Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>
>
> Roughly, at the point when the main source of your income ceases to
> be your paycheck or social security (or some such social wage). If
> you can count on being able to live without a paycheck or a social
> security check (or some such social wage) for the rest of your life,
> without working for yourself or working for others, you are not part
> of my class.
>
Fussing about borderline cases is fine for academics struggling for tenure and journalists writing feature articles on "life in America" or something like that. For them "classes" are merely little plastic boxes in which one piles different colors of stones. Utterly static.
For political purposes, one needs to understand the fundamental dynamic of capitalism (as Yoshie has been explaining). That does require constant "redoing" of Marx such as you find in Gramsci or Lukacs or Harvey, but for the most part that is making new what we already know but which we need to grasp afresh. "Sorting" emerges from practice, not from bean counting of journalists and academics.
Journalists as journalists and academics as academics (perhaps bureaucrats also) have the habit of looking at the world from some position of vantage _outside_ it. This makes their perceptions (or more exactly, the questions they hassle over) fairly irrelevant at best to political thinking. To pursue the questions they raise will be the delight of antiquarians a few centuries from now. The question of whether this particular level of 'managers' are working class or capitalist belongs to the same realm of discourse as the question of whether _Paradise Lost_ is an answer to Hobbes or an amplification of Hobbes. A truly fascinating question, but not of much political interest -- or of historical interest for that matter when attempting to view the present as history.
Carrol