It's Heating Up ( is "class" in the US today a meaningful con cept for analysis and organizing?)

[Paul Mielke]

Try, especially, Erik Olin Wright's "Class Counts", either the 1997 or the 2000 (student) edition from Cambridge University Press.

-----Original Message-----
From:	Mikalac Norman S NSSC [SMTP:MikalacNS at NAVSEA.NAVY.MIL]
Sent:	Monday, October 30, 2000 7:28 AM
To:	'lbo-talk at lists.panix.com'
Subject:	RE: It's Heating Up ( is "class" in the US today a meaningful con	cept for analysis and organizing?)

ok, i'll check out your author suggestions, but they better be talking about
US citizens in 2000, not Europeans in 1850.

thanks for your response.

norm

-----Original Message-----
From: Justin Schwartz

If you really want to think about whether Marxist definitions of class might

be useful, you ought to read some of the literature on the subject. On one 
account (G.A. Cohen's), class is defined by ownership and control of 
productive assets: those who control their own labor power but no 
significant productive assets are workers, for example. This leaves out the 
dimensions of class consciousness and organization that Marx insists on and 
which are emphasozed by E.P. Thompson. the problem of the "middle 
class"--people who seem to own some productivea ssets but not toi be either 
classic small producers or big capitalsits--is extensively discussed, e.g., 
by Eric Olin Wright. A good summary of the recent debate on classes is in 
Jeffrey Sitton's Recent Marxist Theory. But don;ta ssume that Marxism is 
naive about class: if there is one thing that that they have paid some 
attention to, it's that. --jks