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This paper argues that Marxian class analysis and critical poststructuralism are not merely compatible theoretical approaches, but different trajectories of the same general method; where post-structuralistism takes apart cultural products to illustrate their contradictions, biases and silences, class analysis seeks to deconstruct economic arrangements in order to identify their social construction, concrete power implications and potential rupture. The theoretical questions are explored in the context of particular historical and political challenges: the impact of Soviet orthodoxy, the challenge of new social movements, and the ongoing crisis of the Left despite the re-emergence of a diverse and vibrant anti-capitalist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intimate relationships of contemporary life -- household, marriage, family -- have rarely been examined in terms of the class processes (in surplus labor terms) that they include. This essay explores the class processes that shape household relationships today. It examines the interactions between class and non-class processes -- especially the gender processes that likewise constitute those intimate relationships. A major goal is to specify how the interactions of class and non-class processes contribute to the contemporary "crisis"of the family. A second goal is to consider what combination of class and non-class transformations might resolve that crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay illustrates the power and reach of the new Marxian class analysis when it is applied to the economic development of the third world. Economic development in third world countries has been analyzed, debated, and promoted but the implications of class analysis (in the surplus labor sense) have rarely been explored. This essay will reexamine the concept of the peasantry that has played such an important theoretical role in Marxist theories of development. In contrast to the typical concept of the peasantry as a rather homogeneous group differentiated according to levels of income and/or property ownership, we develop a theory of the peasantry based on a surplus labor theory of class. A surplus labor theory of class will allow us to investigate in a systematic way how the multiple class structures of so-called less developed rural economies contributed to their "underdevelopment." This question derives in part from Kautsky's parallel inquiry into the nature of the class structure in the rural economy of a country supposedly in transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist forms of production. We redirect this question to investigate empirically the complex class nature of rural Kenya by looking at data concerning household productive activities. Based on our findings we will explore the implications for political action and policy that promote various forms of non-exploitative class structures in rural Kenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class analyses are both very old and quite new. This essay argues that Marx contributed a new class definition and analysis focused on the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor. Yet, that innovative, new class analysis was lost by being dissolved into either pre-Marxian conceptualizations of class in terms of property and power or later social theories in which class was determined by people's consciousness and self-identifications. In this context, the essay pays special attention to the recent work of E.O. Wright. Class analysis based on the surplus labor definition of class is compared and contrasted with Wright's differently based definition and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article criticizes the class-dominance theory, which is exactly how the corporate rich dominate the federal government in the U.S. Although the paper was aimed at the pluralists, who may not be recognized by the younger generation as the main rivals to a class-dominance view in those days, the model proved to be just as useful in the arguments that arose with the state autonomy theorists shortly after the paper appeared. The change in the economy meant that the Southern capitalists had less reason to remain Democrats, and the change in the polity meant that African-Americans had the ability to force the worst racists out of the Democratic Party through their votes in both primaries and regular elections. The end result was that most of the Southern rich were on their way to the Republican Party, taking the majority of average-income whites with them on the basis of appeals to racism and religious fundamentalism.

This paper addresses one of the most important and widely-debated concepts in social theory -- class, particularly its contemporary political significance. Even within Marxist and Marxist-influenced analysis, where class is placed at the center of social, political and economic change, its conceptualization has remained a source of considerable confusion. The paper, therefore, briefly evaluates some influential Marxist attempts to provide a coherent Marxist definition of classes in contemporary capitalist societies. It goes on to argue for a nonessentialist understanding of class and class politics that draws primarily on Marxist political economy, concluding with a discussion of the continuing theoretical and political value of class theory and Marxist analysts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years a perspective known as Analytical Marxism has come to the forefront of Marxist thought This perspective considers Marxism to be a useful tradition, but one that is haunted by a number of theoretical and methodological flaws This new perspective claims to have corrected these "flaws" through its methodology, particularly the usage of methodological individualism, rational choice models, and game theory, as well as a new analysis of exploitation and class formation The purpose of this paper is to survey and evaluate the works of Analytical Marxists and their critics in these areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article counterposes a class analysis to the more conventional Weberian frameworks that have been used to interpret past and current attempts at working class internationalism. It uses the U S -Canadian case to show that working class nationalism has not universally displaced cross-border class solidarity and that, even when it has, that displacement process is better understood as a dimension of class conflict than as a geo-cultural phenomenon. The article shows that different fractions of the working class have greater propensities toward internationalism than others. The article is a caveat on the spirit of enthusiasm that reformists have shown for the recent secessions of Canadian unions from the AFL-CIO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the strengths and weaknesses of the reformulation of the Marxist conception of class. Among Marxist theorists, the class position of salaried managers and professionals has been the focus of long and heated controversy. The reasons for this preoccupation are not hard to identify. As salaried professionals, most theorists are themselves members of this group. Their concern has thus been motivated by an interest in self-understanding, if not by an inflated sense of their own importance. Given their heterogeneous composition, salaried managers and professionals pose some of the most difficult problems for the classification of persons according to their place within the social relations of capitalist production. Disagreements over the nature of the class structure have therefore focused on this stratum. Finally, because of their increasing numbers relative to other occupational groups, salaried managers and professionals have figured prominently in speculation regarding the transformation of the class structure.

The article presents notes from various articles published in the journal "Critical Sociology," in the Volume 29, issue I, related to sociology. In the first article, Resnick and Wolff revisit what they call composite theories of class, as personified by Erik Olin Wright's corpus in which class structure is informed by property, power and consciousness. They begin by reflecting on a history of class analysis to identify the intellectual traditions that inform such conceptualizations of class relations. Drawing on their own prior research, they argue that class structure is more properly to be understood as based on the surplus produced by the productive class. In the next article, Gabriel and Todorova offer an exploration into race and racism and how its conceptualization is connected to exploitation and accumulation. In the third article, Fraad examines the nature of the family in capitalist society. Calling it a family in crisis, she looks at production in the household and specifically how household labor embodies its own class process. Offering a typology of the various forms of labor found within the family she posits that this labor produces surplus, which in turn is appropriated within the family.

The paper illustrates Marxist conception of class and explores its implications for the politics of groups that did not fit easily within the traditional class categories of the proletariat and bourgeoisie. Implicit in this undertaking were a number of assumptions: that Marxist class analysis provides a valuable framework for analyzing power and conflict in capitalist society, that alienation and oppression are inherent in capitalism and can only be overcome through socialism, and that socialism is only possible as the achievement of a broad-based coalition of workers and their allies. These assumptions are no longer widely held among left sociologists in the U.S. or, if they are, they are not evident in the scholarship generated within these circles. The Marxist thesis that ownership and control of the means of production is the fundamental basis of social power is rarely explored in a discipline that increasingly treats culture and language as the ultimate causes of all things social. Socialism is widely viewed as a failed historical project unworthy of rehabilitation. And "class" has been virtually expunged from the sociological lexicon, except for its largely ceremonial inclusion in the modern catch-phrase of "race, class, and gender."