>And not, surely, "What class do people think they are in?" but "What
>class would (say) 20% of the working class think they were in after five
>years of growing mass activity around a given set of issues?"
That's what Marx says: "For the creation on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, as well as for the success of the cause itself, it is necessary for men themselves to be changed on a large scale, and this change can only occur in a practical movement, in a _revolution_. Revolution is necessary not only because the _ruling_ class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because only in a revolution can _the class which overthrows it_ rid itself of the accumulated rubbish of the past and becomes capable of reconstructing society" (_The German Ideology_). The same goes for social change that doesn't quite amount to revolutionary change in the mode of production: i.e., reforms.
While opinion surveys, ethnographic studies, etc. of people who are not currently politically active in a self-conscious fashion may not be totally useless, what they reveal is mainly "accumulated rubbish of the past" as well as institutionalized gains from past struggles carried over as a matter of habits.
>One of the great changes capitalism brought about was to make absolutely
>fundamental to human life the fact that the world in which an act's
>consequences play out is a different world from the world that existed
>before the act.
Philosophies like David Hume's would have been impossible before the rise of capitalism.
>The title "One Nation" is an obvious lie.
A regress from Disraeli's _Sybil, or The Two Nations_....
Yoshie