Suchergebnisse

It is argued that Karl Marx invented an original concept of class that differed sharply from the major pre-Marxian concepts, which held class to be a matter of property &/or power. The relevance of Marx's work is shown to be its determination to displace these two long-existing concepts of class by an insistent emphasis on class understood as a matter of production & distribution of surplus labor. Surplus labor's very existence implies a complex process that defines groupings of people along a new axis of differentiation; ie, persons can be classified according to whether they perform surplus labor, appropriate someone's surplus labor (or its fruits), or obtain a distribution of surplus labor (or its fruits) from an appropriator. The analysis is applied to the current crisis in French socialism under President Mitterrand. Modified AA