Eric Beck:
> and though they may dispute it, in the process they repudiate, or at
> least critically complicate, marxist writ about capitalism being the
> struggle between two classes
In the sense of the critique of political economy, class is a form-analytical category, like "value". At the level of concrete empirical phenomena, things are much messier.
That's also what I find baffling about syndicalists and Trotskyists who prioritize trade unions as a privileged arena for political intervention. I've never heard a convincing argument for this, other than the moralistic one that they are "workers organizations".
I'm not saying people *shouldn't* be active in unions. I just don't understand the arguments for prioritizing them over political parties, churches, schools, universities, etc.