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In reply to the discussion: Thank you, Edward Snowden, for so clearly allowing.. [View all]struggle4progress
(118,566 posts)in a tedious and detailed class analysis, and for that purpose you need to understand exactly what realities the concept "class" is intended to abstract
A "class" is a group of people who all serve similar structural roles and who therefore have similar life circumstances and similar interests. Thus, for example, migrant agricultural laborers form a class, which is distinct (say) from the class of instructors at universities
Your effort at analysis will be complicated by modern international trade, because one class may live quite far away from another: the class of sweatshop garment workers may not always be found where the class of electronic equipment assemblers are located. Thus, in trying to develop a useful class analysis, you first need to confront the fact that there are likely to be a number of classes with which you are only slightly familiar or even entirely unfamilar
Your effort at analysis will also be complicated by the following fact: a useful class analysis is a process of abstraction from actual facts, and it requires some insight to see "similar structural roles" and "similar interests." The ideal situation, of course, is that members of the class themselves recognize their class commonalities, but this presumes that class-members can freely communicate with one another and can transcend various intellectual habits instilled by education, cultural history, mass media, &c&c. In practice, class-members will be conditioned by ideas formed fifty or more years earlier, reflecting some cultural synthesis of experiences in circumstances that no longer exist; class-members can be artificially divided by various notions (such as race); and various other factors also slow the development of class-membership awareness among class-members. So identification of a class, even if accurate and useful, may be rejected by members of the class
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