Just an aside before I begin today: I’ve gone back to teaching and the semester is ramping up. This will be the last scheduled Monday post for a while – there may be occasional ones in the future, but you should not expect them every Monday. I know that some people have come to expect them, and I’m sorry to stop, but this isn’t yet a job for me, and I have only so many hours in the day.

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In my piece on Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” I touch upon the idea of class. The one thing I note that I want to zoom in on is the statement:

I feel like a lot of even the most well-meaning critiques completely fail to understand that class isn’t just how much money you have. Class status isn’t akin to race or gender, which Krul is correct to note are inscribed on the body of a person; it may be more akin to a mental illness. I understand Fisher grew up working class, so may have been free to forget that he was white or male in the privacy of his own mind, but he could never be free of the skinner-box anxiety.

I later go on to amend this, stating that “It seems to me that if an impoverished person is no longer impoverished, they retain the traumatic awareness of money and its lack. It is inscribed on the body, invisibly, in the nerves and adrenal glands, but it is inscribed.”

Please note, in this section, I’m referring to the conception of trauma that I put forward in “Again and Again: On the Nature of Trauma and its Connection to Art” – to reiterate, I frame trauma is a sort of memory-sink, a whirlpool in our recollections that draw us back, repeatedly, to a moment from which we desire to escape.

This piece – at least how I imagine it going at this point in the drafting process – is informed by McKenzie Wark’s book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? In which she takes the Marxist position: class is a dialectic relation, framed as how one relates to the means or forces of production. The oldest relation is based on the land – the farmer works the land to produce food and necessary goods, and pays rent to the land-lord. Next came the relationship of the Proletariat to the Bourgeois. The former works the factory, the latter owns the factory. She says that informational technology has resulted in the emergence of a new means of production and a contingent class relation. The Hacker produces novel arrangements of information; the Vectorialist owns the Vector along which the information moves.

Notably, we can look at this through the lens of acceleration – the Hacker and Vectorialist existed in the middle ages, but the Hacker was a scholar and the Vectorialist was the collective entity of the monastic order that reproduce copies of the book. This was an unsophisticated version of this relationship, and a largely non-economic relation, only becoming a viable mode of economic interaction with the introduction of the Gutenberg press, thus allowing information (in the form of books) to be commodified and subjecting it to market forces.

With the introduction of the same technology that’s allowing me to shout into the void and you to read this, it’s accelerated yet further: information is now ubiquitous, as easy to access as a breath of air. Interpretation, knowledge, sense – these things are subject to scarcity.

This is, fundamentally a critique derived from Marx. The reason I bring up Wark, though, is that she does a fantastic review of the literature on class relations that I wanted to get through before I dive into my own interpretation. She identifies, in addition to the Marxist approach the “Durkheimian” and the “Weberian” models

The Durkheimian approach focuses on selection and self-selection into closed groups who interact more with each other than with other groups. Credentials and the formal definition of occupations play a role here. This works well for explaining individual-level outcomes.

So Durkheim is focused on the interpersonal, while Weber takes a more macro-level approach:

A key to Weberian theories is opportunity hoarding or social enclosure, by such means as credentialing, licensing, the color bar, or gender exclusions. . . Both Marx and Weber saw property as fundamental to a relational concept of class. Both grasped the distinction between objectively defined class and subjectively lived class. Both thought humans followed material interest in the long run. . . However, Weber was much less inclined to think classes would polarize and become the key social dynamic.

Much of this is drawn from a work by Erik Olin Wright, entitled Understanding Class, but I must admit to only having encountered this work second hand – hence my use of quotes from Wark.

Wright’s own theory about class hinges on three axes: Relations of Property, Authority, and Expertise. In short, who owns what, who can tell who what to do, and who is understood to know more.

I was led to believe that being a worker would involve a lot more of being fed through the inside of a monstrous engine of some variety.

Meanwhile, I spent all of yesterday and the day before working in a retail environment, and this is where I start my critique of class-as-relation-of-production. If I sell five hundred dollars worth of product (and it’s wild to me that, in the back room, we just refer to it as “product” – as if to emphasize that this was produced somewhere and there is in a relationship to production) have I created anything?

No! I didn’t create shit.

Does this mean I own things?

No! I don’t own anything in that building that I didn’t carry into it on my person.

So I am neither a worker-of-the-means-of-production nor am I an owner-of-the-means-of-production. I am the error message of the Marxist class relation.

In the piece I wrote on automation in the arts (“You Can’t Automate Enlightenment”) I discuss the labor theory of value, namely, that human effort is the only source of economic value: generally, things are more valuable if more hours of labor went into their creation.

So what are my efforts? Is my labor the waste-heat of the engine of capital?

Only if a sanitation worker’s is, too. Sanitation workers dispose of waste, and without them we’d be swimming in our own filth. Their labor is valuable.

(Fundamentally, my job is like that of a sanitation worker, because we are both trying to make sure that something ends up in a place. We’re facilitating movement.)

Only if a nurse’s is, too. Care workers don’t actually “produce” anything – this doesn’t mean that their labor has no value. Quite the contrary

(Fundamentally, my job is like that of a care worker, because we’re both using a social toolkit and specialized knowledge to help people pass through our place of employment.)

Like this. What kind of mileage do you think he gets on that thing?

So while production is definitely part of it, I think that value must be considered separately from production. The concept of the White Elephant – in its original construction, as something valuable but undesired, something that requires effort to maintain but cannot be easily offloaded because of its value and the contingent effort required – puts a lie to the idea that value is derived from desire.

Now what does that mean?

Is value like matter or energy, something that can neither be created nor destroyed, only shuffled around, like numbers in a spreadsheet?

(I have entertained this thought: perhaps economic activity is just about moving pre-existing value around the world.)

I think this is as false as the other idea, and we’re getting very deep into the weeds here, very far from the original topic. I don’t think that value works like any of these things, and I feel like the question of value is to big a one to handle as a subsidiary point.

Instead of looking at things in terms of what people do or what people get, I think it’s best to take a more apophatic approach. In short: let’s talk about a class in terms of what it isn’t.

Leaving aside the question of value and relations to the means of production, let’s talk about speeding tickets in Finland. That link is to an Atlantic article from 2015, entitled “Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket” — the article describes a system in Scandinavia whereby fines are keyed to the income of a person instead of static to the crime. In short, it’s an attempt to address what I think is the key marker of class: who is subject to which punishments for which transgressions.

Finland: a nation with robust social programs, but also the nation that put the fear of winter into the Russians. — Finland: a nation with robust social programs, but also the nation that put the fear of winter into *the Russians.*

To a struggling delivery driver, a $75 ticket could be the difference between employment and unemployment. To a wealthy lawyer, it’s an annoyance. This is, of course, leaving aside whether the lawyer would ever be subject to the ticket in question (different groups being policed differently.) What to one person is nothing, is to the other person is everything.

Let’s consider shoes: sturdy shoes that last a long time are more expensive, and thus are out of reach for people of less means, and if you need shoes now instead of in six weeks, you buy the cheaper ones, even though you’re going to replace them ten times as quickly as the other pair. The way the system is structured, the poorer person’s need is (effectively) punished and the wealthier person’s need is filled.

Let’s talk about housing. Rent paid is money lost: it goes into the pocket of the property owners. Mortgage paid is not just generally cheaper, but can be regained if the house is sold. Likewise, any disputes about this (in American law) are civil disputes, meaning there is no right to an attorney, meaning that the poorer party is required to represent themselves if they can’t afford an attorney and is starting out behind the 8-ball.

The more means you have, the fewer punishments you are subjected to. The less stress you feel (not no stress, but generally less.) In our society, there is a desire by those with means for this system to be continued and strengthened — because otherwise they might be subjected to the same punishments.

This, more than relations to modes of production, seems to be material to me on the social level. It’s a problem of hierarchy.

It’s almost like this problem has been noted before.

Edgar, notably disagrees: they have said in the past that class is mostly about expectation. Class-position is based on what you expect and want out of life, and what you are expected to want out of life. I think there is something to this, but fundamentally it is the fact of surplus sadism and hierarchization is the problem that needs to be solved.

Even in a supposedly classless society, I think that there would be analogous self-chosen blocks of the population. I don’t think this is the problem. I think the existence of one, singular, all-pervading hierarchy is the problem.

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On Class and Hierarchy