1 Marx’s New and Different Concept of Class Richard D. Wolff (Working paper for presentation September 29, 2015, Economics Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Not for circulation, quotation, or duplication.)
1. Concepts of Class The concept of class poses profound problems for theory and practice. This is true across the academic disciplines and in the confused incoherence around "class issues" when concepts of class surface in economic, political and cultural discourses. Since 1945, the Cold War and its lingering effects prevented many discussions of social trends, events, and crises from considering their class causes, components or consequences. For many, loyalty to capitalism and/or hostility toward its critics took the form of refusing to use concepts like class. The very idea of class when applied to the US or advanced capitalism anywhere was rejected with claims that it was outdated (since modern capitalism homogenized nearly everyone into a vast “middle class”).1 Many dismissed class analysis because it was “tainted by a lack of objectivity" (a quality that they located in the concepts they used instead of class). Only quite recently, following the 2008 global capitalist crash, have concepts of class resurfaced in many minds and therefore in much public discussion. What might be called the return of the repressed discourse of class is problematic because there is no one concept of class. The word, like the concept, entails multiple, significantly different meanings among those who think and communicate using it. Only a small minority of users explicitly identifies and justifies which meaning it prefers. Most users think, speak, and write as if the particular concept of class they use is the universally agreed concept. Because that is not the case, discourses using class categories are often confused and misunderstood. When the relation between class and social change arises as a practical matter, the problematic nature of class as a concept becomes historically urgent.