Huh. I could swear I remember South Africa being pro-apartheid. Mandela effect?

Grateful that so many families and communities will be reunited today: the 13 Israelis, 10 Thais and 1 Filipino who were held by Hamas, and the 39 Palestinian women and children who were held in Israeli jails. Everyone for everyone.

You *can't* do sound class analysis without some methodological understanding and application of levels of abstraction. The basic tool is fundamental for critical social theory broadly and Marxism in particular...

What we think constitutes a class is a theoretical decision that matters, principally, for what we are trying to explain. Class is, necessarily, a taxonomic concept, with class locations within class locations..

At each lower of the the level of abstraction on the concept (for ex, from working class, to industrial workers, to energy workers, to the workers at Chevron) we add new determinations, which ideally will help us understand something important...

Typically, Marxists have theorized at one of three levels of abstraction -- the mode of production, the social formation, or the conjuncture (though more levels have been added). And at each level classes take on more or less complexity...

For the class analyst, for whatever level they chose they also choose a corresponding object of analysis - that is what they are actually trying to make sense of using these concepts, which they are filling with their empirical observations and interpretations...

In Classes, Erik Olin Wright argued (convincingly, I think) that the mode of production isn't the only or best level to theorize class structure...he showed that lower levels are needed for understanding the emergence of the middle class (his object of analysis)...

E.P. Thompson suggested that the best solution to the class structure problem, ie how to make sense of structures that contain nested determinations, is to toss it entirely. For EPT, the WC is a "multitute" and to the extent that it is a thing it is through formation...

Stuart Hall, went another way. To understand class at the level of a social formation -- the class analyst needs to see how class is expressed in non-class structures...i.e. "race is the modality in which class is lived"...

Others, myself included, argue that pressing contemporary problems - such as policing, climate change, finance, etc - we need a more conjunctural understanding of class politics. Gramsci has identified an even lower level of abstraction, writing of "situations"...

If your class analysis doesn't even recognize that the level at which you are talking about class in the first place is a theoretical choice, which itself must be justified, you are doing *bad* class analysis...

And this is absolutely the case for class power. Mike Davis showed that class capacity *itself* can be understood at across multiple levels of abstraction, from the mode of production to the conjuncture....

This is what he wrote in Old Gods, New Enigmas: "The first arise from the proletariat’s position in the mode of production…the second is limited to historical stages or episodes." Class analysis always requires a choice of level of abstraction...end