Description In this paper I examine the interconnections between `race' and social class, with some reference to caste, religion and gender, in schooling, society and economy in the UK, in particular relating to the two million heritage children and adults in Britain who are of Indian (South Asian) heritage. This is a panoptic paper both methodologically and empirically that attempts to bring together, to link, empirical and theoretical data and analyses across a number of areas: South Asian labour market and educational experience in Britain; issues and analyses of `race’, caste and class oppression; Marxist, revisionist socialist and social democratic educational and political analysis; neoliberal and neoconservative policy and its impacts. The value of this paper is its critique and evaluation of three forms of analysis/ theorizing of `race’ and class: firstly, Critical Race Theory, advanced in the UK, inter alia by David Gillborn; which seems to me to be an inappropriate and situationally specific (and also erroneous) form of left radical United States imperialist hegemonizing; secondly, theories, again, widespread in the USA, advanced, for example by Michael W. Apple, arguing that there is an equivalence or parallelism between `race’, class and gender as forms of structural oppression in society; thirdly, theories salient in India, but present in Indian heritage communities, for example in Britain, that the dominant form of oppression is caste oppression, of Dalits (`Untouchables’) by (high-caste) Brahmins. I critique these from empirical and theoretical/ analytical perspectives, concluding that the salient forms of discrimination, oppression and inequality in the classroom, as in the economy and society, whether in the UK, USA or India, or elsewhere, are those relating to (`raced' and gendered and caste divided) social class, and that these forms and processes of marginalization and inequality are a function of the capitalist system of exploitation, which uses schooling and formal education to reproduce the existing patterns and forms of educational, social and economic inequalities.

This is a panoptic paper critiquing theoretical analyses in the light of emprical data

The conclusion is to validate Marxist analysis and the salience of class oppression and discrimination in both schooliong and society,while recognising the materiality of ideology for example regarding racism,racialisation, and xeno-racialisation.