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A touch of class  April 17, 2004  Printer friendly version
Print this article Email to a friend Email to a friend  Is there
such a thing as a working class today? Christopher Scanlon
argues the old class distinctions based on wealth no longer
hold.  A couple of years ago, while working as a criminology
tutor, I asked my students if they thought of themselves as
belonging to a particular economic or social class. The topic
for that week was Marxist theories of crime, and I figured that
drawing on the students' own experiences might be a good way to
get a discussion going about this cornerstone of Marxist
thought.  As expected, most described themselves as middle-
class. In one tutorial, though, almost every one of the 20 or so
students politely though firmly informed me that there was no
such thing as class. Anything people wanted could be theirs, if
they were willing to work hard enough for it.  I suggested that
what they perceived as the absence