Fantastic article:
http://www.grundrisse.net/grundrisse22/tellingTheTruthAboutClass.htm
"Some people mistake the absence of identifiable cultural and status groups on either side of the class divide for an absence of class rule. But this is false. The capitalist class rules, but it is anonymous and open, and therefore impossible to hate, to storm, to chase away. So is the proletariat. Legal, political and cultural equality (equality here only means a random distribution of – very real – advantages and privileges) has made class conflict into what Capital makes it out to be. Class conflict is dependent on the extraction of surplus, and it is not a battle between two camps for superior recognition and a better position in the scheme of (re)distribution. That battle goes on still, to be sure, but it is essentially the battle of yesteryear. The bourgeoisie is by now incapable of autonomous self-representation; the representation of its interests which is taken over more and more by the state. Since the state represents, and looks after, capitalism, the old-style self-representation of the working class is moribund, too, but the state is not supplanted – as was the case, at least symbolically, in the past – by political institutions of counter-power. Thus revolutionary proletarian movements, although they now barely exist, are cast into the outer darkness.
The truth about class is, therefore, that the proletariat had, historically, two contradictory objectives: one, to preserve itself as an estate with its own institutions (trade unions, working-class parties, a socialist press, instruments of self-help, etc.), and another one, to defeat its antagonist and to abolish itself as a class. We can now see that the abolition of the working class as an ‘estate’, as a ‘guild’, has been effected by capitalism; capitalism has finally transformed the proletariat (and the bourgeoisie) into a veritable class, putting an end to their capacity for hegemony. Class hegemony of any kind (still quite vivacious and vigorous in Gramsci’s time) was exactly what was annihilated. Class as an economic reality exists, and it is as fundamental as ever, although it is culturally and politically almost extinct. This is a triumph of capitalism."