I just wanted to put a quote from Blackshirts and Reds here. Chapter 9 as a whole has some very prescient parts:
To the extent that class is accorded any attention in academic social science, pop sociology, and media commentary, it is as a kind of demographic trait or occupational status. So sociologists refer to “upper-middle,” “lower-middle,” and the like. Reduced to a demographic trait, one’s class affiliation certainly can seem to have relatively low political salience. Society itself becomes little more than a pluralistic configuration of status groups. Class is not a taboo subject if divorced from capitalism’s exploitative accumulation process.
Both mainstream social scientists and “left” ABC [Anything-But-Class] theorists fail to consider the dynamic interrelationship that gives classes their significance. In contrast, Marxists treat class as the key concept in an entire social order known as capitalism (or feudalism or slavery), centering around the ownership of the means of production (factories, mines, oil wells, agribusinesses, media conglomerates, and the like) and the need—if one lacks ownership—to sell one’s labor on terms that are highly favorable to the employer.
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To support their view that class (in the Marxist sense) is passé, the ABC theorists repeatedly assert that there is not going to be a workers’ revolution in the United States in the foreseeable future. (I heard this sentiment expressed at three different panels during a “Gramsci conference” at Amherst, Massachusetts, in April 1987.) Even if we agree with this prophecy, we might still wonder how it becomes grounds for rejecting class analysis and for concluding that there is no such thing as exploitation of labor by capital and no opposition from people who work for a living.
Class has a dynamic that goes beyond its immediate visibility. Whether we are aware of it or not, class realities permeate our society, determining much about our capacity to pursue our own interests. Class power is a factor in setting the political agenda,
selecting leaders,
reporting the news, funding science and education, distributing health care, mistreating the environment, depressing wages, resisting racial and gender equality, marketing entertainment and the arts, propagating religious messages, suppressing dissidence, and defining social reality itself.
ABC theorists see the working class as not only incapable of revolution but as on the way out, declining in significance as a social formation. Anyone who still thinks that class is of primary importance is labeled a diehard Marxist, guilty of “economism” and “reductionism” and unable to keep up with the “post-Marxist,” “post-structuralist,” “post-industrialist,” “post-capitalist,” “post-modernist,” and “post-deconstructionist” times.
It is ironic that some left intellectuals should deem class struggle to be largely irrelevant at the very time class power is becoming increasingly transparent, at the very time corporate concentration and profit accumulation is more rapacious than ever, and the tax system has become more regressive and oppressive, the upward transfer of income and wealth has accelerated, public sector assets are being privatized, corporate money exercises an increasing control over the political process, people at home and abroad are working harder for less, and throughout the world poverty is growing at a faster rate than overall population.
This, I think, has a lot to do with Dems today, esp. with Chuck Schumer appealing to "moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia", which blatantly shows how little they understand class, even in an election--and as we've seen, even when a fascist could win instead. The dismantling of class conscious has been a disaster for the world. This is especially the case as people conflate hardworking intellectuals with the bourgeoise, and misconstrue legitimate protests against state greviances as a "color revolution".
