So, Class

[JimW]

Hmm, most of the biographies I've read (and that's by no means more than a minority of them) have him as having been enrolled at PU as well as working there.

Just had a check as that was off recall; seems he was doing a half-work, half-study thing called 工读 - that sets out the various understandings of it, which seem to mean that he was given easy work on reasonable pay and could audit some classes and joined student debating societies like the philosophy club.
I think the general line is widely accepted, that he remained something of a provincial outsider to the intellectual mainstream in the capital. Here's a random example off Google:
毛泽东在北大的经历是不愉快的，这种不愉快在他一生中都有痕迹，他对知识分子的态度特别是对自由主义知识分子的评价，与他早年的北大经历是有关系的。
"Mao's experience of Peking University was an unhappy one, an unhappiness which marked him throughout the remainder of his life. His attitude to intellectuals, especially liberal intellectuals, is related to his experiences as a young man at Peking University."

E2A: I will be top history trainspotter on this question

 

[Wolveryeti]

Attracting small private investors into the stock market is a means of propping up share prices in an over-heated stock-market - not democratisation in any meaningful sense. It was a feature of 1929 too ...

Greater access to shares is not just an evil ploy to extract surplus value. There are companies that want to list, and people who want to invest. It's a consensual transaction. And just because we're in a downturn now doesn't mean that shares won't be a worthwhile investment in the future, or that the ease of buying them will go down. As a corollary, financial innovation does not always serve the interests of the moneyed elite very well, as the Duke of Westminster is finding out.

As for human capital, in a service-based economy ownership of knowledge becomes central, but the ability to exploit that knowledge (ie human capital) for disproportionate financial gain still remains in the hands of the few.

This is really quite wrong. The story of the last few decades, in the West at least, has precisely been the ability of startups with minimal amounts of capital to become massively successful companies (I'm thinking the information industry, dotcoms, etc). The people running these companies were not those who control the means of production. Nor is entrepreneurial talent something conferred on you by virtue of coming from a wealthy family. It can be learnt in a variety of ways, and is in itself a form of human capital.

Incomes for service sector workers are lower than in manufacturing - the shift has not been of any material benefit to the vast majority of workers.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. It's not a shift that people had much choice in. The comparative advantage for manufacturing a lot of goods has shifted East, leaving behind specialist, high-tech industries, which understandably pay higher wages for their labourers because they are more uniquely qualified than the average service sector worker. If manufacturing occupied as large a share as it did say, 50 years ago, I guarantee you the comparison would look less rosy.

 

[ymu]

Greater access to shares is not just an evil ploy to extract surplus value. There are companies that want to list, and people who want to invest. It's a consensual transaction. And just because we're in a downturn now doesn't mean that shares won't be a worthwhile investment in the future, or that the ease of buying them will go down. As a corollary, financial innovation does not always serve the interests of the moneyed elite very well, as the Duke of Westminster is finding out.

There's a huge difference between an investor with a substantial amount of capital available to risk - and the ability to spread that risk over a wide-ranging portfolio - and the small private investor who is, in effect, gambling their life savings. In 1929, Rockefeller overheard an elevator boy talking about his own portfolio of shares and realised that if the stock market prices were only sustainable by sucking in the personal savings of low-income individuals, it was time to get out. He did, and avoided the losses that followed the crash.

It's fucking bad news when governments start encouraging people to put their savings in the stock market. They're needed to prop up the bubbles. This crash has been on the way since the early 1980's - PEPs and ISAs and homes as investment vehicles all helped delay the inevitable, but they also helped make it as big and painful as it is now. It's not about allowing people to take a share of the profit - it's about the city deciding it needs to make more money and finding some suckers to make it off.

This is really quite wrong. The story of the last few decades, in the West at least, has precisely been the ability of startups with minimal amounts of capital to become massively successful companies (I'm thinking the information industry, dotcoms, etc). The people running these companies were not those who control the means of production. Nor is entrepreneurial talent something conferred on you by virtue of coming from a wealthy family. It can be learnt in a variety of ways, and is in itself a form of human capital.

You've completely missed the point. Human capital comes in the form of knowledge and skills, but the guy who owns the patent makes the money. And yes, in a post-industrial economy, knowledge is a means of production.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. It's not a shift that people had much choice in. The comparative advantage for manufacturing a lot of goods has shifted East, leaving behind specialist, high-tech industries, which understandably pay higher wages for their labourers because they are more uniquely qualified than the average service sector worker. If manufacturing occupied as large a share as it did say, 50 years ago, I guarantee you the comparison would look less rosy.

You make no sense. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared to make way for lower paid service sector jobs. This has not been good for the average worker.

For example, bus drivers in Cambridge are amongst the poorest paid bus drivers in the country. Bus drivers in Oxford, by contrast, are the best paid in the country. The reason is that Oxford still has a manufacturing industry whereas Cambridge has none.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Just had a check as that was off recall; seems he was doing a half-work, half-study thing called 工读 - that sets out the various understandings of it, which seem to mean that he was given easy work on reasonable pay and could audit some classes and joined student debating societies like the philosophy club.
I think the general line is widely accepted, that he remained something of a provincial outsider to the intellectual mainstream in the capital. Here's a random example off Google:
毛泽东在北大的经历是不愉快的，这种不愉快在他一生中都有痕迹，他对知识分子的态度特别是对自由主义知识分子的评价，与他早年的北大经历是有关系的。
"Mao's experience of Peking University was an unhappy one, an unhappiness which marked him throughout the remainder of his life. His attitude to intellectuals, especially liberal intellectuals, is related to his experiences as a young man at Peking University."

E2A: I will be top history trainspotter on this question

Cool.

Awards JimW "top-spod" badge.

 

[Blagsta]

That revolutions that have their roots in working class struggle tend to end intellectual repression. Trying to nudge leaders marginally onto the right side of the classes doesn't particularly matter to this, especially as I bet any leader of such a struggle will fail your personal definition by virtue of having any kind of education.

The class of the leader is less important than what their power base is, anyway.

You might want to look at anarchism and the free school movement.

 

[Paulie Tandoori]

You might want to look at anarchism and the free school movement.

But that would allow for the open-minded working-class, and/or the ability to think freely notion to become prevalent. Which must be dismissed as so many lies. Apparently.

 

[ViolentPanda]

But that would allow for the open-minded working-class, and/or the ability to think freely notion to become prevalent. Which must be dismissed as so many lies. Apparently.

Well, to do so is fundamentally important if you wish to maintain the status quo, and there is a reason that conservatives are called "conservative".

 

[Wolveryeti]

You might want to look at anarchism and the free school movement.

It's a movement, not a revolution though. I have, since the start of this thread only been talking about revolutions - i.e. seizing power.

 

[JimW]

Seizure of power isn't really it:

Unlike Engels, Marx did not consider that the future revolutionary transformation would take place in the same way as past revolutions, like a cataclysm of Nature crushing men, things and consciousness. With the coming of the modern working class, the human race began the cycle of its real history; it entered on the way of reason and became capable of making its dreams come true and of giving itself a destiny in accordance with its creative faculties. The conquests of science and technology made such an outcome possible, but the proletariat had to intervene in order to prevent the bourgeoisie and capital from changing this evolution into a march into the abyss:

“The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.” [13]

So the proletarian revolution would not be a political adventure; it would be a universal act, carried out consciously by the immense majority of the members of society after they had become conscious of the necessity and the possibility of the total regeneration of humanity. As history had become world history the threat of enslavement by capital and its market extended all over the Earth. As a consequence there had to arise a mass consciousness and will fully oriented towards a fundamental and complete change of human relationships and social institutions. So long as people’s survival is threatened by the danger of a barbarism of planetary dimensions, the communist and anarchist dreams and utopias represent the intellectual source of rational projects and practical reforms which can give the human race the taste of a life according to the standards of a reason and an imagination both oriented towards renewing the destiny of humanity.

From Marx: theoretician of anarchism - Maximilien Rubel wot I have been reading today.

 

[Wolveryeti]

Played the definition game enough today, thanks!

 

[JimW]

Played the definition game enough today, thanks!

It's far more than semantics as is obvious even from the extract above.

 

[Blagsta]

It's a movement, not a revolution though. I have, since the start of this thread only been talking about revolutions - i.e. seizing power.

You might want to look at the history of Spain.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

There's a huge difference between an investor with a substantial amount of capital available to risk - and the ability to spread that risk over a wide-ranging portfolio - and the small private investor who is, in effect, gambling their life savings. In 1929, Rockefeller overheard an elevator boy talking about his own portfolio of shares and realised that if the stock market prices were only sustainable by sucking in the personal savings of low-income individuals, it was time to get out. He did, and avoided the losses that followed the crash.

It's fucking bad news when governments start encouraging people to put their savings in the stock market. They're needed to prop up the bubbles. This crash has been on the way since the early 1980's - PEPs and ISAs and homes as investment vehicles all helped delay the inevitable, but they also helped make it as big and painful as it is now. It's not about allowing people to take a share of the profit - it's about the city deciding it needs to make more money and finding some suckers to make it off.

This is very well put. I'm not sure enough people are learning the lessons though. The mantra still seems to be that the government needs to get in and sort things out then get out again, and we're back to a modified version of the status quo. We'll see how quickly people start believing in the bubble if it ever starts reflating.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Played the definition game enough today, thanks!

You haven't played it at all. That's the problem.

You're surrounded by rigorous thinkers on here. The likes of Ymu take the trouble to respond to you with very thought-provoking posts yet you churn out the same crap regardless.

Define your terms. It's really a very basic thing to do.

 

[Wolveryeti]

There's a huge difference between an investor with a substantial amount of capital available to risk - and the ability to spread that risk over a wide-ranging portfolio - and the small private investor who is, in effect, gambling their life savings.

You are assuming that ordinary investors cannot diversify. This isn't true - what about index funds? I agree with a lot of what you've said about the role of the city, but I personally think it should be tackled with tighter regulation and better education.

But anyway, if increased access to share ownership is so completely irrelevant to class structures, what's the point of stratifying in terms of relationship to means of production anyway? Why not just look at, say, incomes?

You make no sense. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared to make way for lower paid service sector jobs. This has not been good for the average worker.

They disappeared because they were not viable. I am struggling to comprehend a reality in which people would have been served better by indefinitely propping up these companies with state aid.

For example, bus drivers in Cambridge are amongst the poorest paid bus drivers in the country. Bus drivers in Oxford, by contrast, are the best paid in the country. The reason is that Oxford still has a manufacturing industry whereas Cambridge has none.

And London's GDP is massive and well above the national average, despite only being 10% manufacturing, compared to the national average of 26%. What's your point?

 

[ymu]

And London's GDP is massive and well above the national average, despite only being 10% manufacturing, compared to the national average of 26%. What's your point?

We're talking about income inequality not GDP, you moron. GDP has risen massively in the last 30 years, but incomes have not. All but the top 10% have seen their income remain the same or get lower, and nearly all of the additional GDP has gone into the pockets of the top 1%.