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Forum nameOkay Activist Archives
Topic subjectWhat a great question!!
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=22&topic_id=27306&mesg_id=27342
27342, What a great question!!
Posted by Pinko_Panther, Fri Feb-25-05 03:04 PM
And a topic that interests me greatly. Listen, I don't buy into the type of Leninist Marxism that arrogantly states that only those who work in heavy industry are workers. I think class has been grossly misdefined by such groups. Having said this, I would like to bring your attention to Marx whose definition of a worker was simply anyone who had nothing else to sell on the market than their labour power. There is a really good book by Michael Zweig called "The Working Class Majority" that basically posits that "class" should not be defined by income or lifestyle, but rather, the degree of control one has over their labour and general livelihood in society.

You are right in suggesting that technology has made our job of defining these concepts more difficult but that is not to say that the fundemental relationship between capital and labour no longer exist. I think the technological changes of this century has paved the way for a very regressive emergence of postmodernist postering. The emergence of 'identity' politics has fragmented issues of race, class and gender as unconnected and dislocated narritive issues while ignoring the fact that we do indeed live under a very real totality and that each of these identities are conditioned and informed by very totalistic system of production.

>don't you think - due to the technological revolution,
>industry on the decline in "first-world" nations, and the
>globalization of ecnonomies - that class is getting very
>tricky to define?
>
>also, who would be the "lumpen-prole" of our modern times
>(remember, marx hated them as much as farmers and jews).