>>I'm at least as skeptical of class politics as I am of identity
>>politics, and I think there are lots of problems with calls by
>>Michaels and others here for a "return" to heroic class politics,
>>which is frequently insisted on but rarely defined.
>
> You mention Deleuze a lot. I've just started reading Anti-Oedipus for
> the first time and I get the impression that book could help
> here. Do you think that's right?
Anti-Oedipus was the first book I read questioning the primacy of class for liberatory politics. Though it might be more accurate to say that what Deleuze and Guattari did was deny the existence of "the" "working class." I hated the idea at the time, as it went against everything I believed. But I've come to agree with it, more or less. For them, as I understand the argument, there is only one class: the bourgeoisie, since it was that "class" that first conjugated the decoded flow of capital and the decoded flow of labor. That conjugation created capitalism of course, and capitalism is unique among social formations in that enslaves everyone. (Which is why, for instance, in the United States, wealthy people work more hours per week that middle income people [and poor people?].) So there is no "objective" working class, in the sense that some group of lords command and control production by vassals. Instead, there is the capitalist machine that controls everything. (I don't think it's necessary to hold this view and believe in touchy-feely ways of "helping the ruling class down from their perch." You can think this and still utilize some of the five million ways of killing a CEO.)
Anyway, your question. Yes, I think so, very much. Though A Thousand Plateaus is probably more helpful in that its discussions of stratification and assemblages actually offer an alternative to class. Which is to say, Anti-Oedipus offers a good critique of class: that it solely relies on a subject that becomes conscious of itself, of its already existing collective subjectivity. On one hand, this is fitting: attaining consciousness is all that it *can* do because class is an idealist notion, one posited by the early Marx and instituted by Lenin. But it's not real. What capitalism requires is not a working class but abstract labor.
Anyway when Deleuze and Guattari talk about assemblages and other groupings -- or even in Anti-Oedipus when the talk of schizos -- they are talking about processes not determined by attaining self-consciousness, by becoming aware, but by experimentation and connecting.