Ah, this is a bit late - I got a kind of "writer's block" in taking up a set of issues which demand, probably, both more brains and more background than I've got. This section on Marx and Class War will almost certainly take two and probably three sections by itself.

MARX AND CLASS WAR

One of the charges laid against Marx was that he stirred up, was responsible for, or caused "class conflict" or "class war." The assumption being that if only Marx hadn't mentioned class conflict there wouldn't be a problem. (One hears this charge in American political life when Republicans accuse the Democrats of "stirring up class war").

This is a bit like charging Freud with making people think sex was the root of everything. Well, in many ways it is, but Freud had the "poor taste" of pointing out the obvious and people resented it. The Washington Monument a phallic symbol? Of course it is! But the public likes to admire that vast erection without being reminded of its roots in our unconscious. I'm not going to dig deeper into Freud beyond saying that genius often consists in seeing what is in plain sight. (There is a line from a poem by Kenneth Patchen in which he says "Genius is an enormous littleness" - i.e., the ability to think like a child, to look at the reality right in front of you.)

If there is one thing "in front of us" it is the historic struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed - and in capitalist societies this takes on the inevitable conflict between the capitalist class and the rest of us. We didn't always have classes in the Marxist sense. Studies of the few marginal societies that still exist on the edge of our "advanced civilization," show that these tribes don't have a police force, they lack jails, they have nothing like a "state," and while they have some structure (usually a leader of some kind), they do not have anything similar to our concept of classes.

Those of you who have done any study in anthropology know that it is, first, risky to speak of these isolated tribes as "primitive." In many ways they are not. But they are very different from us. They are also different from each other. (And the few such groups that exist, in Brazil, in the Philippines, in New Guinea, are so swiftly disappearing or being absorbed that their study is now very difficult.) It would, however, be accurate to say that none of these tribes have written languages. Some of these tribes are cooperative, some can be fiercely competitive. In some cultures the sexual roles are sharply differentiated, in others the roles are blurred, almost invisible. There is a marvelous little book, "Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches" by Marvin Harris (Vintage, reissued in 1989) which explained the material basis for tribal wars, why Westerners eat beef but it is taboo in India, and in general shows that the customs we think have deep ideological or religious roots are really based on material conditions.

Certainly there are sharply differentiated classes in earlier civilizations, often hereditary. India is the world's most interesting example of a society in which caste is something you are born into and cannot escape. The caste isn't related to control of the means of production, and it is hard to say that one caste is oppressed or one caste the oppressor (there are, of course, the Indians born outside of caste - the "untouchables," who are literally untouchable and do the shit work of Indian society - there is a similar group in Japan which is rarely even acknowledged as existing). In India you marry within your caste, you cannot "leave" your caste - in some ways there is no "up or down," castes are simply a given, and have specific functions within the broader Hindu society.

In Egypt there was a clear ruling class, as also in American cultures such as the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans. This was a very small group because, as I had pointed out in earlier installments, the "surplus" production of these societies was barely enough to feed everyone, much less support more than a small group at the top, who had access to the tools of civilization - reading, writing, mathematics.

We can't even say with confidence that slavery constituted a "broad class" of the oppressed. In Greece there were relatively few slaves, most Greeks, including those who ran the society, were farmers who might, at most, own one or two slaves. And slavery - a topic I don't want to get into in depth here - was not at all what it was in our own country, where people were taken in chains from Africa, and kept in abject conditions here. In Rome many of the teachers who transmitted the skills of civilization were Greek slaves, educated men and women who had been taken as a prize of conquest. For Americans the concept of slavery is one of color - but this was hardly the case in the longer reach of history. In some ways, from a Marxist point of view, slavery was a sign of "progress" over what came before, since prior to saving those who were conquered and using them as labor, they were killed or, going back farther in time, killed and then eaten. One must assume that most of those Greeks who ended up as slaves in Rome preferred that fate to simply being killed. This is hardly a defense of slavery - only a painful realization that it was a human institution, one we created, and which has now been almost universally abolished (it still exists in some parts of Africa), suggesting that human society is able not only to create dreadful institutions, but able also to abolish them. A reminder that our future is "evitable." We are both creations of the history which came before us, and participants in making the "history" of our own time.

There were certainly slave rebellions, in Rome, and in our own South, but even if slavery had been abolished in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, these would still have been pre-industrial class societies, with power vested in a small handful. There would not, however, have been the kind of class conflict to which Marx referred, which is a characteristic of capitalist society.

During the Middle Ages we had feudalism, in which the serfs or peasants, were in virtual bondage to the "lord", who in turn provided some degree of protection from mauraders. Cities were few in number and small. To talk in terms of some vast surge of "class conflict" would be foolish. (Though the period certainly was prone to mass hysteria of various kinds - the Crusades, one of which was led by children, are a case in point).

There were certainly conflicts in abundance - human society is given to conflict. But social conflicts were mediated by the Church, until that in turn gave way to the rise of the city-states and the nation-states. All of that is a fascinating byway, one in which I am not even a badly informed expert, and about which I am not even going to attempt an exploration.

We are concerned with the rise of the capitalist mode of production in which a specific, and unique, working class was created. Prior to this, you had various guilds of bakers, potters, shoe makers, etc., with the people in charge of production also in charge of the tools. (The shoe maker had the tools of the trade in his shop, the baker had his own oven, the seamstress her own loom). Young people were apprenticed to "master craftsmen", being paid very little but learning the trade. Prices were set not by the market but by arrangements among the guilds. People were industrious enough, but there was no "industry" as we know it today. No factories.

With the rise of capitalism - and here I repeat earlier material - the man with access to capital bought the machines, hired workers to run the machines, and then flooded the market with what were essentially mass produced products. Workers no longer sold finished products they had created with their own hands - now they sold their labor to the owner, the capitalist who had the machinery.

A new class is born, unlike any other in history, the working class, and it is pitted immediately into fundamental conflict with the owners because capitalism is a system in which the market governs the price, and profit is determined by "how little you can pay your workers, and how much you can charge the public". Again, this repeats points I have made earlier. The owner of the factory must make a profit from his workers or he will go bankrupt. And since there is not just "one owner", but many owners, and all are competing, each is trying to maximize his profit by selling more of his goods.

You can increase your profit in various ways. You can find cheaper ways to produce goods, you can improve your machinery, you can train your work force to be more efficient. But whatever you do, if it is successful, will soon be copied by other owners. As an owner you are forced to try to pay the workers as little as possible in order to keep your profits as high as possible. And, alas, even if you are a good and decent man, concerned with the welfare of your workers, if you pay them a higher wage than others in your industry, then you will find you make less profit, until at some point someone who is less good and decent, willing to drive his workers like cattle, beats you in the market and, for all your good intentions, you are bankrupt.

There is no Church to intervene and establish some sense of fair play. It is the market, raw, naked, impersonal. Let me shift to farming for a moment, not as an example of class conflict, but of the extraordinary "brutality" of the free market. The nature of farming is such that if the farmers all work hard, the weather is good, and conditions right, then crops will be so abundant that the price will drop and the farmers may not be able to make even enough money to pay their own costs. This is why a "bad year" for harvests, may be a good year for the farmer. If there is a shortage of wheat or corn, then the price rises and the farmer can make a profit. (Of course a "bad year" may mean some farmers go bankrupt because their crops fail totally).

This is one of the paradoxes of the free market - that in a genuinely free market (and in farming we still have a free market) no one farmer can change the price of corn or wheat by even a tenth of a penny by withholding his crop, or by flooding the market with it. Farmers have fallen back on various forms of state control, subsidies, stockpiling of farm goods - wheat, corn, butter - in order to keep prices up. During the Great Depression in the 1930's the New Deal under Roosevelt even resorted to burning crops and slaughtering pigs wholesale to prevent "too much" from reaching the market and forcng farm prices down.

Turning back to the cities, and the factories, workers found themselves entirely at the mercy of the owners, and formed trade unions to give themselves some kind of bargaining power - the ability to strike, to close down an industry. This was always much more painful for workers, since strikes meant an absolute end of income, than for owners, who always had some money in the bank, or some assets that could be turned into cash and thus into food and clothing.

This was the raw class struggle to which Karl Marx referred, and it was new in human history. The interest of workers and owners are not the same. In our society the press, academics, religious leaders, and both political parties, keep telling everyone that unions and bosses really have the same interests - but this just is not true. The worker wants a decent living. He knows that no matter how hard he works he won't become wealthy. He will always be a worker, a member of the class that sells its labor to the highest bidder. The owners however must maximize their profit, whether they want to or not. They are competing with other firms for "market share", if they lose their market share they go bankrupt. (Only in this sense do workers and owners share a common goal - if a factory closes, not only does the owner lose out, but the workers all lose their means of living and must immediately seek somewhere else to sell their labor).

All the reforms from the 19th and early 20th century, starting in Germany and finally catching up with the US during the New Deal in the 1930's, build a kind of safety net under workers - unemployment compensation, workmen's insurance, social security. We take those things so totally for granted today that it is painful to think about conditions in Europe or here prior to these reforms. If you lost your job how could you live? If no one wanted to hire you, how could you pay for food? If you were injured on the job, and could no longer work, what would happen to you? If you had a family, you were lucky because perhaps they could take care of you. But if your family was very poor, you were out of luck. This is, again, the territory Dickens covered in his novels. A world of "realities so dreadful" that they make our contemporary problems seem minor - if only by comparison.