In defense of class struggle

Class consciousness… I think most people have their share. Each of us has a sense of where we fit in the hierarchy. Some people have upper middle class attitudes and achievements to demonstrate that they’ve earned the right. Others of us have a smaller sense of ourselves. I, for example, am petit bourgeois with proletariat roots. These Marxist terms were subordinated by those cursed French post structuralists, but they bespeak an important way of understanding our society. Some people don’t think Government is good for much, I think well administered public services are only possible by supporting a government that will regulate and provide them. The whole libertarian thing is a product of bourgeois success and the delusion that somehow we each might be Rockefeller with a little luck and a lot of hard work.

danah boyd wrote recently about the “subaltern” kids on MySpace as distinct from the “hegemons” on Facebook. This distinction is evidently a tortured proto-academic usage that permits analysis of class distinctions while denying the Marxist foundation of historical and economic analysis, and thus assuring a constant flow of corporate grants.