Class Action: Reading Labor, Theory, and Value

by William Corlett

Class Action attempts to contest capitalist economics and to strengthen workers' organizations while respecting the importance of all members of society. It reveals the numbers of human lives marked for extinction by capitalist ideology and often erased by traditional Marxism. Award-winning author William Corlett looks at the plight of homeless and jobless people as an extreme case of how Americans' sense of self-worth has become entangled with the circulation of money and commodities. Within a theoretical framework that draws from the works of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, and Jacques Derrida, Corlett reinterprets some of Marx's best-known texts and moves toward a plan for direct action. Relocating union organizing and anticapitalist struggle to the least-valued sites in communities can, Corlett argues, encourage people to share resources in mutual support and defense while practicing irredentist maneuvers in the name of a Labor underground.

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 22, 1998

About the author

William Corlett (8 October 1938 - 16 August 2005), was an English children's writer, best known for his quartet of novels, The Magician's House, published between 1990 and 1992.

Corlett was born in Darlington, County Durham. He was educated at Fettes College, Edinburgh, then trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He worked as an actor while embarking on a literary career during the 1960s, and wrote plays and adult novels as well as the children's novels for which he is particularly remembered. Several of his works were adapted for the screen.

Later in life he came out as gay, and it was from his partner, Bryn Ellis, that he gained some of his inspiration for The Magician's House. Corlett died of cancer at Sarlat in France.