Piers:
I am saying that economic class is the base on which social and cultural behaviour is built Absolutely right! But that base was set in place many years ago and has crumbled and shifted hugely since: and that demonstrates one of the absurdities of the English class system and also one of the recurrent traits of the English character - an inate and abiding conservatism.
Look at the monarchy, the judicial system, the fact that we always vote on a Thursday and many other aspects of life in England. All of these are archaic and inefficient, yet we cling to them 'because it's what we always done.'
The same with class. The bourgeois attempts to ape the upper classes are just as anachronistic and absurd, what with fake marble columns outside their executive homes, coaching lamps by the door and a Gadarene rush to send their children to third-rate private schools. It's nothing to do with the relationship between labour and capital; it's the result of an insecurity that falls back on a bogus prelapsarian idyll, when all was right with the world, everyone knew their place and everything was tickety-boo - summed up by John Major's Pooterish paeon to 'Englishness' which evoked old ladies cycling across the village green to Evensong.
I believe that class is now largely distinct from capital. There are people who have money and spend it just the way they want to, regardless of whether or not their choices are 'genteel'. The snobs and those obsessed with class will write snide letters to the Daily Mail about such lapses of taste, but they probably have less disposable income than those they're railing against.
Again, those who have the most power in the country could hardly be described as 'upper class' in the traditional sense. Many of them are from the same sort of backgrounds as the rest of us. Many of them aren't individuals at all but institutions, run by people of all nationalities and backgrounds.
Hungry people don't worry about whether they hold their knife and fork properly or like an american Again true! Which shows that class has now become a sideshow, irrelevant to most except the poor, paranoid middle classes and a few old tankies still waiting for the revolution to start.
Largely unnoticed by them, except when the Daily Mail or Michael Howard jerks the knee of asylum-seeker prejudice, is the hungry underclass of people who don't show up on the traditional spectrum of class distinction.
They are the people who have little voice and who barely register on the radar of most of us. They're the people who clean our trains and hospitals and who sweat in our fast-food kitchens if they have work, or who cling on in silent desperation if they don't. They are so marginalised as to be almost outside the traditional capital/labour equation. They have few rights, little industrial solidarity and no voice, so don't expect them to arise like starvelings from their slumbers!
So, while class in a social sense will always be with us, I believe it is an increasingly unimportant and irrelevant part of our make-up. OK, the public-school money-broker may still be alive and well and getting up your nose, but he's a symptom of the problem, not the cause. The sooner we update Marx and Engels and realise that society does change, the better we can manage that change for the benefit of all. I, too, would like a more socialistic society, but it can't be built on outdated 19th Century ideas - of which class is one.
And, despite the tenor of the above, I an not 'New' Labour and will certainly not be voting for Blair!