>Essentially, my argument has been that it is pointless to classify human beings (by income, lifestyle, preferences, taste, etc etc) but that it is important to have as fundamental an understanding as possible of social relations. Class tells you _nothing_ about an individual. And _no_ description of an individual can have any relevance for "class analysis.
This cannot be emphasized enough. Engels was a small capitalists (not a petty producers - but a true capitalist who lived entirely off the surplus value other wage laborers). A fair number of Kluxers and American Nazis are working people. Class analysis is meaningless at the individual level.
Class analysis is a first cut of analysis. It is mainly useful in the negative; certain tactics will almost never be useful. For example we can't expect to get rid of capitalism by converting the major owner of the means of production to Marxism. Or (just so the post contains something Carroll can disagree with) - the majority of cooordinators will always oppose strongly anti-hiearchal divisions of labor and income.
But a there is a great of deal of more finely grained analysis to be done that is extremely useful, but is not neccesarily class analysis. One example would the divisions of various strata of income and wealth with the working class...