i have to be up at 3 a.m., so no time. i was fucking around about the NC school program. Hyperbole, but there was a way in which the program treated class as an identity: instead of basing the identity on race, they based it on class. a certain nmber of poor people had to be in all schools. it worked because of the creation of social capital.
as for the other, i'm still not sure what you're saying but that's probably more b/c i'm exhausted from a wild and crazy couple of days at work. please badger me if you want to keep the convo going. if the thread isn't right in my face, i forget about it and move on to the next interesting topic.
as to the contradiction issue. i think carrol's right to suggest that there isn't necessarily a contradiction. the most i can say abt that right now is that the clue would be racialization of class. it's part of the creation of class identities that do divide what you want to call the working class.
as a sidenote: i actually studied the issue you are interested in. how can we get people in the professional managerial strata to see that they are proles like everyone else. i went into a recently downsized corporation, a subsidiary of ATT ravaged by chainsaw Al. One of the managers found about my work and invited me inside to study them: they were pissed off and wanted someone to see how fucked over they felt that their colleagues had been sliced and diced like factory workers always had been and that they'd been left, the 'survivors,' to pick up the pieces. he found out about me from his daughter, my student, who heard about my research on downsized professional managerial workers who do start realizing they're cogs in a wheel, disposable like everyone else. what i ended up finding, though, was that they clung to their identity through complex gendered discussions about the meaning of work, yadda. sorry. i'm exhausted.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)