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I do not entirely enjoy it when people get "what class actually is" and "a Marxist analysis of economic relations" confused like this. It's one of my least-favourite failure modes for Leftist thought. (Thread) https://twitter.com/FayeEcklar/status/1295788247893721088
Like, YES it is useful to define what we mean when we say "Bourgeois"! It adds a layer to a person's understanding of both class and how the world works if they grasp that the Marxist definition of "Bourgeoisie" is not the colloquial one. It's a good set of lenses to have.
It is, however, one you should don in addition to your existing lens, and use when appropriate. You need class consciousness before a Marxist analysis of class can be helpful. Many people don't seem to have that, or be aware of it anyway. And without that base, Marx doesn't scan.
Americans, I have noticed, are particularly bad at this. It isn't exactly surprising, for reasons mostly having to do with race and how that's used as a default schema for social interaction instead of class by most people here. And it makes it really easy to misapply Marx.
Being from the UK — somewhere that used to have an honest-to-god, legally-enforced class system — this is less of an issue. Growing up with a keen awareness of class, you get to understand it pretty well. Marx's ideas on it were no great revelation to me, when I read him.
([White] Brits, in our turn, tend to lack racial consciousness and it obscures race in a similar way American racism does class. That's where we often fall down in analysis, the thing for which we have no instinct. Where Americans fail to recognise class, we fail on race.)
Class is not — categorically not — solely determined by your relationship to the means of production. It's much, much more complex than that, and simply giving a Marxist analysis of economic relations doesn't change how it works as a social system.
Just saying "if you own the means of production you're Bourgeois and if you don't you're a Worker" is not an analysis of class, it's a description of one aspect of it. And frankly unhelpful when talking about anything other than power-dynamics under Capitalism.
It is reductive and harmful to an understanding of a huge and complex social system like class to split the population into two categories and then try to fit everyone into them. Marx didn't do that, and neither should we. If anything, we need /more/ categories than he used.
The economy, and our society, is far more diverse and globalised than it was in 1867. We have many more different types of worker and sub-classes than are covered a traditional Marxist framework. Which is why arguments like this make no sense: https://twitter.com/FayeEcklar/status/1295788249793753088
It's an artificial line drawn to deal w/ the sense that "these people are of a different class to people who make less money, but don't own the means of production" within a model which precludes making that distinction. The "Labour Aristocracy" doesn't exist, and isn't in Marx.
The reason it feels necessary to do that is because the class system as it exists does not line up with a neat division of society into "owners" and "workers". It is far more stratified. There are many, many different classes, not all of which are in conflict with each other.
If Marx's own set of definitions are no longer sufficient, reductive takes such as the one that made me write this giant-ass thread — insisting that your class is only determined by whether you're an Evil Owner or Heroic Worker — cannot hope to successfully explain society.
Which is why, later in the thread, she has to patch back in the terminology and model of class relations she threw out in the first tweet. You can't talk about class without reference to how people generally conceptualise it, or how it operates materially: https://twitter.com/FayeEcklar/status/1295788257704161280
That she has to do so is telling, and points to where her argument goes off the rails: Marxist theory is meant to be used in addition to the class system people work with every day, to analyse it, and built upon how the society it's used in functions. It is not a replacement.
Ultimately, she's trying to create class consciousness among Americans. And that's a good thing. But you can't just say "the model of this thing you have in your head is wrong; use this instead". People here often have no sense for class, but that's no way to give it to them.
You cannot instil class-consciousness by giving people a Marxist take on economic relations between Owners and Workers. Trying to do so is harmful. Class-consciousness, and an understanding of how class functions in terms people understand and use daily, needs to come first.
Otherwise, you end up tying yourself in knots trying to structure the universe via a tool that was designed for a specific purpose: breaking down how Capital affects class. Capital is not the world. And when we focus only on nailing things, we forget we need more than a hammer.
