I'm not sure what this means. Cooperation and conflict aren't mutually exclusive. Even wars and corporate profit-seeking rely on the (often uneasy) cooperation of many people. In modern society, this cooperation requires a costly infrastructure -- trillions of dollars spent on public relations to control the domestic populace, on military for controlling foreign populaces, etc. Continuous class warfare, at great cost, in order to extract some cooperation.
And I think he assumes we're more civilized overall. But wasn't the 20th century the bloodiest in human history? Domestic violence between normal citizens of developed nations may be lower than before, but the violence nations wield against each other is unprecedented, IIRC. Even now, we're hearing signals of interest in starting World War III.
> The quote above is preceded by a criticism of the use of 'class' as
> the defining concept for describing turn of the 20th century
> existence. Dewey writes:
>
> In spite of the existence of class conflicts, amounting at
> times to veiled civil war, any one habituated to the use
> of the method of science will view with considerable
> suspicion the erection of actual human beings into fixed
> entities called classes, having no overlapping interests
> and so internally unified and externally separated that
> they are made the protagonists of history -- itself
> hypothetical.
Did marxists ever define classes this way? Context is missing, but this paragraph in isolation sounds like the sort of strawman we'd find on usenet.
Economic classes certainly have common interests; for example, they all have some interest in the survival of the human species. (Though some classes may be more or less suicidal...) Furthermore, classes are necessarily fuzzily defined because human relations are fuzzy, so we'll also have individuals straddling classes, some who act counter to what we'd expect from some class analysis, etc.
And of course, each societal model we have, like econ, describes only a facet of society. Depending on the society, something like economic class analysis will have less explanatory power than other models.
I feel like much context is missing, context I wish I had time to track down.
Tayssir