Is this an objection to the notion that people can have anything in common?
Or just that they can’t have “class” in common?
One nurse is an entirely different person to another nurse, and yet if you got them talking they’d be all but guaranteed to have plenty to talk about - at least as far as work and types of interests go.
The same for fathers, the same even between all family members - they are a “group” of individuals by virtue of having things in common whether through one of many roles they each play in their life, genetics, or some other common ground.
“Selling wage labour” as opposed to “buying it and the use of money as capital” each serves a different distinct function, even though they can overlap to different degrees for each individual person. A “working class” individual will be more reliant on selling their labour in order to remain qualified to participate in the economy, having too little capital to no longer have to do that - i.e. “earning” money from owning the property that other people work with and thus having claim over any of the profits “gained” from paying workers less than they earn you. It’s a very broad distinction between the two roles, with every unique person having a different life experience of each of the two roles.
I’m not sure if it was Marx, but I think it was, who observed that a working class person would probably have more in common with another working class person from a far removed country than they would a capitalist from a nearby neighbourhood. Things overlap a little more nowadays with the “middle class”, but the observation will still stand to an averaged-out degree.
Such a claim would seem as broad as if you replaced the term “working class” with either “male” or “female” though. Mechanics or mothers have more specific experiences in common, and it’s easy to identify them as a group even if each member is a very different person overall. But the same concept goes for gender and class simply by virtue of having a significant part of one’s unique life in common with other people. The reasoning therefore goes that it’s odd that “class consciousness” wasn’t a particularly binding ground to say “you have something in common with a bunch of other people and thereby qualify as a distinct group”, when other broad things like gender, job and family role always were seen as legitimate common grounds to substantiate a “group”. Therefore wouldn’t it be interesting to see if raising “class consciousness” went anywhere towards rethinking normalised economic strata and perhaps revolutionise economics?
In short, just like any other group can have common struggles by virtue of things they have in common in their life, why can’t “broad economic role” be a common struggle by virtue of having that in common with separate/other/different people?
The struggles of parenthood and jobs don’t make you a victim any more or less than your economic role, even capitalists have their own common struggle by virtue of their common economic situation - even though they’re all completely different people. Working individually or collectively to overcome these difficulties is what everyone does, so why is it particularly bad if the working class do the same?
It’s funny that both political groups - for and against the notion of “class struggle” - each complain about the others complaining over nothing.
Where is the introspection, and impartial personal evaluation? Less hypocrisy would go a long way to resolution, in my opinion. But then, it occurs to me that that’s the whole point - to not resolve things. People love to externalise their anger and frustrations upon a common “enemy”. It’s been a while, but I think this is a point Nietzsche made in “Beyond Good and Evil” - that “wrong” is socially defined by what the other tribe with whom they war does differently to them. We see the same thing on this forum all the time. I’ve still never read “Human, all too human”, but it probably covers similar themes - at least the title rings true on this “very human” behaviour.
So welfare is no trouble, so long as the country is rich enough to afford it for a scarce enough population?
Similarly, I’ve brought up the topic of how Capitalism works best for poorer countries with an abundance of people.
I think Social Democrats and Communists tend to have so much beef with each other because they’re annoyed that the other group is approaching progression in “the wrong way” when they could be combining their resources and have more of a chance of success. A Conservative might quip that they’re both right, but whilst Social Democrats pursue reform and regard revolution as too extreme and unnecessary, Communists regard anything short of revolution as insufficient and only serving to tinker with a fundamentally broken system and therefore justify it staying mostly as it is. It’s an ongoing trend in my country for all the left wing parties to collectively outnumber the right wing parties by a significant margin, but the right wing still consistently gets in because there’s less variation that’s more consolidated in the fewer number of parties.