New Classes, New Markets?

While I found the Ehrenreich's analysis of the PMC thought provoking and at least an important step forward in understanding class in the US, I found many of the critiques far too theoretical to take seriously. However, Sandy Carter's examination injected a level of reality into the collection as a whole, reorienting theoretical marxism to lived life. Carter's analysis of the PMC did not start from a theoretical grounding of Marx's definitions, categories, subcategories and subsubcagetories, but from a real historical-anthropological look into people's experiences and relations. And while Cohen and Howard tried to use the concept of social relations, they used a blunt theoretical term instead of actual social relations in the real world. They wind up sounding like nitpicking schoolmasters furious at a student for forgetting a Latin noun declension. By starting from people's lived experience, Carter shows us that there is some sort of social division between managers/professionals and the working class that demands attention by social theorists even if it does not represent the emergence of a new class. The methods of historical materialism pioneered by Marx cannot simply rest on authority, but need to dynamically look into lived social relations and conditions. And in the United States, at least, one cannot talk about a unified “working class” in the same sense that one could in 19th century England.

If the PMC exists, I think that it would be fruitful to begin to think about the production of labor as a commodity, and a fetishized commodity at that. While Marx pays a lot of attention to labor as a commodity that can be bought and sold, he does not differentiate between different types of labor or different ways of producing laborers. However, it is imbedded in the language of the education system, where universities talk about “producing scholars” and the “job market.” Labor, whether mental or physical, must be produced just like any other commodity, and the 20th century did a great job of branding just what kind of labor we all possess. You only need to look on craigslist to find the job market divided between the sorts of jobs you can get with a high school diploma, a GED, an MA, a BA, a JD and a million different types of certificates or licenses. Regardless of whether or not there is one working class, the labor market seems to have changed a lot since our friend Mr. Moneybags first bought a man's labor power in Capital. Therefore, the underlying phenomenon of the Ehrenreichs' study of the PMC must reveal some fundamental shift in the way capitalism has developed in the 20th century, with an expansively complex market for labor. Even if this simply means a diversified proletariat, or a new petty bourgeoisie, the implications of this new development must be taken seriously for marxist thought to go anywhere, and we need to craft new questions to push this thought forward. Is there one labor market, or many? What do managers really do? Can class consciousness be achieved within a diversified class? What happens during major recessions when people drop down a class?

Without questioning Marx's definitions and explanations, we cannot come up with a complete model for the economic and cultural world.