Morning Comrades.
Whenever I write these dispatches I have my partners voice in my ear; they’re an incredible conversationist and challenging sparring partner in these matters, smarter in a lot of topics relatively new to me and one point they regularly make is that I often presume a baseline understanding of the topics I try to tackle here. That made me think about a term I often use here that, after actually going through the archive here, I have never actually written about here: The Working Class.
As a matter of fact, once that information had settled with my second coffee this morning I realized just how broad the topic is, how wildly misunderstood and abused the term is and thus, I figured, let’s break it down. To be clear, these next two day will serve as an introduction to the Marxist concept and analysis of the term Working Class and should serve primarily for clarity and a starting point to then dig into the conversation that has been held within the queer / feminist / de-colonial communities since the 1970s, since this is where the vanguard of that conversation has been taken place since then. By the end of this I will try to point you in those directions but I will leave the actual to those scholars invested in that topic, as it is their conversation to present and not mine, entirely.
So, the working class, or classes to be clearer. We all think we know what that means, I would wager use the term objectively without truly realizing what it means, to us, and subjectively within the ongoing historical development of our existence and more. We ware going to be covering a few baseline definitions and how they relate to us today and tomorrow, why this conversation is so hugely important to our collective efforts and then what it means to us, today. Importantly, Marx and most secondary work are tools not dogma and it is up to us to know how to use these tools to have any chance at not only ending this shit show but building a better tomorrow.
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