I would second the postings of Max, Justin and Doug to the effect that struggles around issues of economic justice [very roughly speaking, the relations between 'haves' and 'have nots'] are very pertinent for political organizing on the left. They remain central to any left project, both as a matter of political right (they ought to be) and as a matter of political strategy (a left which discards struggles for economic justice abandons any hope of a majoritarian social base.)
But it seems to me that this is a separate question from whether or not the classical Marxist concept of class is the best, the most useful, means of understanding those struggles. On this matter, I would express some strong reservations.
For one, we should start by admitting that the Marxist concept of class is not the only way to conceive of relations of economic injustice and struggles around it; certainly, in the field of sociology, and even in economics, there are other ways of looking at the phenomena, some of which, such as left Weberian models, clearly provide an alternative view from the left. One would thus have to examine the relative merits of the different conceptions.
For another, I believe that the Hegelian apparatus of Marx's concept of class, with notions of objective, "classes in themselves" and subjective, "classes for themselves," is really metaphysical in nature, and not very helpful in understanding the ways in which the 'existence' and 'being' of 'class' are inextricably joined in social practice.
On a third count, I believe that the ways in which the Marxist concept of class is deeply embedded in an ontology, a notion of man as a laboring being and of human nature as labor, is quite problematic. The types of impediments such an ontology poses in understanding 'class' relations can be seen in the inane debates within Marxism over "productive" vs. "unproductive" labor, and the religious ways in which some Marxists insist upon holding onto a notion taken straight out of bourgeois thought -- the labor theory of value -- despite the obviously problematic nature of its contentions. [Ever since Locke, the labor theory of value was a staple of bourgeois thought, reappearing in Rousseau and Hegel as well as Smith, since it provided the grounds for critiquing pre-bourgeois, "unproductive" forms of class rule.]
So much of current Marxist writing on class is caught up in attempting to make this inadequate apparatus work merely as a description of the existing class relations (i.e., all of the focus on figuring out where to put the various middle strata), that it is of little or no use in understanding the relations at work. Hell, Erik Olin Wright has made a very productive academic career simply out of producing endless taxonomies of Marxist classes. And the ways in which this focus on 'productive' labor establishes the "industrial working class" as some sort of key class vanguard, independent of all concrete political analysis of the conjuncture and in defiance of its waning role in contemporary capitalism, is hardly helpful in understanding organizing around relations of economic injustice.
The one major exception to these reservations is the literature that developed, in the wake of Braverman's classic _Labor and Monopoly Capital_, on the subject of the labor process, and on the role of struggles around 'deskilling' and knowledge in class relations. This body of work provides some quite useful concepts for understanding contemporary social class, IMHO.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --