Just some things that I've been thinking about, which I'm sure must have been incorporated into anarchist class analysis.
Now, just to take an example, a master plumber can earn anything from 50 to 80 grand a year - and a lot of that tax free, if he insists on cash payments. Despite all this, he may come from a working class background, and talk "common."
I, on the other hand, have a Northern Irish working class dad, but a middle class mum, and I've been brought up all my life to talk "posh" (okay, I don't really talk all that posh ). When I was 13 I got a scholarship into a private school, and so I've had a private education for GCSEs and A levels. I'm now at university studying English. Research has shown that English students earn less than the average wage. If you were to meet me, and to meet an average "common"-talking plumber, you'd come away with the impression that I was middle class, and that the plumber was working class. But clearly that has no relationship with our wages, or actual positions in the capitalist system. I'm the one who's always dead broke and has to buy Tesco Value (as CW put it in that other thread), with limited prospects for a stable job in this day and age.
To pick a more extreme example (and this is what I'm driving at), lots of very wealthy businessmen have come from working class backgrounds. Now, we in our society traditionally tend to think of class as something that comes around from birth and upbringing, that manifests itself particularly in the way you talk and act. But an advanced class analysis would surely reveal that such a view is deeply flawed.
So can someone break this down for me? To what extent should anarchists try to analyse class objectively? Clearly as a rule of thumb working class by birth tends to make someone more likely to be working class, because of how the system cracks down on people's opportunities (particularly in this time, the era of unemployment). But lots of people who're nominally "working class" in general social currency aren't that at all, right?
I'm kinda in a hurry, but just quickly - as millions of people on here have said already (
), class (from a revolutionary point of view) isn't about your accent, clothes or taste in food (sun dried tomatoes vs. jellied eels etc.)
It's about your relationship with society and capital.
By Marx's definition the working class/proletariat or wage-earning class is the class which has to sell its labour power to survive.
A tiny number of people don't have to do this (work, sign on or live by crime), these people live by exploiting the labour of others. These people are capitalists - bosses, landlords, shareholders, investors etc. But of course many of these people work too (but they don't have to). E.g. a CEO works for a wage but also gets huge share options.
Now of course lots of workers do assist the bosses, and act against working class interests (like being managers, bailiffs etc.).
So that's my 2c