Nations, nation-states and nationalism.

OK, I accept the linguistic distinction. "Real" in my usual contexts is associated with the Platonic idea of the "Real" - the ideal form.

So you would call the soviet regime "real communism" where I would say "communism in practice" and reserve "real communism" for something more like what Maju preaches?

In that case though I would challenge that what we see in actual practice is "capitalism" at all. Just as I would challenge that what was seen in practice in the Soviet Union was "communism".

I really don't think that the current economic systems of the West are capitalist in the Marxist sense at all, in that the owners of capital do not control it (for the most part). "Corporatism" would be maybe a better word, but it was hi-jacked by Mussolini.

Managerialism?

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As for the working class, the book I mentioned above, "Making of the English Working Class" by E. P. Thompson is a very important work on how the self-consciousness has a crucial role in the making (in fact this verb implies his view) of a class. If you can find it please read it (though it's a very large book).

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I don't know if you read my article in the newsletter on the development of the print unions in England/Britain. It encapsulates my opposition to the Hobsbawm/Thompson kind of thinking.

The term 'the working class' is new. But the economic and the political concept isn't so new.

"When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?" goes back to 1381 and the Peasants' Revolt - which was indeed an organised political movement of the 'working classes'. Moreover, how about

"Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital

I admit that the subject is somewhat abstruse, but there is a necessity for the labourers to comprehend and be able to refute the received notions of the nature and utility of capital. Wages vary inversely as profits; or wages rise when profits fall, and profits rise when wages fall; and it is therefore profits, or the capitalist's share of the national produce, which is opposed to wages, or the share of the labourer.

The theory on which profits are claimed, and which holds up capital, and accumulation of capital to our administration as the mainspring of human improvement, is that which I say the labourers must, in their own interest, examine, and must, before they can have any hope of a permanent improvement in their own conditions, be able to refute.

They, indeed, are so satisfied that by their exertions all the wealth of society is produced that no doubt on the subject has ever entered their minds. This is not, however, the case with other people, and whenever the labourers claim larger wages, or combine to do themselves justice, they hear, both from the legislature and the Press, little or nothing about the necessity of rewarding labour, but much about the necessity of protecting capital.

They must therefore be able to show the hollowness of the theory on which the claims of capital, and on which all the oppressive laws made for its protection are founded. This will, I hope, be a motive with them for endeavouring to comprehend the following observations, as it is my excuse for directing them, not so much to show what labour ought, as to what capital ought not to have."

That is a generation before Marx. It was written in 1825 by Thomas Hodgskin.

(The full text of this, with my comments, is on my website at http://www.cleverley.org/areopagus/docs/hodg/hodgmain.html 

"The Marxist accepts political dictatorship as the cost of economic justice. The unregenerate capitalist uses political freedom as the justification for economic injustice. Hodgskin asserts that economic justice requires political freedom: both require a free market."