The kernel of truth in Woj's baby-with-the-bathwater-dumping here is the point that the old man made long ago talking about the French peasantry -- without social ties, common political culture, shared organization, and class consciousness, a group of people with a similar position with respect to the means of production are just like potatoes in a sack.
As Woj ought to know perfectly well, this issue has been among the most heavily discussed on the left and among Marxists for 150 years. People like Erik Olin Eright have made whole careers of studying it.
What Woj and all the other anti-class theorists miss is (a) even mere objective class structure is still primarily determinative of more about society than anything else (and explains a lot), and (b) those other factors do become effective now and then, resulting in vast social mobilizations.
Actually right now, as Thomas Franks has been pointing out, as the Democrats have abandoned the language of class, the GOP has clever picked it up, forging a (false) class consciouness of working people against liberal elites. Give up the notion of class, we'll never get those people back.
jks
--- Eubulides <paraconsistent at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Wojtek Sokolowski" <sokol at jhu.edu>
>
> Class is too broad of a concept to be of much
> analytical use. I prefer
> much
> smaller and better defined social groups. Observe
> that many groups, from
> organized religion, to unions, and civil society
> groups vie for and get
> the
> attention of people who support themselves for
> selling their labor. What
> is
> more, the type of work matters - professional
> workers have different
> affinities than manual or service workers, etc.
>
> The genius of class notion in Marx's analysis was
> that it pointed to the
> notion of objectively defined social group (i.e.
> introduced the meso-level
> of analysis) in the theoretical landscape that saw
> only individuals
> (micro-level) and nations (macro-level). But today
> we can do a much more
> refined meso-level analysis, so jettisoning the
> concept of class is not
> the
> rejection of the social group influence. In fact I
> identified many such
> influences of various types.
>
> Wojtek
>
> -----
>
> James Madison lives!
>
>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com