Theory on Class

Working-class distinction is no longer seen as a starting point by a new generation of academic critics, but rather as a theoretical conclusion. This is a highly cynical stance that hides the real causes of defeat—the atomization and resignation of the working class.

The increase in debate and discussion surrounding the idea of class is one of the most encouraging developments in the resurrection of socialist politics. Class talk was frowned upon and prohibited during the 1980s and 1990s. Politicians charged with "class warfare" anyone who even ventured to mention it, while academic theory only gave it lip service, as Wendy Brown phrased it in the mid-1990s: "Class is invariably named, but rarely theorized or developed in the multiculturalist mantra of 'race, class, gender, sexuality."

However, following the political tremors caused by Trump and Brexit, the importance of class in politics reemerged. Disputes raged about whether Trump's supporters were petty bourgeois or members of the working class. Even though it could have grown boring, the PMC debates in 2019 at least addressed the issue of class. Above importantly, there was a strong contender for president who advocated for class struggle politics. In 2019, Sanders said on Twitter, "If there is going to be class warfare in this country, it's about time the working class won that war."

Sanders' and Corbyn's class struggle politics were found to be more of a left populist fantasy. They left behind an uninterrupted process of class realignment between urban and rural, college-educated and non-college-educated workers. A rising number of academics are once more extremely concerned about all this "class" discussion in this new vacuum. These critics argue that emphasizing class is either too specific, too broad, or not broad enough to encompass the many contemporary left-wing struggles (such as those over the environment, policing, trans rights, etc.). A recent online discussion hosted by the Seattle-based Marxist conference "Red May," simply titled "How Not to talk about Class," encapsulated this trend.

Attacks on "class reductionism" are nothing new—they have been brewing throughout the recent upswing in class-focused politics—but what sets the latest criticisms apart is that they originate from individuals who at least pretend to be Marxists. A supposedly anti-obfuscatory "post-Marxism" of their academic teachers, this type of Marxist yet holds onto elements of its culturalist interpretation and pluralist democratic politics. The euphemism of "orthodox Marxism" and its class-based politics is another opponent that these new Marxists have in common with post-Marxism. The key right now is to acknowledge the significance of class and class politics while also using cutting-edge theoretical tools to patrol and contain their territory.

Primacy of Class Rejection

The most significant contribution to this discussion is an essay by Michael McCarthy and Mathieu Desan titled "The Problem of Class Abstractionism". McCarthy and Desan criticize Vivek Chibber's work and his most recent book, The Class Matrix, which surprisingly supports the idea that structural class relations have a greater explanatory power than culture and that culture plays a crucial role in fostering class solidarity and collective power.

McCarthy and Desan fundamentally disagree with the political supremacy of class, casting doubt on the post-2016 comeback of class-focused politics. The analytical distinction between the structural primacy of class and the political primacy of class—along with the necessary 2x2 table—is the crux of the argument. Chibber and his contemporaries support the "class abstractionism" movement, which upholds the structural and political preeminence of class.

Class abstractionists, according to McCarthy and Desan's account, contend that class structure "alone directly govern[s] people's material well-being" (as opposed to other potential factors they label "nonclass social structures" like citizenship, racial, or gender discrimination), and based on this structural primacy, they then implicitly assume class has political primacy. They go on to say that class is understood in the work of theorists like Chibber at a "abstract" level, in terms of capitalist owners of the means of production vs owners of labor power. Class structure produces a homogenizing force that can lead to a collective political formation centered on the shared experience and material concerns of workers at such stratospheric theoretical heights.

McCarthy and Desan propose a different approach that they refer to as "class dynamism," which upholds the structural importance of class but rejects its political preeminence. They also provide a very different interpretation of the importance of class structure, though. McCarthy and Desan disagree with Chibber's "abstract" theorization and think that class structure plays a special role as a "endogenous mechanism" of competition and social difference. Simply said, market pressures and technology advancement tend to separate workers according to their skills, locations, and a variety of other identity constructions. The necessity of a more-than-class approach to the conjunctural specificity of political mobilization stems from the important role of class in social differentiation. As they put it, "When workers are organized into unions, parties, or other political associations, they may be mobilized on the basis of a variety of (layered and sometimes contradictory) subjective identifications. They may be interpellated as workers, but rarely are they interpellated exclusively as workers in the abstract. Indeed, at a conjunctural level, they may also be interpellated as families, believers, citizens, immigrants, members of racial groups, members of age cohorts, and so on."

Despite the fact that McCarthy and Desan classify "intersectional" approaches—what they refer to as "class relativism"—in a different cell of their 2x2 table, their strategy bears a remarkable resemblance to that of the relativists. According to their interpretation, class is merely one "structure" out of many and does not "alone" influence material well-being in the absence of "nonclass social structures" like racism. McCarthy and Desan would likely interpret plantation slavery as a combination of two intersecting "structures"—planter and slave on the one hand, and white supremacy on the other—rather than understanding it as a uniquely racialized class structure, as Barbara Fields does. Additionally, in their writing, politics is seen as being fundamentally influenced by a number of overlapping "subjective identifications" such as workers, citizens, immigrants, etc.?Given the prevalence of diversity and inclusion discourse in academics (which is occasionally used against workers' organization), it is understandable why this kind of argument would be warmly received.

This brings up the argument presented by McCarthy and Desan's first significant flaw: their idealist view of politics. For them, the act of mobilizing a wide range of subjectivities is all that politics is. Politics is covered throughout the essay in terms of the "discursive basis for political mobilization" and working through "multiple subjective orientations." According to this interpretation, a group has simply mobilized a diverse group of individuals into a broader structure in order to attain the end of politics (as opposed to arriving at its essential beginning point). It is not addressed how such collective amalgamations truly alter society.

They refer to their article as "a contribution within Marxism," but Marxist politics is not just about mobilizing identities and subjective orientations; it is about class struggle. More importantly, politics is about acquiring and using power in opposition to the power of capital (and, presumably, one day, completely reversing the power of capital). While the subjective components of political consciousness are undoubtedly significant, political power cannot simply be attained by assembling subjectivities in a coherent configuration. Symptomatically, the authors never talk about power as such (the sole mentions are from block quotes taken from works by Helmut Wiesenthal, Claus Offe, and G?ran Therborn).

This brings up the piece's second flaw: it fundamentally misinterprets the Marxist theory of class political predominance. Not only is class important in a broad, analytical sense—"the history of all previously existing society is the history of class struggles"—but the working class, sometimes known as the proletariat, also plays a significant political role. This has nothing to do with whatever subjective potential that the category "worker" might have; rather, it has to do with the specific type of agency that an organized working class possesses; the objective power of the working class as a class "in itself."

The working class, which makes up the great bulk of society, has an objective power to withhold the labor required to maintain society's functioning as well as a material interest in confronting the inherent insecurity of capitalist social relations. Simply put, workers have a position of power because they have the ability to strike, threaten to strike, or, as Jane McAlevey frequently claims, "create a crisis," which compels political systems to act. McCarthy and Desan only make a single allusion to this idea: "…because the capitalist social order is dependent on the working class—which makes up a majority of the population—in a way that is not true of other social groups, the working class occupies a politically strategic structural location."

They seldom consider the political ramifications, which is telling because from a Marxist perspective, the labor movement is crucial to the political primacy of class. And despite the diversity of other social realities, the labor movement has been most successful in uniting working people around material interests. However, McCarthy and Desan seldom even mention the labor movement (the phrase "union" appears twice, but "strike" does not). This is due to the fact that, once more, for them, "politics" merely refers to the subjective confluence of multiple identities into a "movement."

Reduced Workplace Organization

The piece "Class in Theory, Class in Practice" by William Clare Roberts, published in the journal Crisis & Critique, is a more recent addition. The points made by McCarthy and Desan on structural vs. political primacy and class abstractionism are expressly cited by Clare Roberts, yet it is indisputably the case that Roberts' understanding of "class" is much more robust and materialist. Clare Roberts views the centrality of class in terms of society's inextricable connection to production rather than as just one "structure" among many: "Class relations organize production, and, since production is fundamental to the existence of human society, solving the class relation problem is a limiting constraint on everything else that goes on in society."

Next, Clare Roberts draws some insightful contrasts between a politics of "work relations" and a more general politics of the proletariat, which she defines as "the class of people dependent upon wages for life, whether they are working or not." A "proletarian" politics that organizes the material interests of this sizable class against the authority of capitalism will undoubtedly be a goal of any Marxist politics.

But this is where everything start to go awry. Clare Roberts bases his entire thesis on downplaying the significance of labor and worker organization, in contrast to McCarthy and Desan who merely fail to mention it. He maintains that workplace organization can only have a limited impact because a truly proletarian class politics is about "the possibility of taking over production and producing otherwise." He specifically criticizes Chibber's assertion that the strength of the working class is derived on their ability to stop working through strikes: "It is absurd for Chibber to maintain that the proletariat has the “ability to crash the entire system, just by refusing to work.” Organized refusal to work has only ever won concessions from or provoked confrontations with bosses and the state, and it will never be able to do more than that. It is impossible for a refusal to work to “crash the system” for the simple reason that workers have to eat in order to be in a position to make a revolution, and food will not produce itself."

Marx then goes on to say that a country that "ceases to work" will "perish." True enough if the objective is merely that strikes have not resulted in socialism, but why would this need to be stated? But does this mean that the Left should give up on the unions if the point is that the concessions from the bosses and the state are dead ends and could never be weigh stations on the route to more comprehensive transformational gains? Is our attitude to be "You will never do more than that" when the West Virginia teachers went on strike for two weeks and obtained their political demands in a right-wing state?

Clare Roberts concludes by making the case that the influence of strikes in increasing the political power of the working class should be diminished. This is contrary to the classics and trivializes the work of groups like Labor Notes and intellectuals like Jane McAlevey and Joe Burns, who contend that restoring workers' ability to strike—a power that has fallen off a precipice since the early 1980s—is essential to reestablishing working-class power.

More generally, it is hard to believe that an academic Marxist in 2023 will consider it important to downgrade workplace organizing and strikes as not properly proletarian class politics in an era where workplace organizing is on the rise from Starbucks to Amazon and a 350,000-strong UPS workforce that moves 6% of the US GDP may go on strike this summer.

Clare Roberts ultimately arrives at a similar analytical conclusion as McCarthy and Desan. They both contend that these class abstractionists are ignorant of the fact that the working class is split: "The only fair reading of the situation is that the working class is divided against itself, and that these mutually opposed fractions of the proletariat have allied themselves—politically and culturally—with different fractions of the capitalist class." Instead of viewing working-class distinction as a political issue that must be resolved via organization, the new academic critics of class view it as a profound theoretical conclusion.

What is likely Chibber's strongest point is ignored in favor of the necessity to highlight the various factors that contribute to working class divide, such as racism, sexism, nationalism, and others. For him, the main obstacle to working class organization—especially in the neoliberal era of working-class defeat—is not so much these polarizing forces as it is widespread atomization and workers' resignation; a lack of faith in politics or collective organization's ability to do anything to improve their lot. It's difficult to blame them given how thoroughly capital has colonized politics.

Marxists traditionally begin from the premise that the working class has shared material interests rooted in the common experience of exploitation and material insecurity that need to be brought forth through organizing work, despite understanding the difficulty and complexity of working-class differentiation. This fundamental stance, according to McCarthy and Desan, is overly grounded in a "abstract" understanding of class (the employment relation). Similar to other critics, Clare Roberts disputes the idea that "the working class has a broadly unified set of interests."

The evidence contradicts this denial of the concept of shared material interests. Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner estimate that 79% of households in the U.S. are dependent on wage income in another recent attempt to define what constitutes class politics. Adding this to the widely held belief that 62% of Americans "live paycheck to paycheck" reveals a generalized level of economic uncertainty that affects a sizable section of society. For this reason, it makes sense for socialists to unite in support of "wide-scale economic redistribution that provides a modicum of personal security for the entire society." Such a strategy for organizing stems from the reality that a sizable working-class majority, despite its various divisions, shares a common interest in such redistribution.

Of course, merely asserting that the working class has similar material interests does not address the issue of how those interests are collectively organized into political forms. Perhaps at this point McCarthy and Desan would concur with Chibber's contention that "cultures of solidarity" are genuinely necessary to develop class awareness or to create a class that "for itself." On this point, McCarthy/Desan, Clare Roberts, and Chibber would all concur that history does not support the "orthodox Marxist" theory of the "natural" emergence of class consciousness. The main distinction is that, in Chibber's view, solidarity relationships must be rooted in class organization and demands that seek to materially elevate individuals.

Without any idea of shared material interests, we run the risk of having politics that degenerate into unbound culturalism. "If the proposition that 'interests' do not exist independently of their modes of representation [is true]...we are in the realm of absolute idealism, where nothing exists but Idea," stated Ellen Meiksins Wood vehemently during the 1980s academic movement toward culture and discourse.

Organize around similar interests to fight our common foes in the capitalist class. That is the essence of class politics. Reinforcing the differences within the working class as though they are insurmountable is not only a gift to the capitalist class (which profits from our divisions), but it also ultimately results in disarray and a lack of clarity over how to focus our political activities. Following the class theory patrollers leads to a way of thinking that is fundamentally uninterested in politics as such. If we want instruction on how to or how not to talk about class, we should seek elsewhere. Those of us interested in actually restoring working-class power should.