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Rethinking Class Politics

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Abstract

It is now a commonplace to suggest that class politics is at an end. In the face of widespread social and economic change, class has become increasingly marginal to the theoretical and practical concerns of those engaged in emancipatory struggle. This is discernible most clearly in the recent proliferation of emancipatory projects constituted around non - class axes where class appears to be of little, if any, relevance. Nevertheless, and despite all of this, there remains an inescapable sense in which class still matters in any consideration of contemporary political struggles. In this article, I suggest why class is still important for our understanding of political struggles, including ostensibly non - class struggles, but only if we are able to think of it, both politically and epistemologically, as a process that is, by necessity, only ever evolving and never fully constituted.

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