Audio: Class classification and its limitations

international | the left | link to audio Wednesday November 04, 2009 04:22 by Paul Bowman - WSM - personal capacity wsm_ireland at yahoo dot com

Recording of a WSM branch education that looks at 'what is class' and outlines many of the different classifications that have been used before asking whether this is right approach to the question at all. Followed by a brief discussion of class in relation to a popular Irish phone in radio show phone ins demanding a public sector pay cut.

An IWW version of the class pyramid referred to in the talk

Areas covered in talk

A certain Chinese encyclopedia
How rational are our categorization schemes
Objects and relations
The ABC12DEs
The Class Pyramid
Class and Marx
Kautsky, Orthodox Marxism and socialist consciousness and false consciousness
Why your position is bourgeois
The new left & EP Thompson
The 60's, self management & Parecon
Autonomia & workerism
Negri and the right autonomists
Malatesta on class - 1907 Amsterdam conference
Class defined by struggle

Discussion
Joe Duffy & the public sector wage cut and orthodox marxism
Racism & housing
Lenin, Malatesta, the syndicalist wave and the need for specific organisation

Educational was given late September 2009, the occasional electronic interference is because it was recorded on a iPhone and I forgot to turn off the phone radios.

The audio was first uploaded to indymedia.ie and can be accessed there at http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/oct2009/paulbowmano...n.mp3 It is about 45 minutes long and is a 20mb mp3 file