new ways of looking at class in the modern world

It’s an article of faith for the modern Right that class no longer matters. Curiously enough that view is mostly shared by the modern Left (or at the least the entity that today calls itself the Left). That the Right and the Left agree that there is no class struggle any more is not surprising since the modern Left and Right share almost identical views on economic matters.

The idea that society is divided into the exploiters and the exploited still persists on the Left, but they insist that this no longer has anything to do with class. We’re told that society is no longer divided along class lines but along racial and ethnic lines. Whites are the exploiters and non-whites are the exploited. Feminists on the other hand insist that men are the exploiters and women the exploited. There’s also the newly fashionable idea the the exploiters are those who cling to outdated gender binary ideas (such as the notion that people are divided into men and women).

Another curiosity of the modern world is that the far Right to a large extent shares these views, the only difference being that they think it’s whites and men who are the exploited.

The truth of course is that class warfare is still with us, but the old-fashioned Marxist view of class really is outdated.

Michael Lind has come up with some theories that are interesting attempts to grapple with the new realities. His blog post The Double Horseshoe Theory of Class Politics is pleasingly brief and clear and it’s worth a read.