>I've worked with lots of folks who understand labor without studying marx.
What does "understand labor" mean?
I think what shag and Julio are talking about is well stated here by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, whose radicalism and introduction to Marx preceded her going to college:
http://www.reddirtsite.com/interview-dixon-march-2008.htm
I continue - mainly out of stubbornness - to call myself a Marxist. I still think it's very important to keep focused on capitalism and the importance of class analysis. It's in that sense that I still pay tribute to Marxism. It's sort of like if I was a physicist. All physicists are Newtonians. They are Newtonians plus everything that came after, but they wouldn't feel ashamed of that. That's the kind of debt I feel toward Marx, who clarified the role of capital. We have to build upon that, not forget it. I think it's forgotten too much in our social movements, or not even considered in the first place. In the so-called anti-globalization movement there was a lot of misunderstanding about the actual nature of capitalism. By its very definition capitalism is global, and globalization is a new phase of capitalism. There's this impression that, before today, there was humane capitalism. The implication is that a return to that period would put a human face on capitalism and put an end to these bad things that have recently developed. I think that it has stunted people's political growth, at least in the US, to not have any grounding in Marxism.
http://www.reddirtsite.com/about.htm
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, daughter of a landless farmer and half-Indian mother. Her paternal grandfather, a white settler, farmer, and veterinarian, had been a labor activist and Socialist in Oklahoma with the Industrial Workers of the World in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The stories of her grandfather inspired her to lifelong social justice activism.