The interior of North East Brazil has emerged over the last three decades as a fast-expanding zone of export grape production. Its growth is based upon fast-changing class relations. This chapter reflects upon the author's attempts to deploy Marxist class analysis to comprehend these dynamics. Illustrating the forces at work in the case and field-sites analysed, the chapter discusses a dual process of ‘learning Marx by doing’. First, it describes the author's process of learning how to move from abstract, static and structural conceptions of class relations, to dynamic and experiential ones, in order to decipher the region's social transformations. Second, it illustrates how field observations on the rising self-organisation of the export sector's labour force and its achievement of significant concessions from employers were informed by, but also informed, the author's understandings of capital– labour relations. The chapter also addresses the relevance of methods aimed at carefully mapping and recording field findings, as these greatly help in identifying key features of class and power in their concrete manifestations in given settings.

The modern bourgeois society […] has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. (Marx and Engels 1969: 14)