Hello, I'd like to debate the issue of social classes here. I know this is often associated with Marxism. But let's discuss the different perspectives on this. The first question would be
Do social and economic classes exist?
And if this is confirmed, then one needs to ask:
Is there something like class struggle?
What would be a good libertarian perspective on this all.
If you rank people into ordinal categories then associate fictional behavioural properties to the categories, than yes.
One can rank and categorize people according to their income, whether they have assets within certain levels, formal education, type of occupation etc. And then one can investigate their behaviour. It's of course a bit tricky to assign causalities there.
A few methodological questions:
Would assigning a person to a class on a practically unchangeable trait (sex, race) be in line with your approach?
Do you see a class as a single overwhelming poperty for a person, or is it ok for a person to belong to a lot of classes? To infinitely many, in fact, limited only by imagination?
yes
dont know about the libertarian perspective
http://agorism.info/AgoristClassTheory.pdf
found this, ill be able to read it later
@ Andris, The following would be my opinion for now: - class traits can change unlike traits related to sex and race. - one can however be born into an economic class as defined above. i.e ones parents or guardians can fall into them. - IMO economic class would be possible to change during a persons life time. There maybe other barriers to do that, except for legal ones.
- How dominant "being in a class" is on the persons behaviour would be an interesting question. Or perhaps whether there are personality traits that influence a person to live as part of a certain class. A hen and egg situation may also be a possibility.
http://mises.org/document/6087/The-Clash-of-Group-Interests
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It's easy to refute an argument if you first misrepresent it. William Keizer
"Do social and economic classes exist?"
Yes, but how you define these is entirely arbitrary, so their level of "existence" or even "reality" is sort of up in the air depending upon your definition of classes in the first place or upon what you consider either of the above words to mean.
"Is there something like class struggle?"
Certainly, although the exact nature of the class struggle depends upon time, place, and definition of "struggle".
"What would be a good libertarian perspective on this all."
Remember that all Libertarianism implies is anti-government, you could still totally believe in classes and be a libertarian. With this said many libertarians either deny the importance of class or, for the most part rightly, claim that the existence of government exacerbates the problem. A good Austrian insight is that people don't act according to class unless there's something compelling them to doing so (such as being convinced of acting in a certain way, or aligning themselves based upon some sort of shared bond or the like), otherwise individuals will act relatively independently. We also know through catallactics that on the free market class distinctions based upon income result from voluntary exchanges on the market, and therefore the ones who produce the most for others in one way or another are the ones who will receive the greatest amount of income.
Narrowing your question would add to the discussion
I'll second this. Even if you block quote a Mises / Rothbard / Shumpeter /whatever article talking about class to help put this into a better context
I don't think it would be too contraversial to say the Austrian Perspective would say: these are things that exist in our minds, if that is a sufficient enough answer.
"As in a kaleidoscope, the constellation of forces operating in the system as a whole is ever changing." - Ludwig Lachmann
"When A Man Dies A World Goes Out of Existence" - GLS Shackle
But dont get excited. History and events can only be understood through individual human actions. If by class struggle, you mean a bunch of people who have roughly the same living standards, motives, and beliefs working together, we have plenty of historical examples of that, both violent and nonviolent. But it means little if your lens is focused on things so big that you cant see the individuals responsible for the events you witness. Nationalism is a powerful idea, it has killed countless individual human beings.
My response to your first question would be "No" and my response to your second question would, obviously, also be "No". The entirety of the concept of classes warring between each other seems to me to be fundamentally incompatible with methodological individualism; only individuals can act, not groups, and they act for a multitude of reasons and not strictly along "class lines". The concept also fails the simple litmus test of common sense; if, say, incomes of $100,000 and above are "upper class" and all other incomes are "lower class", does this mean that when an individual moves from an income of $99,999.99 to $100,000 that his "class consciousness" changes from the lower to the upper class, seemingly by magic?
I think class struggle (as defined by Marx) is interesting, but doesn't say as much as it thinks it does. Mises and Hayek provided devastating refutations of both the theory as presented by Marx, and the institutions constructed under the guise of elevating the "working class" and wiping out the "bourgeoisie", communism and socialism.
Agorism recasts this struggle as being between those in power, attempting to live off of the efforts of others through coercion, and those operating in a productive manner through voluntary non-coercive actions. That's a more realistic stratification if one were to make this attempt. However, in practice we find that both (workers and the bourgeoisie) attempt to use the coercive governmental apparatus to live off of the other in our current social democracies.
The capitalist system as described by Marx is an emergent system. One that arises out of the praxeological nature of man IF combined with a stable political system that emphasizes and protects individual property rights. However, we've seen that in practice due to their monopolistic nature, these "stable political systems" aren't in fact stable. They gradually (see Crisis and Leviathan) decay and atrophy as more and more "citizens" attempt to use the state to live off of their fellows. We can't all live off of someone else.
So, do social and economic classes exist? Sure if you say so. But be careful, this viewpoint may obscure other more important ways of looking at the political, economic and social phenomena. I would start with a deep and fundamental understanding of Praxeology, and I'd start that understanding with Mises's book "The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science"
Is there something like class struggle? Yes and no. Class struggle is an interesting way to group a set of general disputes and dissatisfactions that are commonly experienced by men who have a set of similar attributes (wage earners). Again, I find it more interesting to get a clear understanding of the social sciences by starting with Praxeology see the book I referenced.
It's also important to note that both Mises and Schumpeter agreed that an understanding of classes is important to understanding a historical event. Classes, if used in a useful manner, describe little more than a general way that people under certain conditions. It is a limited and flawed concept, for the only entirely "true" class would be all relavent knowledge upon a specific individual. With this said any sort of relavent economic analysis, including Austrian economics, depends upon an understanding of classes. AE uses the concept of capitalist, laborer, landowner, consumer, and government at practically every turn, but this does not deny the variation within the implied groups of people, only their role within the economy insofar as they perform certain tasks.
Furthermore the leftist dreamworld of all out class warfare is equally possible. Theoretically every single individual who owned capital could come together and attempt to depress wages, they would do so as long as they were able and believed that it would lead to a more pleasant outcome than any other would. The fact is that this is just very unlikely. It is equally possible to imagine a world in which the vast majority of people who make less than 60K a year decided that they were the enemies of those who owned capital, in the past the conditions have simply never brought this state of affairs about.
There is no contradiction between being a believer in radical individual subjectivism and believing that 99.999 percent of all people will choose to keep drinking liquids.
To paraphrase Schumpeter in "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy": The interactions of classes may well describe, if not the entirety of of history, then a good deal of it, but in which way one defines classes is highly relevant.
One can always make abstractions like "class," and they can be useful, but you have to remember it's just intellectual shorthand; a "class " has no motives, thoughts, actions, etc. This problem of ontologically prioritizing abstractions over the reality from which they're abstracted is ubiquitous in many fields of knowledge.
Agorism recasts this struggle as being between those in power, attempting to live off of the efforts of others through coercion, and those operating in a productive manner through voluntary non-coercive actions. That's a more realistic stratification if one were to make this attempt.
Indeed. It's always been the political versus the economic means.
Agorist class theory is, imo, too simple. That's something like saying there are two classes- those that violate NAP, and those that don't. That's a moral, not a class distrinction, you can't belong to the "class" of NAP breakers by birth.
There are, as far as I know, three alternatives.
Webberian upper-middle-lower class distinction, which is pretty much the most common sense one, depending on the amount of wealth.
Marxian class theory with the main bourgeoisie-proleteriat distiction is based on the ownership on the means of production, with nonsensical additions making classes up to 10 in number.
Also, there's the Proudhonian/Chernovian toilers-exploiters class distinction, based on the Rousseauan labor theorty of property.
I think I address the ontological issue concerning classes first:
I agree that it can be done entirely arbitrary. However I think there could be valid distinctions between classes, subclasses, too. Distinctive marks could be - The type of occupation - Whether a person gains an income by labor or by absentee ownership. - Whether the income is sufficient for sufficient savings to built assets or not. Additionally there may be sociological questions regarding with whom a person assossiates, where he stays, life styles etc.