During a 1787 debate on the new American political system, Alexander Hamilton expressed his disdain for "the mass of people." He demanded the political institutions being created under the new Constitution should empower the wealthy minority to keep control of the government in order to avoid the "imprudence of democracy." Because most of the "founding fathers" shared Hamilton's view, they created the US Senate and provided it with special powers to block or undermine political demands for reforms made by the people. More recently, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey described working people who join unions as "parasitical." Mackey and other opponents of workers' rights, following Hamilton, will rely on the Senate to stall reforms like the Employee Free Choice Act or health reform that would improve the lot of working families.

Both men viewed the majority of people as holding irrevocably different interests from their own and thus a potential threat to their fortunes and power. More than simple personal prejudice, their words betray an open class preference for undemocratic power relations. At bottom, they held a shared theory of class: what it is, how it works and our places within it.

People with Marxist, socialist or even radical democratic and liberal viewpoints, on the other hand, often talk and write about class, class struggle and class consciousness as if definitions of these terms are common knowledge, or as if experiences of class are shared widely enough that working definitions aren't needed. You know it when you see it, right? Unfortunately, this assumption may lead to misunderstandings, inaccurate analysis and misguided political action. For these reasons, taking some time to define class theoretically and concretely seems as important now as ever.

A book titled Class Matters, published a couple years ago and compiled by a handful of New York Times journalists and other commentators, makes an attempt to provide an explanation. Resurrecting the Weber-Marx split on the definition of class, the book's editors wonder in the introduction if class remains an issue of status or education, or if it is even relevant. Despite well-written, readable articles that handle a wide range of class issues from access to education, income, geography and the gender wage/wealth gap, the answers provided by the book are less than satisfactory. So even if class itself may not pertinent, the book admitted, social effects associated with class do.

Class comes out in the open

Notably, the Class Matters anthology came out prior to the collapse of the financial system and the subsequent economic crisis that now has seen about one in five Americans thrown out of work, one in eight on food stamps and 120,000 people file for bankruptcy every month. Accompanying this economic reality, the dominant values and ideas that make capitalism and its innate inequalities and abuses seem natural or normal or just have been shredded. A poll released in 2009 revealed that maybe just half of Americans continued to support capitalism, while the rest were split between a favorable view of socialism and indecision. Undoubtedly, the anxiety over and the palpable experiences of class before and since the economic crisis provoked this disillusion with capitalism.

Instead of asking whether can capitalism last, many people began to wonder if it should.

If the economic collapse and the ongoing jobs crisis teaches anything it is that we can safely dismiss right-wing claims that class is little more than the figment of Marx's imagination. After the Wall Street meltdown, it became patently obvious that financial giants like the Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and AIG never lacked access to the highest levels of political power. Government technocrats moved swiftly to protect their profits, even as bankers admitted to the corrupt practices that threatened the very existence of the banks and even capitalism itself. Bankers and their right-wing allies had successfully pushed for deregulation in the 1990s and early 2000s that allowed a free-for-all in the financial sector. Deregulation was quickly followed by the installation of the Bush administration and his ideologically motivated refusal to pursue its legally mandated authority to regulate the financial (as well as other) sectors of capitalism.

During the 2008 election, the most politically engaged – and class conscious – workers were trade unionists (both white and non-white), people of color, women and others who vigorously fought the election of John McCain and Sarah Palin, rejected the myth of classlessness. They came to understand clearly that McCain's main political base, as he admitted openly, was the rich and powerful. A majority of working-class people of all races and backgrounds rejected the influence of racism and racial doctrines spouted by the Republican candidates and their allies in the media. Instead, they went to the polls with a shared view of working and living conditions and values as well as a common political strategy for change.

In general, basic facts about inequality in America came into sharp focus in that election. Funds for education never seem to be lacking in wealthy areas, while teachers in working-class school districts are forced to beg for donations of pencils, paper and other basic needs for their classrooms. The richest CEOs and corporate executives, a tiny fraction of the population, earn about one-third of the country's total income annually, while working families have seen their wages stagnant over the past decade, are forced to fight to keep their homes and struggle to pay health insurance premiums.

In 2010, the Obama administration earned the ire of the banking section of capital when he ordered a tax on banks to recover the remaining portions of the Wall Street bailout money. This proposal was followed up by a proposal to create stiff new regulations on banks, known as "the Volcker rule," that would limit their risky behaviors and set limits on how big they could get. Bankers threatened to sue to block the tax, and promptly rebelled at the idea of new regulations. Siding with the banks, Republican ideologues, like TV personality Sarah Palin, insisted that new oversight of the financial sector and its mostly covert activities wasn't needed.

Despite today's popular anger over the economy and the abuse of power by Wall Street, corporations have not set aside their class interests. For example, massive spending on Washington lobbyists, media campaigns and elections of Republicans by the health insurance industry effectively pushed the best ideas for health reform off the table even before the debate began. The Republican-dominated Supreme Court overturned decades of laws that slowed the influx of corporate dollars in elections, potentially handing the electoral system over to the richest multinational corporate interests.

Meanwhile, 750,000 people are homeless, one in five American children suffer due to "food insecurity" each day, and record numbers get food stamps. Unemployment remains a "lagging economic indicator" even as Wall Street profits have been restored.

Working-class people who get sick and expect their health insurance companies to pay for serious or chronic illnesses are likely to face rejections, exclusions and denials. Workers who try to organize labor unions at stores like Whole Foods, Target or Wal-Mart face threats of firings and other abuse. Working families who simply want the school district to hire a music teacher or the city to fix potholes in the road in front of their house are told there is no money. These people experience some of the worst realities of class in America. Ask any small business owner displaced by a newly opened Wal-Mart whether or not class exists. Indeed, in our hyper-media society, in which a mere six mega-corporations own close to 90 percent of every media outlet in the country, most Americans have some basic idea that the talking heads and pundits who favor capitalist values, ideas and agendas win most shouting matches. Take for instance the corporate-financed "tea-bagger" town hall meetings that significantly shifted media attention away from health reform to violent threats against reformers in the fall of 2009. Or debates about federal budget deficits; unlike the Bush deficits, most media bill current shortfalls as a "threat to national security" or as "generational theft."

But are the whole of these experiences and inequalities simply class-ism, that is, a kind of individualist prejudice aimed at poor and low-income individuals? Or are they symptoms of unequal power relations built into the system of production, circulation of commodities and reproduction of labor power known as capitalism?

Some modern views of class

Many academics commonly refer to the basic "trinity" of race, class and gender (some add sexuality, gender identity, ability, nationality, religion, age) that impact our individual and social lives. While these categories are necessary means for explaining why people live their lives the way they do and make the choices they make or are forced to make, these categories are often equated as "identities" emerging and developing on a field of neutral or equal economic relations, in which we all have equal say over where we've come from and where we're going.

Within this framework, class is typically reduced to its effects – levels of income and education, social status or attitudes, even physical characteristics like hair color or height - which may provide obstacles to achievement that individuals can overcome with the proper education and hard work. The term, "classist," has even been invented to describe the prejudices of middle- and upper-class people against the poor. In a society that usually pretends class isn't real and that all experience is individual, the reintroduction of some version of class, as the book Class Matters did, no matter how thin, is a remarkable event. Still, reducing class to feelings or to its effects fails to explain real causes or to provide a road map for change, except, at worst, self-improvement or a transformation of personal attitudes and, at best top-down reforms that make no serious attempt to amend the status quo in relationships of power.

Much worse is the right-wing point of view which denies the reality of class. This perspective demands individualist solutions that place the responsibility for change on the shoulders of the victims of class inequalities. For example, if a family is tired of a bad education system, the individualist solution is to work harder, take on another job and save up to move the kids to private schools (despite their dubious record in producing better educational experiences). Can't afford health insurance? Eat better, take vitamins and use the emergency room when you get ill. Can't find a job? It's because employers pay too many taxes or, because of union contracts, pay workers too much. Individualist solution: work for less, rat out other workers and vote for right-wing politicians who want to gut the social safety net.

On this latter point, see for example a recent article in the right-wing Weekly Standard, which placed the onus "on workers to relocate and retrain" in the current economic crisis. (And heaven forbid the government fund retraining programs; the deficit is too high!) Simply put, capitalists aren't responsible for the solutions to the collapse of the economy; individual workers and their families should be left on their own to find their own solutions to their own problems. That journal's general ideological line is against socially oriented solutions to rising unemployment, such as direct government intervention in the economy, unless that intervention is aimed primarily or solely at providing economic benefits to the wealthy or to powerful corporations. That same opinion piece further put its proposals for health reform strictly in the context of how reform - if it is needed at all – must guarantee high profits for the insurance monopolies.

Class in theory

Let's look at some of the classic literature on the subject. For Marxists, class in general always results from specific historical conditions in which it is developing. In other words, to speak of class today, we must speak of classes under capitalism and the specific historic and social conditions in which it has developed. Prior to capitalism, class worked differently and carried different meanings. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels, for instance, use terms like "social rank," "orders" and "gradations" to name social classes before capitalism, which were proscribed by non-economic factors such as "divine right" or kinship.

In his essay "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," Engels examines how classes under capitalism were formed. He argues that "the products now produced socially [under capitalism] were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by capitalists." Private property and political power allows capitalists to own and control all of what workers made. Capitalism changed the "means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity" of people. In this way, "social rank" and "orders" of pre-capitalist days disappeared in favor of a capitalist class structure. This new situation "brought out the incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic appropriation," Engels adds. Laborers became permanent sellers of labor power for wages, the previous order of social classes was eroded and the social system of capitalism began to produce two great economic groupings, "the capitalists on the one side, and the producers...on the other." The antagonism between workers and the class of private appropriators (the capitalists), shared conditions of labor (or not) and dispossession (or ownership) turned workers and capitalists into distinct classes.

It should be noted that Engels's division of society into only two classes was a simplification of actual conditions. He made the generalization for the purposes of explanation. Or as Marxist political scientist Bertell Ollman might put it, Engels deployed the "process of abstraction" in order to break down social complexities into "manageable parts." Abstraction, Ollman explains, is intended to aid in classifying and explaining a subject, in this case, class. In other books and articles, both Engels and Marx would speak of classes outside of this two-class concept, for example, peasants or small business owners. Lenin would even argue that multiple modes of production with competing class structures could exist side by side in a single society, especially those in transition. Engels's point here, however, is that a single mode of production comes to dominate over others, and when it is capitalism, the general trend is toward the elimination of other classes outside of the worker-capitalist class structure.

In his own discussion of capitalism's origins and development, Marx regarded class in general as a dynamic relationship of groups. What shapes class, Marx argues in Capital Vol. III, is "always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers." This relationship produces antagonism at the point of production and in society in general, transforming individuals, by necessity, into something greater than themselves. Individuals form a class, he notes in The German Ideology, only "insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class." This relationship also creates distinct class cultures. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx argues that class conditions forcibly separate one group's "mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes."

Once this relationship exists and antagonistic interests form, Marx states in The German Ideology,

The class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class.

Marx qualifies this generalization to say that other factors also influence class and the determining role it has for people. In Capital Vol. III, Marx argues that class, "due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc.," could show "infinite variations and gradations in appearance."

Class and non-class social factors

Important non-class factors (we might add gender, sexuality, nationality, ability and more to Marx's list) affect class, how it functions, what effects it has on the individuals living it out. In each society, non-class factors develop under certain historical conditions. They are the result of political and cultural struggles.

Here, Marx doesn't insist that class determines these other non-class factors. In fact he argues that they condition class - how it appears or is experienced. On this point, Marx should not be taken to mean that non-economic factors mystify or distort class's true essence, as if it could be magically removed some purer, even less difficult or less confusing form of class struggle would make itself known. Marx means that certain non-economic factors cause class to operate in different objective ways under historically specific conditions. These conditions cannot be wished away, but overcome only through the political and cultural struggles forged in such realities.

While the basic truth of the abstract concept of class underlies this objective reality, other factors make the lived experience of class – and thus the necessary modes of resistance – unique to each society or sections of a society. For example, in a predominantly African American city like Detroit with an unofficial unemployment rate of close to 50 percent and a poverty rate of probably double that figure, class experiences are infused with institutional racism.

Social realities like joblessness, poverty, racist "criminal justice," uneven access to health care, environmental racism, limited political power and unequal distribution of public resources make the experiences of class dramatically different from those of the people who live in the predominantly white working-class communities that border that city. As Marxist scholar E. San Juan Jr. puts it in his book, Racial Formations/Critical Transformations, historical experiences and contemporary ideas and practices around race relations have produced "racially ordered capitalist relations of production." And as the late Henry Winston argued following Marx, such a system of relations has been generated and preserved primarily by "capital's material stake in racial dissension."

Preservation of the fundamental relations of power in a capitalist society is also aided by other forms of social "dissension." Consider the foundational role of the inequalities staked out along lines of gender both in the historical division of labor - both in public and in the private "domestic" sphere - and the role of family formation and the reproduction of human life under capitalism. Scholars such as Kathleen M. Brown (Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs), Benita Eisler (Lowell Offering), Alice Kessler-Harris (Women Have ALways Worked), Gayatry Chakaravorty Spivak ("Diasporas Old and New, Women in a Transnational World"), Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race and Class) and Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsamana (Women and Globalization) have studied the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and labor in the US and global contexts, and have produced brilliant books and articles on this particular subject matter.

Also, consider how genetic variations that produce a diversity of sexuality and gender differences in the human family have been turned into the sharpest "cultural" conflicts exploited to divide working-class people and co-opt consent for rule by the extremist sections of capital. Similar differences around age, nationality, immigration status and religion likewise aid capitalist in fostering divisions of labor, uneven and unequal life chances, and modes of workforce and social discipline through their exploitation of cultural differences. While many cultural differences are unchosen or easy for most people to appreciate, understand and even value, individuals and institutions seeking (or designed) to preserve capitalist power relations cultivate suspicion, disapproval and even hateful attitudes among diverse communities through competition over material goods (such as wages) or through distorted cultural representations.

Class as process

In the wake of the Russian Revolution, Lenin echoes Engels and Marx on the subject of class in his 1919 pamphlet titled "A Great Beginning." "Classes are groups of people," he argues, "one of which can appropriate the labor of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy." But more than simply groups of people, Lenin argues two years later in Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, class is a "division according to status in the social system of production." Note that status is an effect of class, which itself is a "division."

Lenin builds on his view of class as a "division" in his 1919 speech "The State." Class is "a division into groups of people" he remarks, "some of whom are permanently in a position to appropriate the labor of others, when some people exploit others." More than being simply a division, class is a device for exploitation, or a relationship of power and dominance that permits one group to exploit another.

Lenin amplifies this concept in his 1921 speech on "The Tasks of the Youth League": "Classes are that which permits one section of society to appropriate the labor of another section." Here again, class is not simply equated with a "group" or "section" or "division," but with resulting power relations. In fact, Lenin regarded class as a power relation that propels capitalist production forward. Class, in other words, is the engine of the whole system.

Lenin also views classes in their dialectical relation to the different sides of production. "Classes are large groups of people," he argued in "A Great Beginning,"

differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production by their relation...to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it.

In other words, Lenin defines class within a complex of relationships involving all sides of production. It is a process that includes performance of labor, as well as the methods of appropriation, the distribution of products and the resulting uneven and unequal life chances reproduced in society.

To sum up, Marx, Engels and Lenin define class from three fundamental sides. It is (1) an political economic community affected, proscribed and motivated by non-class factors, (2) the defining relationship(s) at the heart of any mode of production (other than communism), and (3) a process that makes up and conditions the process of the production and reproduction of capital and labor.

What does it mean today?

Is it still worth viewing class in similar ways to these three dead European guys from a different era, as opposed to how it was undertaken by the New York Times book Class Matters? I think yes. If class is viewed only as a series of social problems unrelated to the very logic and processes of capitalism itself, no systemic transformation is required. If reduced opportunities for social mobility, poverty and unemployment, the race to the bottom in wages, benefits and worker protections, the lack of access to education, health care and political power are viewed outside of a class lens, the solution from this point of view is to increase opportunities or create programs that ease social ills. Tweak the system. All that is needed is a mere shuffling of priorities, moving the marginalized to the centers of public life and ensure they to have access to basic social goods. But as scholar Victor Villanueva puts it in his autobiographical work, Bootstraps, this version of social reform doesn't address the class system directly. "[T]hose we call the marginalized are not in the margins of the class but are within the structure – at the bottom," he writes, following the thinking of radical pedagoguish Paulo Freire. Thus, a more fundamental thinking process aimed at realizing and envisioning inequality as systematically structured, rather than the result of accidents or personal prejudices is necessary.

In its specific aims, an approach like this is worthy; indeed, working people should be more and more a part of the fight for social programs that improve their lives, strengthen their collective hand for long-term battles and unite them in common struggle - an agenda or strategic outlook not advocated by the New York Times anthology. For this, a better book is Inequality: Social Class and Its Consequences, edited by D. Stanley Eitzen and Janis E. Johnston (Publishers, 2007). In the latter anthology of essays from a range of liberal and left perspectives, some key aspects of life under capitalism are dissected and important reforms, changes and improvements are proposed. Together they complete a puzzle of problems and solutions that promise, as Marx might have it, a comprehensively dialectical approach to the social problems that lie at the heart of a class divided society.

Discarding the right-wing's individualist lens through which they'd have us look at social issues in favor of a broader, dialectical social outlook provides a stepping stone to more systemic change. Indeed, such changes in a social system, as Marx in Capital showed about feudalism, can over time build up into an irreversible tipping point of more fundamental change. Such movements are rare in human history, but are possible.

But one of Marx's most significant contribution as a theoretician was his opinion that social change is not outside of human control. In order to strengthen our collective grasp on how to make meaningful change, a systemic view of class allows us to see capitalism as a system that always reproduces the social problems and consequences of class. As Nick Dyer-Witheford explains in his book Cyber-Marx, under capitalism, class "remains a definitive social power" with "privileged" status because capitalism compels all social relations to "revolve around hub of profit." Class antagonism - competing interests, not on an individual, but a social scale – is inherent to the system and disproportionate political power ensures that the interests of the minority override, evade, erase, even demolish the interests of the majority. Profits are put before people's needs. Wars for oil based on lies rage. Environmental catastrophe looms. People die of treatable illnesses.

We don't need no education

A brief look at basic inequalities in public education, for example, reveal the systemic nature of class differences that are more fundamental than simply differences of status or income. Education activist and author Jonathan Kozol has made his career out of documenting the massive inequalities in public education. They persist by race, ethnicity and national origin and by geography with the strongest determinant going to class. And, as he noted in a lecture for the Media Education Foundation, inequalities prompted by racial and ethnic segregation are worsening.

In her book The American Dream and the Power of Wealth, sociologist Heather Beth Johnson explains how wealth promotes the reproduction of class inequalities in a society in which we simultaneously promote the contradicting mythology of individual merit, free choices and social mobility. As Johnson demonstrates, more than simple individual chances or Horatio Alger luck, wealth inequalities reproduce society-wide patterns of living standards and future prospects that have been systemized and are protected by laws and social customs governing private property, inheritance, taxation and the general distribution of social resources.

Not only does segregation by race and class persist in public school systems, as well as uneven and unequal access to resources, but the style of teaching also differs widely by class, geography and race, producing and reproducing systematized ideological patterns that justify the status quo. As researcher Jean Anyon reports in her ground-breaking study of schools, "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work," class divisions (intersected by racial and geographic inequalities) have produced a system in which future prospects for students are carefully circumscribed.

For instance, in working-class schools, young people are expected to learn through memorization and repetition. Questions such as "why are we doing this" or "are there other ways of solving this problem?" are discouraged and silenced, sometimes even treated as hostile breaches of the authoritarian teacher-student relationship. Strict discipline is enforced. Working-class and minority students, in fact, are typically taught that what they hope for, believe in, or have to say about the world has little value or consequence. They are often trained to internalize a belief in their innate inferiority or their inability to contribute something of value to society. And they respond accordingly.

Whereas in schools located in wealthier districts with high populations of elites, professionals or upper-income families creativity, leadership and self-expression are modeled, encouraged and rewarded. As Anyon writes, "the ‘hidden curriculum' of schoolwork is tacit preparation for relating to the process of production in a particular way." Thus, not only is social mobility through educational opportunities bounded by class, but the system as it exists now is designed mainly to reproduce, on one hand, a new generation workers experienced in obedience and the routines of the workplace in a capitalist system. And on the other hand, the luckier few already benefited by the privileges of wealth are taught to become the managers of the emergent workforce, bosses of the corporations and rulers of the next generation.

These same "Fordist" pedagogical models of repetition and discipline also persist in higher education, as scholar and university professor Vijay Prashad argued in his short essay, "Other Worlds in a Fordist Classroom." He writes, "Our classrooms are victims of a fordism of education in which the students read brief and scattered extracts and spend short, efficient periods ... learning as much information as quickly as possible." In addition, financial burdens typically force working-class college students to take on jobs in addition to their academic course loads and extra-curricular activities. Many suffer through the anxiety over the possibility of failure in the face of such schedules that far surpass in intensity the typical workload of wealthier students at elite universities. Indeed, the twin burdens of work and academic study reduce the quality of the educational experience of those who survive it, while easy passage through an elite university (aided by expected grade inflation and rich endowments and fellowships) ensures the wealthiest students access to the highest-paying, most satisfying and upwardly mobile positions. In this way, rather than guaranteeing the egalitarian social mobility of our national mythology, class divisions as they impact higher education work to ensure their own reproduction.

Exposing the hidden realities of class helps us understand how the power and wealth of the minority, in fact, depends on increasing the exploitation of the majority, and how both the institutions and values of the capitalist system serve to perpetuate its inequalities and realities. We can also easily see how the myths of meritocracy or of how individual action can lead to social mobility mean little or nothing to the vast majority of people. This point is born out by empirical data produced by the Economic Policy Institute. Since the 1980s, the EPI reports, the rate of social mobility has flat-lined, especially for working-class families and their children. In fact, the EPI concluded in 2006/2007 report "The State of Working America," that, even before the official beginning of the current economic crisis (December 2007), the data "belies any notion of a totally fluid society with no class barriers." With the recession comes "economic scarring" on working-class families with impacts that can be felt far into the next generation, EPI reported more recently as the second year of the current recession was coming to a close. For working-class families, in other words, the income, education and resources of the parents play the central determining factor for which income bracket (and consequently class position) their children will end up in.

Meanwhile, the EPI study adds, the children of the wealthiest families maintain the most options, opportunities and choice. Simply put, the Horatio Alger myth works best the higher you look up the income/wealth ladder.

Class is strategic

A systematized understanding of class also helps us realize that individualist action or social mobility does not and can not transform social relations and inequities. Individual hard work and mobility will never, by itself, produce a more democratic society. Collective, political and cultural action aimed at broad, dialectical approaches to reform and a revolution in customs and values, instead, are needed to make the changes which may ultimately prove to be revolutionary. In fact, the most progressive social changes, such as reductions in discriminatory job and wage practices, relief for health and safety violations, an end to exploitation of children and slavery, protection of citizenship rights and more, only came with concerted political struggle by working-class people.

For this we need a view of class that examines community (and identity) formation as the product of historical and current struggles. These include cultural contests for self-determination of meanings of symbols born by the community, its values. These also include the workplace and political struggles over equal access to the material benefits offered by society. Such a view should follow and reflect the more dynamic pattern of human life than is typically offered in non-class or anti-class analysis of how social systems work. We should link democratic struggles for equality inseparably to our view of the general class struggle. Such a viewpoint throws the diversity of communities into an intersecting (if not common) and strategic unity of interests and agendas. At each point of intersection, alliances are made possible and, consequently, an ever-expanding base of support for an alternative to a class society can be brought to life.

Alliances at these points of intersections of communities will necessarily center around struggles for reform. Struggles for reform have, at bottom, a fundamentally democratic character. In the US, such struggles have historically been couched in terms of civil rights: the right to vote, right to social equality, right to organize, right to health care, right to equal, quality education and so on. Thus, democratic struggles are foundationally related to the working-class struggle for power and fundamental social change. This fact makes working-class leadership on key democratic struggles both necessary strategically – for purposes of class unity and the adoption of a democratic platform – and theoretically – the fullest, clearest understanding of the nature and complications of "class" itself.

References:

Anyon, Jean. "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work." Journal of Education, Fall 1980.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber-Marx. Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism. University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Economic Policy Institute. The State of Working America 2006/7.

Eitzen, D. Stanley and Janis E. Johnston. Inequality: Social Class and Its Consequences. Paradigm Publishers, 2007.

Engels, Frederick. "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," MECW, Vol. 24 International Publishers, 1989.

Johnson, Heather Beth. The American Dream and the Power of Wealth. Taylor an dFrancis, 2006.

Kozol, Jonathan. "Education in America." Video by Media Education Foundation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgkZKTPEspg

Lenin, V.I. "A Great Beginning." Collected Works, Volume 29, Progress Publishers.

-----. "The State." Collected Works, Vol. 29, Progress Publishers.

-----. "The Tasks of the Youth League." Collected Works, Vol. 31, Progress Publishers.

-----. Left-wing Communism an Infantile Disorder. Collected Works, Vol. 31, Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. III. MECW, Vol. 37. International Publishers, 1998.

-----. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. MECW, Vol. 11. International Publishers, 1979.

-----. The German Ideology. MECW, Vol. 5. International Publishers, 1975.

Ollman, Bertell. The Dance of the Dialectic. University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Prashad, Vijay. "Other Worlds in a Fordist Classroom." Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere. Edited by Amitava Kumar. New York University Press, 1997.

San Juan Jr., E. Racial Formations/Critical Transformations: Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States. Brill Academic Publishers, 1992.

Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps. From an American Academic of Color. National Council of Teachers of English, 1993.

Photo: Workers circulate a petition in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. (Photo by Casie Yoder, courtesy AFL-CIO Flickr, cc by 2.0)