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The experience of socialist countries, which Geoff Eley and Keith Nield
do not address, raises fundamental questions about their argument. Class-based
thinking and rhetoric under Soviet socialism served as a weapon in the hands of
the authorities, not as a vehicle for critical analysis, let alone for human
emancipation. Before 1917, class-based ways of looking at the world presented
enormous, indeed insurmountable obstacles for a liberal-based politics. Eley and
Nield, while embracing liberalism, want to retain a role for class, but their
vague proposals are almost exclusively rooted in historiographical polemics of
overblown significance.

In arguing for more finely nuanced and inclusive understandings of class in the USA, I write as a 'poverty-class scholar' articulating an identity, experience, marginality, and concomitant consciousness and epistemology distinct from that of working-class academics. Both in and out of academe, representations of working-class identity are juxtaposed against and, thus, reinforce the 'otherness' of poor women who are positioned as boundary markers, demarcating the unacceptable and illegal 'others' of the working class. Concomitantly, in claiming to speak for and then neglecting these differences, working-class scholarship allows for the cooptation, erasure and mis-representation of poor women and children. Ultimately, I argue that only by including theories generated 'from experience outward,' that expose and critique the differential impact of class on women's lives without claiming an uncontestable authenticity, can we begin to understand the operations of class as it is lived, theorized and contested in contemporary society.

Plusieurs hypotheses existent, qui tentent d'expliquer la faiblesse du vote de classe au Canada. Je tente ici de reformuler certaines de ces hypothPses, i partir de leurs postulats i1'6gard de la conscience de classe et de la formation de classe. Deux types d'explications sont identifies: celles, d'abord, qui soutiennent que le bas niveau de conscience de classe au Canada est la cause de I'absence de formation de classe; et celles pour qui l'inverse est vrai. Toutes les hypotheses considerees trouvent des donnees qui les supportent dans la ricente Etude electorale nationale. I1 est actuellement impossible de choisir entre elles, alors que les donnees disponibles ont une valeur limitee et que des problemes de niveaux d'analyse restent i resoudre. On devrait considerer les deux modes d'explication comme interactifs, et aussi vraisemblables l'un que l'autre.Many hypotheses have been advanced to explain the low levels of class voting in Canada. This article reformulates a number of these in terms of their assumptions about class consciousness and class formation. Explanations are divided into those which hold the society's low level of class consciousness responsible for the lack of class formation, and those which propose the reverse. Evidence from recent National Elections Study data contains support for all of the hypotheses, and it is concluded that choosing between them is currently impossible because of data limitations and level‐of‐analysis problems. The two lines of argument should be regarded as interactive and equally plausible.