti-consumer actions and collusions, etc. We also see all kinds of horrible actions from wage earners, consumers, the government, etc. What is your point?
I'm clearly talking about an attitude that basically all capital owners are in secret cahoots with each other to destroy their sworn enemy: workers. Aka, the class war they don't want you to believe is happening.
They were literally in cahoots to keep wages down, you can’t hand wave it away as nonsense when it’s factually occurred.
You do have bad actors amongst labor but everytime labor tries to coordinate together the union crushing apparatus comes out so you don’t tend to see as much coordinated bad activity.
And with AI we’re not seeing companies chomping at the bit to make all their employees more productive left and right, we’re seeing them chomping at the bit to see how many employees they can cut
