Kelley Walker wrote:
>
> o Indeed, the debate over how to define and study class has been
> central to the development of sociological theory.
Kelley, this debate is really fruitless -- there is no common ground for it. Were you and I living in the same geographical area we might (probably would) be able to unite in terms of shared practice. And even in the rarified atmosphere of a maillist (as a browse through the archives would show) we share a good deal. But whenever the subject of class comes up, we are separate before we start. And I have argued this out with various sociologists going back to at least 1970. One can make the abstraction of "strata," just as one can make the abstraction of "humans-with-an-odd-number-of- remaining-teeth." The difference betwen them is that the latter is merely silly (though profoundly true) while the latter is a serious barrier to understanding capitalism. (Incidentally, the concept of strata is rather older than that of class -- it goes back to Plato. One of Marx's foundational achievements -- along with the recognition that what the object of knowledge is relations rather than the things related -- was his untangling of the concept of class from the trivialities of stratification. And the developed theories of stratification (from Weber on) have had no other real purpose or actual result (however expressed, and whatever the theorists _thought_ they were doing) but to hide the existence of the working class. Such theories probably also blur the outlines of the capitalist class, but it is the concealment of the working class from itself which is the real evil.
Carrol