Class Analysis

I thought of doing a kind of class analysis, kind of like Marx.  However, he tended to see class in terms of the relationships that various people have to the means of production.  This is a valid way of dividing people into various classes, as far as it goes.   Where he errs, and many other leftists err, is in neglecting the relationship between the rulers and the ruled.  This error causes many to refer to the rich as the ruling class, regardless of whether or not they hold a special position in government.

Authority in government means a special right to apply coercion.  In many societies everyone has the right to use coercion to defend themselves.  This doesn't make them part of the government.

In a purely direct democracy we might be tempted to think that there would be no such special right.  I want to examine this a little.  Such a democracy would have to enforce its laws by removing violators from their protection.  Instead of giving an executioner the right to kill a convicted criminal, they would have to give that right to anyone.  That is, the law would no longer recognize killing that individual to be murder.  Instead of prison, we would allow anyone to detain the criminal against his or her will.  This goes beyond what most people mean when they say that democracy is direct.  Legislative power is what they have in mind.

Now, as far as the classes go we have the working class, investors and rulers.  The latter class includes but is not limited to the aristocracy.  The form of government generally refers to the relationship between the rulers and other classes.  Marx spoke of a dictatorship of the proletariat.  If we wanted to, we could charitably interpret this as referring to democracy with universal suffrage.  Democracy that was limited to property owners would be a different system.

However, I don't think this list exhausts the classes of people.  Class denotes how an individual makes a living.  Some earn their money by governing, some through their investments and others by working for investors.  This last group would be part of the proletariat.  We also have government employees, those hired by the rulers.  In addition we have people who make a living from donations, which should be divided into to classes.  There are people who work for charitable organizations, and beggars, who Marx considered part of the lumpen proletariat.  We also have people who provide services for a living, but these can be seen as part of the proletariat.

Unless we are to consider childbearing a service we will also have to include mothers as a special class of person.  A class analysis that fails to take motherhood into account would be incomplete.

I would argue that any class analysis should treat government employees separately.  Employees of charities should also be treated separately, since their living will depend on the moral and ethical values of the society.  Rulers and government employees will depend on the political system, which in turn depends on the moral and ethical values of society.

My approach to class is somewhat more idealistic than that of Marx, since it is not only the mode of production, but also the moral and ethical ideas of society that will have an influence on class structure.

One problem that this kind of analysis has is that people do not fit neatly into one class.  Mothers can work and run for office.  All the other groups can invest.  Motherhood is relevant to class analysis because childbearing involves some loss of the ability to earn wages.  Time and attention spent looking after children will as well.  With the two main classes that Marxists traditionally deal with there are some people who might benefit from an increase in wage rates and others who would suffer as a result.

Marx stated that all of history was the history of class conflict.  Indeed if you take enough classes there is frequently conflict between classes.  However, conflict within classes is common as well.  Take, for example conflict between rulers, or war.  There will often be sectarian conflict between charitable organizations.  Workers will compete for positions.  Romantic rivals will compete against one another.

Conflict need not be violent.  Every election that is contested is a conflict between two or more candidates.  Not even revolution needs to be violent.  Revolution simply means a change in the system.  The changes that I am interested in are structural changes in the system itself, rather than changes as far as who occupies which position.  In this sense, the most revolutionary political development was when women were given the right to vote.  This was accomplished much less violently than other changes.

The future is difficult to predict, but it seems unlikely that we will ever have Communism.  The bourgeoisie are likely to be with us always.  So long as property rights are extended to include capital goods that can be bought and sold, there will be a class of people who own them.  Some will have more of this property than others.  There are likely to be some people who accumulate so much of this property, that they would benefit from a reduction in wages.  However, it is not certain that most of this kind of asset will be owned by such a class.  A society where most of the capital goods are owned by workers is possible and compatible with capitalism.

The most important thing to note here is that capitalism is not a political system.  Bourgeois democracy, or a right to vote that is restricted to property owners, is a political system.  However, this is a different matter.

There are economic revolutions as well as political ones.  Take, for instance, the industrial revolution.  One can think of this as being the change from a system where land was the primary capital good to one where it was not.  There were always tools that humans used for production.  Before this there was the agricultural revolution, which took a lot more time.

Some say we are now in the midst of an information revolution, but all of the major changes in our society are a result of the industrial revolution.  Information technology has made political repression more difficult in some places, but so far it has not given birth to any new form of government that wasn't in widespread use before this new technology was invented.  Also there is the problem of how to tell when the information revolution took place.  Was it with the computer and the internet or the telephone?  Why don't the inventions of the printing press and written language count?

Changes in a political system are changes in the relationship between the rulers and various other classes.  A likely development is toward more direct democracy.  We might see changes between parliamentary democracies and presidential ones.  The voting age might be lowered.  I think we are likely to see protests directed against immigration policy.  I suspect that the net effect is likely to push in the direction of more liberal policies.

Karl Popper pointed out that the main advantage of democracy was not that it enabled the people to rule, which he said never took place, but that it enabled them to replace their rulers.  Indeed any empirically minded philosopher should doubt the ability of the people to form good opinions about prospective rulers when they have not seen them actually rule.

This points us to a distinction between various forms of democracy.  How expensive do the rulers make it for the people to replace them?  I suspect that there might be better ways of selecting good rulers than putting it to a vote.  I have suggested that we conduct an examination instead.  We would conduct elections to determine what proportion of people in the legislature should be replaced.

In order to promote such a system I would have to persuade large numbers of people that that system would be better than the status quo.  I have argued that such a system would provide more incentive for the government to produce legislation that a large number of people would approve of.  Instead of selecting popular measures, they would implement ones that would have popular results.  If they failed to produce those results, individual legislators would be much less likely to retain office than they are under the existing system.

In short, I would be reluctant to agree with a theory of history which attempted to predict future stages that we would go through.  There is less certainty that we should prefer advancement along those stages.  If we want to convince others to prefer some other system to the status quo, we have to come up with valid reasons for them to prefer our favored system.  I believe that we should stress non-violent methods of change over violent ones.  None of Marx's work even approaches an effective way of dealing with the socialist calculation problem, so workers will quite wisely reject socialism, which is not a political system in any case.  In our society the rich are too rich to desire political repression as a means to increase their wealth.

When our founding fathers wrote our constitution they didn't intend it to be a sacred document.  It was constructed in order to bring about desired political ends.  The chief end was to preserve a republican form of government.  We need to acknowledge that some of their ideas were flawed.  The right of the people to keep and bear arms was held as being necessary to prevent tyranny.  Many republics survive quite well without it.  The same goes for the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of government.  Here they were flat out wrong.  Parliamentary democracy has been shown to be more stable.