Resources for learning about class structure that won't piss me off

[sqbr]

So as you may have noticed I've been talking about race a lot recently, plus a bit about gender and sexuality and other stuff like that.

One thing I tend not to talk about, at least not in top level comments, is class. It's not that I don't care, but I don't really have the language to talk about it: thanks to the vagaries of my upbringing I have fairly extreme left wing views which mean I get annoyed by mainstream (or right wing) analysis, but since pretty much everything I know I got by osmosis I'm not up with all the technical terminology etc that other people with similar views might have, and also 99% of the stuff I've read sets off my "Annoying socialist propaganda" alarms and pisses me off too much for me to keep reading.

So does anyone have advice for resources that might help me get a more deep and educated understanding (as well as figuring out quite where I stand) that's unlikely to either assume I've got an arts degree (or want one) or be thinly veiled propaganda for the authors views on how things should be rather than an attempt at an objective understanding of how things are? Bonus points for intersectionality.

Where I'm coming from and what annoys me: My maternal grandparents are ex-communist socialists, and my parents staunch Labour voters. In recent years my dad has become more of a radical lefty and started spouting conspiracy theories about the Capitalist Oligarchy. At his worst he starts sounding like this guy. So I grew up surrounded by a left wing view of the world, with my mum's more moderate views in mild conflict with my grandparents and now fathers. Since every time I talk to my father about race/gender etc he ALWAYS tries to turn it into proof of how Capitalism Ruins Everything and It's All Really About Class I have very little patience for that sort of one-eyed thinking, as well as the general tendency for socialists to reject facts and interpretations which don't fit the One True Vision, or to answer any question about "How do we fix this particular social ill?" with "ABOLISH CAPITALISM". (I'm not sure capitalism needs to be abolished anyway, but even if it does that's not going to happen any time soon, we need to engage with the world as it is not wait until we reach utopia before we start worrying about injustices happening now) See also Why I am not a socialist.

I've been pondering reading some Marx to at least get a feel for the classics, especially since people keep quoting him, but it's hardly up to date.

I kind of feel like someone from a fundamentalist background trying to go on a spiritual journey :)

Comments

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

In many ways, Bertrand Russell is very deceptive, because he's almost definitionally upper-class, white, and British. And he completely destroys any idea that he doesn't agree with. (There's some essay that he wrote about causation that has a phrase like "the idea of causation is so utterly otiose that it becomes unbelievable that anyone with our current understanding of science should place serious faith in it." And it's utterly glorious prose, and it's the kind of the thing that you read and think "I cannot summarise this essay. It has to be quoted whole, or not at all." And it's also so incredibly strange as an argument that it's difficult to believe that anyone could ever argue for it as it stands). And his incredibly arrogance in these sorts of things means that he's excellent to read, but that there's not always that much substance to a lot of the positions that he has outside of relatively pure philosophy (logic, linguistics, history, and such). (But I think it's also his arrogance that makes him such an admirable person, because I don't think that he would have been able to have given a lot of the arguments he did without having effectively nothing to lose).

But he's just so COOL.

Foucault I really don't like that much. He's hard to read (although that could, admittedly, be his translators), and apparently some of the things he talks about may actually just have been invented and have no basis in anything that actually happened. Which is...well, it's really dodgy scholarship at the best. And that gives me an uneasy feeling around his ideas, because there are some things where I think "ah yes, of course this is the case" but I genuinely don't know enough to be sure that whatever idea is being used is based in something. I know from my own research stuff that there are areas where Foucault is regarded as foundational (a lot of critiques of the medical profession tend to be predicated on him), where it's not clear at all that firstly, Foucault is right in his discussion of the history his ideas are based on; and secondly, that Foucault's ideas, if correct for a particular period, can still be applied to now.



But stuff about me aside, the general recommendations I've always had are to try and get hold of things like the Cambridge or Oxford guides to particular people or ideas if the people themselves are difficult, because the guides really go out of their way to give a charitable interpretation of things, while still trying to uphold an academic level of analysis. But it's more useful than trying to work out if the dummies' guides are more than caricatures.

[alias_sqbr]

apparently some of the things he talks about may actually just have been invented and have no basis in anything that actually happened. Which is...well, it's really dodgy scholarship at the best

Ouch. Indeed.

the Cambridge or Oxford guides to particular people or ideas if the people themselves are difficult

Yes, ok, that might be a but more intellectually rigorous than "Dummies guides" and wikipedia :)