it's kind of funny that you can give Dilas a pass on making a class analysis specific to stalinist bureaucratic socialism but you won't give the same leeway to barbs doing it for post-war western capitalism
Two points, in order of least important to most important: First, I didn't criticize Ehrenreich specifically for doing this, I criticized the American-Western Left for resisting (and both Press and the author of the N+1 piece for perpetuating) any analysis that didn't subscribe to it. The Ehrenreich's wavered on how to place it but (and as she notes in the interview) were ultimately writing for a Left audience and so conformed their analysis. Second, Dilas lived inside an authoritarian system that suppressed his work and then imprisoned him for like 10-15 years as a "dissident" and only let him write on toilet paper for years AND he was originally writing like 25 years before the Enhrenreich's and "neoconservatives" discovered the New Class for Left canon. They lived in somewhat better circumstances.
My main point of criticism and I see now that I wasn't really clear on this, is that both articles to me came off as still somewhat living in the past because they're still going back to Enhenreich and the PMC as the foundational text. Going to her for the interview was totally fine, but I think part of the blinder they're making (or at least the N+1 author was) in their piece about this supposed "natural alliance" is that they're continuing to try and construct it as "one big happy pile of six billion workers" and the evil ten capitalists and that the PMC's work propping up the system stems entirely from their own exploitation and not their own, new, class interests that diverge from both the traditional white working class and the .1% capitalist class. Not to mention what I consider a multitude of other classes.
There was a piece that I can't find now from a left-anarchist of semi-libertarian bent from around the Occupy era asking if today, should "we" (aka the proletariat) see MUTLI-MILLIONAIRES as allies because you can be someone who works all your life for someone else and basically never really own more than your house and so on, yet become a millionaire quite easily. One example given was I think a good PMC "case" a lawyer who works for a corporate law firm but never becomes a partner. Law firms today employ thousands of these people, they will never become partners, they will never start their own law firm, they rarely take cases of their own accord, they aren't only working for the law firm partner but the corporate partner who is likely some billion dollar corporation fighting with another billion dollar corporation. Instinctively no one would ever consider them an exploited class. And certainly not part of the proletariat.
The N+1 piece does some amusing stuff with this when talking about medical workers, then constantly stopping at nurses, because "doctors" of course never would seem like an employee. But in today's medical system they certainly can be and spend their whole lives in that position much like the lawyer example. The tension does come, as you note, from the point where you're basically either forever kicking these people out until they drop in absolute terms economically, or you're writing in people so broad as to make the terms ultimately useless. The argument was double amusing in that they were doing it to basically say "it's fine to vote for Elizabeth Warren ya know" but, to bring it back around to the interview with Ehrenreich, they're writing for a "Left" audience so they had to throw in three hundred pages of gibberish framed as class analysis.
