Notes on Reading: Class, Power, and Conflict
Purpose of reading: offer a comprehensive introduction to current debates in class analysis.
What it (attempts to) avoids:
Obscure issue of class analysis by unhistorical accounts of stratification (the act or process or arranging persons into classes or social strata)
Tendency of authors who have written from NON-MARXIST and/or ANTI-MARXIST position
The tendency that either Marx or self-professed ‘Marxist’ have said all there is to (important) say about the question of class and class conflict.
Position of the authors:
Marx’s writings/teachings contain ideas of essential significance, which continue to be relevant today as they were to the analysis of the structural properties of industrial societies. But an unconstructed version of Marxism doesn’t have a hope of coming to terms with a 20th century world that looks different like Marx predicated.
On forced labour: to whom does it belong?
It belongs to a being other than myself.
Who is this being?
Gods?
In ancient times it is clear (by temple building, etc. in Egypt, India, etc.) that the service rendered to the gods, that the product belonged to the gods.
Author: However the gods were not the lords of labour
Man:
The alien being to whom labour and its products belong to.
The alien to whose service labour is devoted and to whose enjoyment the product of labour goes.
The product of labour doesn’t belong to the worker
Product of labour belongs