The Problem of Class Abstractionism

What Is Class Reductionism?

The term “class reductionism” is pejorative—few Marxists would use it to describe themselves. Many would point out that far from being exclusively concerned with “class” in a narrow sense, Marxists have often been at the forefront of historical struggles against other forms of social domination, such as racism, patriarchy, and imperialism. Still, this disavowal does not necessarily amount to a refutation—it is perfectly consistent to be concerned with various forms of domination while believing them to be, in some meaningful sense, subordinate to class domination. The problem is not the disingenuousness of Marxists who reject the charge but, rather, the ambiguity of the charge itself. Indeed, class reductionism has become something of a folk concept, with more polemical than analytic value. In this section, we attempt to analytically clarify the meaning of class reductionism in terms that both Marxists and their critics might accept.

At its most literal, class reductionism refers to the view that various social phenomena, especially other forms of social domination, are ultimately reducible to economic phenomena related to class. Take the famous metaphor of base and superstructure and the notion that the political or cultural forms of the superstructure merely reflect or express the mode of production that is their base. Such a simple view of the relationship between base and superstructure, usually associated with orthodox Marxism, has in fact long been out of fashion among Marxists, among whom criticisms of “vulgar” Marxism and “economism” have been commonplace for decades (e.g., Williams 1973). Indeed, even on its own terms, the base/superstructure metaphor only implies that political and cultural forms are built atop a foundation set by the economic mode of production, not that these are reducible to this foundation in the sense of being reflections or expressions of it.

At least since Althusser’s (1969) pioneering contributions, Marxists have sought to present a more complex picture of the relations of determination that tie base and superstructure together. For Althusser, the various “levels” of a social formation—the economic, the political, the ideological—overdetermine one another in a way that is explicitly nonreductionist. Moreover, levels other than the economic can be “dominant” within a given social formation. Nonetheless, Althusser maintained that the economic remained “determinant in the last instance,” and the “dominance” of a given level was itself ultimately assigned by the economic mode of production. The coherence of Althusser’s oft-maligned formulation need not detain us here; what matters for our purposes is that it more aptly specifies what is at issue with class reductionism. The charge, insofar as it is directed against Marxism, is not really about reduction per se in the outmoded sense of reflection or expression but is about the more basic claim that class structure is unique and fundamental relative to the social structure as a whole. For example, Wright, Levine, and Sober (1992) concede that variation in noneconomic phenomena is irreducible to class but nevertheless posit a “causal asymmetry” in which class structure determines the limits within which noneconomic forces exercise their determination. The precise way this is conceived can vary, but both Marxists and their detractors can agree it is hard to imagine a Marxist not holding to some version of the causally asymmetrical character of class structure. We can thus clarify some of the ambiguity surrounding the charge of class reductionism by specifying that it refers to a belief in the structural primacy of class in sociohistorical analysis. Class structure, in other words, is not just one among many principles of social differentiation but has meaningful causal priority over these other forms of differentiation due to its unique structural features. A key theoretical task is in showing what these features have primacy in explaining.

This structural dimension does not exhaust the charge of class reductionism—there is also usually a political dimension to it. Marxists are frequently accused of unduly privileging class not just in sociohistorical analysis but also in political action, and indeed, many Marxists have affirmed the view that class is in some sense more politically important than other subjective bases of mobilization. This is perhaps obviously the case when the outcome of interest is the development of a politics of socialist transformation. At issue here is the political primacy of class as the privileged subject of radical, and especially socialist, politics. It is a commonplace understanding among Marxists that Marx’s contribution to socialist thought was to tether it to the workers’ movement as the agent of socialist transformation. Nonetheless, it is equally clear that socialism, as a doctrine, is not simply an ideological reflection of the workers’ movement. Socialism, after all, remains an irreducibly political movement, which, through a conscious transformation of social structure, aims at subordinating “the blind processes of second nature . . . to the will of humanity” (Riley 2022:39). ¹ Class consciousness and a socialist political consciousness, or what we might call class formation at the economic level and class formation at the political level, respectively, should thus not be conflated, and indeed, much of Marxist theorizing has been a reflection on the politically mediated relationship between the two. What we call the political primacy of class, then, refers not to a general claim of the political significance of class, which all Marxists would agree to, but rather to a particular way of understanding the relationship between class formation and socialist politics. Specifically, it refers to the claim that such a politics must in the first instance be pitched in class terms to be effective. Although most Marxists would justify claims of political primacy in terms of the unique structural features of class, this need not be the case, as we will show. What defines claims regarding the political primacy of class is simply the view that the subjective basis for radical politics should a priori be defined in terms of class. Or, to put it differently, class interpellations form the immediate and exclusive basis for the development of any effective socialist politics.

This political dimension of class reductionism is typically conflated with the structural dimension by critics of class reductionism, regardless of their sympathy for Marxism more generally. Thus, for example, in The Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger (1991:7), one of the foremost critics of class reductionism from within the Marxist tradition, bemoans how Barbara Fields’s (1990) insight—that “race” as an ideology is socially and historically constructed in a way that class is not—is “often boiled down to the notion that class (or ‘the economic’) is more real, more fundamental, more basic or more important than race, both in political terms and in terms of historical analysis.” The question, which Roediger largely elides, is whether rejecting the primacy of class “in political terms” also means rejecting its primacy “in terms of historical analysis” or if, in fact, these are not distinct problems. ²

The charge of class reductionism thus covers at least two distinct claims: one about the structural primacy of class in sociohistorical analysis and another about the political primacy of class in the development of radical socialist politics. That these are often conflated is not just an effect of ambiguity produced by subsuming them under the single label of “class reductionism” but is also attributable to the assumption that the structural and political claims entail one another. For critics of class reductionism, criticism of the political primacy of class often stands in for criticism of claims of its structural primacy. For many defending the primacy of class, its political primacy is assumed by virtue of its structural primacy. Yet making an analytic distinction between the structural and political primacy of class suggests that formally speaking, the two claims can exist in various combinations. Indeed, crossing the two claims generates a 2 × 2 table yielding four separate cells (Figure 1). In the top-left cell, both the structural and political primacy of class are rejected; in the bottom-right cell, both are affirmed. This diagonal axis of opposition represents the terms in which the debate over class reductionism is usually presented. However, breaking down class reductionism into its component parts reveals the possibility of two more categories: a top-right cell in which structural primacy is denied but political primacy affirmed and a bottom-left cell in which structural primacy is affirmed but political primacy denied.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Primary of class.

The formal possibilities generated by distinguishing between structural and political primacy are not mere analytic fictions. Each cell of the table in Figure 1 can be elaborated with substantive theories. What all theories classifiable in the top-left cell have in common is the underlying notion that class is neither unique nor fundamental relative to other forms of social difference in terms of its structural powers of determination and its political efficacy. As such, we call this cell “class relativism.” This cell encompasses a wide range of non-Marxist theories that, despite their differences, all reject any special ontological or political status for class. Thus, it includes various theories according to which class is only one of many axes of differentiation or principles of social closure governing the distribution of material and symbolic resources and culturalist theories (e.g., Sewell 2005; Somers 1992) that insist on the equally culturally constituted nature of all social structures, class included. The main point here is that class has no structural privilege, either because it is only one social structure among others, all of which work in analogous ways, or because structure as such cannot be said to exist prior to its cultural mediation, meaning the class structure only exists in and through interpretive processes of subject formation and meaning-making that precede it analytically. The implication of these arguments, often tacit, is that class, robbed of its structural privilege, also loses its political privilege.

Class relativism is perhaps best exemplified by the framework of intersectionality (Collins 1990, 2015, 2019) or the paradigm of “classism” (hooks 2000), both of which tend to conceptualize class relations in analogous terms to other relations of power. But it is also exemplified by Bourdieu’s (1987) neo-Weberian theorization of class. Against Marxism’s supposed “substantialist” bias, Bourdieu argues that what exists from a “scientific standpoint” is not a particular class structure but, rather, a multidimensional “social space” structured by the distribution of various forms of capital. Classes, then, are symbolic constructs that translate common conditions and experiences into subjective affinities, but because these are a function of proximity within a “social space” in which all axes of differentiation (i.e., forms of capital) are in principle a factor, “class” loses its economic specificity and instead becomes a generic term for subjective group formation. ³ Economic capital may be a more or less salient factor in structuring the social space in a given context, but for Bourdieu, there is nothing structurally distinct or fundamental about it relative to other forms of capital such that it is theoretically rather than contingently more determinant of class. ⁴

A rejection of the political primacy of class, however, need not follow from a rejection of its structural primacy. The top-right cell in Figure 1 includes fewer obvious examples, but it is also a logically coherent position. Class-based political discourses can be justified in terms of their efficacy without making any assumptions about the distinct determinative power of class structure. Class, for example, might be considered a more effective discursive basis for political mobilization because its quasi-universalist connotations crosscut other social differences, even if it is denied that such economic interpellations are any more structurally determined than competing interpellations. In other words, the arguments within this cell share the constructivist premise that class is in the first instance a discursive construct but grant political privilege to this construct in radical politics. As such, we label this cell “class constructivism.” Such arguments could be made in a discourse-theoretic vein drawing on the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1985; see also Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2018), for example, in the various forms of left-populism they have inspired that attempt to discursively polarize the political field around relatively indeterminate but resonant economic categories such as “the people” versus “the elite” or “the 99%” versus “the 1%.” Such categories refer to economic inequalities, but their open-ended and inclusive character is meant to overcome the limitations of political interpellations based on traditional, structurally defined class categories. Indeed, populism more generally can be defined as a kind of free-floating class discourse that refuses any anchoring in structural determinations.

We are left with the bottom two cells of Figure 1—what we call class abstractionism (bottom right) and class dynamism (bottom left). These two positions are the focus of the rest of the article. The bottom-right cell, which is characterized by the claim that the structural primacy of class necessarily entails the political primacy of class, is familiar—it is the position traditionally associated with Marxism and the typical target of critiques of class reductionism. For both critics and defenders of the primacy of class, the twin claims of structural and political primacy are tightly bound together, with claims regarding the political primacy of class thought to follow from claims of its structural primacy. As we suggested, however, these two claims are not identical. In the next section, we evaluate recent Marxist arguments that ground political primacy in an account of structural primacy. We find that such attempts are unsuccessful and ultimately posit an untenable conception of structural primacy, with the result that they unwittingly rely on nonstructural arguments to support the political primacy of class. However, this is not an argument for rejecting the structural primacy of class. Instead, in the final section of this article, we show that a proper specification of the structural primacy of class does not necessarily entail its political primacy, thereby outlining the final cell of the 2 × 2 table.

Class Abstractionism

If critics of class reductionism tend to conflate claims of structural and political primacy, it is because the most familiar theoretical expression of the primacy of class—what we loosely refer to as orthodox Marxism—explicitly claims to ground the political primacy of class in its structural features. This is also true of more recent “neo-orthodox” Marxism, which shares with its orthodox forebears the belief that the political primacy of class is entailed by the unique properties of the class structure itself. ⁵ The basic argument is that 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. In this section, we argue that this belief relies on an abstract conception of class that, rather than deriving the political primacy of class from an account of its structural primacy, effectively presupposes such political primacy. We suggest that this move, characteristic of the bottom-right cell in our 2 × 2 table, is better described as class abstractionism than class reductionism.

Orthodox Marxism is characterized by a particular understanding of the relationship between the structural dynamics of capitalism and socialist politics. The developmental logic of capitalism not only generates the objective basis of its own transcendence in the form of an irreconcilable contradiction between the forces and relations of production, but it also generates the subjective basis of this transcendence in the form of a self-conscious working class aware of its historical interest in overthrowing capitalism. Socialist parties play an important role in consolidating and expressing such class consciousness at the political level, but the shift from a class “in itself” (i.e., class structure) to a class “for itself” (i.e., class formation) is ultimately rooted in the homogenizing pressures of this developmental logic. ⁶

What defines orthodox Marxism, especially as it was elaborated by central figures in the socialist movement like Karl Kautsky (1909), is the quasi-naturalistic way it conceived of the growing political consciousness and cohesiveness of the proletariat as emerging from and reflecting its economic growth and homogenization. ⁷ Orthodox Marxism assumes that political class formation, in the sense of the constitution of a collective political subject self-consciously mobilized on the basis of its class interest in transcending capitalism, directly expresses class structure. That is, orthodox Marxism tends to assume that structural classes appear at the level of politics in an immediate way. The task of socialism is to organize the working class politically, and thus the development of a specifically socialist consciousness remains politically mediated, but class formation itself, in the sense of the constitution of class subjects, is presumed to occur without such political mediation. Because it treats class formation as a natural and necessary process entailed by the class structure of capitalism, Kautskyism represents the strong version of grounding the political primacy of class in the structural primacy of class. The political primacy of class not only expresses its structural primacy; it does so more or less spontaneously.

Classical Marxism has recently seen a revival of interest. What might be called neo-orthodox, or what Riley (2022) calls “late Kautskyist,” Marxism is arguably the most vital and influential current of Marxist thought today. While jettisoning the more obviously reductive assumptions of orthodox Marxism, this current has mounted a vigorous defense of the primacy of class, to the point where some have, albeit with tongue in cheek, embraced the label of class reductionism (e.g., Calnitsky and Billeaux Martinez 2023). Within this current, Chibber stands out for the lucidity of his defense of both the structural and political primacy of class.

Chibber’s (2022a) recent book, The Class Matrix, represents a sophisticated example of neo-orthodox Marxism, and we thus engage with it at length to evaluate whether this revision of orthodox Marxism provides a convincing account of the primacy of class. ⁸ In this book, Chibber seeks to “rescue” class from the cultural turn by reaffirming the primacy of class structure over culture. ⁹ In doing so, he elaborates a theory of capitalist reproduction and class formation built around four core theses, which we name in the following.

The first, what we call the “class difference thesis,” posits that class structure has primacy of determination over nonclass social structures because it alone directly governs people’s material well-being and therefore their material interests. Typically for a Marxist, Chibber defines class in structural terms as discrete locations within a system of production that determine access to the social product and thereby the means of subsistence. Defined in this way, class is distinct from other forms of social difference because it uniquely determines “the rules for what actors have to do to reproduce themselves,” as Chibber (2017:34) puts it in an earlier article. “The peculiarity of class,” Chibber (2022a:17, emphasis added) claims, “resides in the fact that it is the only social relation that directly governs the material well-being of its participants.” For this reason, the determination exercised by the class structure operates at a distinct and more fundamental level relative to other forms of social difference. Whereas conformity to nonclass social roles (e.g., those attached to various identity categories such as gender, race, sexuality) depends on contingent cultural processes and is enforced through agent-imposed sanctions, the class structure is unique in exercising its compulsion automatically and impersonally because actors’ material reproduction directly depends on conformity to class roles in a way that is not true for nonclass social roles (Chibber 2022a:29–37). ¹⁰

The second thesis, what we call the “negative selectivity thesis,” posits that class structure determines culture in the sense of selecting against incompatible cultural forms. Although Chibber defends the determinant role of class structure over culture, he rejects the orthodox Marxist reduction of culture to a simple expression of the class structure and concedes that a range of contingent cultural forms may exist within a given structural context. Nonetheless, he argues that class structure retains primacy over cultural forms because the structural imperatives of class ultimately select against incompatible cultural forms in a way that sets definite limits to cultural heterogeneity. ¹¹ Chibber’s innovation is to grant a measure of contingency to culture—a fact that accounts for capitalism’s ability to thrive in varied cultural contexts—while still insisting on the ultimate causal primacy of class structure in defining the parameters of this contingency.

The third thesis, what we call the “capitalist reproduction thesis,” posits that the reproduction of capitalism is secured not through added cultural factors such as ideology or hegemony but through the immanent workings of the capitalist class structure itself. For Chibber (2022a:106), the risk/reward matrix of the capitalist class structure leads workers under normal circumstances to “accept their location in the class structure because they see no other viable option.” Workers see no other viable option not because they are blind to their own domination—indeed, Chibber explicitly counterposes “resignation” to “consent”—but because the class structure itself imposes heavy costs on collective action and thereby incentivizes individual accommodation. Workers choose individualized strategies “not because they fail to recognize their interests, as theories of false consciousness or cultural hegemony would have it, but because they accurately perceive the risk/cost matrix associated with collective action” (Chibber 2022a:155). ¹² This is another area where Chibber diverges from more reductive versions of orthodox Marxism. Whereas these predicted that class formation, that is, the constitution of a collectively mobilized class subject, would emerge quasi-naturalistically from the class structure and whereas subsequent Marxists tended to explain the failure of this prediction in largely cultural terms, Chibber argues that the incentive structure of capitalism itself—what he calls the “class matrix”—is the primary barrier to class formation.

If the capitalist class structure does not predict class consciousness and collective action, but rather individual accommodation and resignation, then what can overcome this built-in conservatism? Chibber offers a voluntaristic and quasi-culturalist answer to this question with what we call his “class formation thesis,” which posits that class formation occurs when workers’ meaning orientations change from individualistic to solidaristic through the cultural work of organizers. If class remains the privileged subjective basis for radical politics, as Chibber (2022b) argues elsewhere, and if class consciousness is inhibited by the class structure, then it follows that radical politics depends on the cultivation of class-cultural forms that can override this structure. Indeed, Chibber argues that the problem of class formation can only be solved by creating cultures of solidarity that help workers build a sense of shared purpose with each other as workers in a way that overcomes structural imperatives. ¹³ But if class formation depends on the cultural and political mediation of unions and parties, Chibber (2022a:74–75) nonetheless insists that the contours of this mediation are set by the structure: Class formation “requires an ongoing process of cultural intervention, but its effectiveness is conditional on aligning it with workers’ material interests. . . . [It] runs along grooves firmly set by the class structure.” In other words, class formation is culturally contingent, but the form of collective action as class formation is structurally given.

Despite being frequently accused of class reductionism, Chibber thus rejects and improves the more reductive elements of orthodox Marxism. Nonetheless, his account reproduces a critical weakness in orthodox Marxism’s theorization of the primacy of class. The way Chibber conceptualizes the structural primacy of class implies its political primacy. But as orthodox Marxism did before, Chibber effectively presupposes the political primacy of class and backfills the conceptualization of class structure in a way that justifies its premise but ultimately mis-specifies the structural primacy of class. Chibber’s neo-orthodox account still hinges on an unduly abstract conception of the class structure that belies its materialist pretensions. This, we argue, is the real problem, shared by orthodox and neo-orthodox Marxism alike, with attempts to ground the political primacy of class in its structural primacy, a problem that has less to do with reductionism than with what we call abstractionism.

Chibber’s account reproduces the central problems of class abstractionism.” For example, the presumption of class’s political primacy leads him to theorize class structure and its primacy in setting material interests in an arbitrary way. Throughout his analysis, in a move we call “horizontal conflation,” Chibber conflates class structure with structure as such, thus confusing arguments for the causal primacy of structure over culture with arguments for the causal primacy of class structure over other social structures. This is apparent in how his argument unfolds: Although framed initially as a theory of how structure relates to culture, “structure” is quickly conflated with class structure and “culture” with cultural meanings as they pertain to class such that the ensuing analysis ends up being about the relative causal power of structure versus culture in terms of class. This is justified by the dubious claim that the “only” social relation that “directly governs” the material well-being of its participants is class (i.e., the class difference thesis). ¹⁴ Tellingly, where Therborn (1980) spoke of a broader “material matrix” of structural sanctions and affirmations in his theory of ideological subjection-qualification, Chibber reduces this to a simple discussion of the “class matrix.”

Because of this horizontal conflation, Chibber’s account has little to say about how the process of class formation relates to cross-cutting or competing nonclass political identifications. Class determination stands in for structural determination as such, and class mobilization stands in for political mobilization as such. Chibber’s account is decidedly economistic, defining class consciousness in terms of realizing workers’ corporate interests but saying little about how economic conflicts are translated at the level of politics. Class formation is thus reduced to a collective action problem with a binary outcome: individual resignation or collective action along predetermined class-structural lines. Everything not directly pertaining to class structure in the way Chibber defines it falls out of sight. How various structurally determined interests might be articulated into a common project of social transformation does not enter the framework. In other words, the theory does not account for the specifically political dimension of socialism. By conflating class structure with structure as such and class mobilization with collective action as such and by providing an account of class formation that reduces it to a collective action problem, Chibber effectively presupposes the political primacy of class rather than deriving it from a theory of its structural primacy. ¹⁵

The problem with class abstractionism extends to how the class structure itself is conceptualized—an issue we term “vertical conflation.” Chibber defines class structure only in its simplest and most abstract determination at the level of the mode of production—that is, the division between owners of means of production and owners of labor-power—and ignores its existence at multiple levels of abstraction. ¹⁶ The matrix of material interests in which workers are embedded is defined not just by their location in capitalist relations of production but also by their structural location at, for example, the industry, firm, and occupation levels. Class formation is therefore not just about how individuals grasp their economic interests in collective terms but also about what forms of economic collectivity become salient to them. The class structure does not provide a singular mold that class formation simply fills, nor does class formation simply proceed along “grooves firmly set” (Chibber 2022a:75); its existence at multiple scales allows for a variety of class formations at the economic level beyond the binary between individual resignation and collective action. By defining class structure only at its most abstract level and conflating this with the class structure as such, Chibber’s account sidesteps another central question of class formation: Why and how do workers act collectively as workers across craft, industrial, sectoral, national, and other economic divisions? Here again, Chibber does not actually derive the political primacy of class from his structural analysis. Instead, a particular conception of class formation is presupposed at the outset as the only possible form of collective action, and he constructs the class structure in such a way that precludes consideration of alternative forms of economic collective action.

The problems with Chibber’s defense of the primacy of class, we suggest, are the problems of class abstractionism more generally. Both orthodox and neo-orthodox Marxism rely on the framework of class abstractionism, that is, the substitution of a class structure conceived exclusively at an abstract level for the concretely overdetermined social structure as it exists at multiple scales. What neo-orthodox shares with orthodox Marxism is the pretension to justify the political primacy of class, that is, the notion that class subjects are a priori the necessary subjects of radical politics, in terms of its structural primacy at this abstract level. This pretension, however, amounts to little more than a prejudice: In practice, the political primacy of class is simply presupposed, and class structure is defined in such a way that confirms this premise. Class abstractionism dodges any consideration of how class formation relates to other forms of collective identification and action at the political level. Class structure is conceptualized in the image of a class formation whose form is already assumed, and the question of structural determination is reduced to a binary outcome in which all that matters is whether or not this image is realized. In the rest of the article, we consider what consequences a more satisfactory account of the structural primacy of class might have for thinking about its political primacy.

Class Dynamism

In this section, we aim to show that a plausible alternative to class abstractionism exists within a Marxist framework. We argued in the previous section that class abstractionism posits an abstract conception of the class structure that, in bracketing off alternative structural determinations at both the economic and noneconomic levels, effectively presupposes the political primacy of class in a way that sidesteps crucial questions of class formation. The problem, in other words, lies in how class abstractionism tailors its account of the structural primacy of class to fit the presumption of its political primacy rather than deriving the latter from the former. However, we need not abandon the structural primacy of class to overcome the shortcomings of class abstractionism. Indeed, we argue that an alternative account of the structural primacy of class leads us to the lower-left quadrant of our 2 × 2 table: class dynamism. In this account, the class structure is uniquely and fundamentally determinant in a meaningful sense, but what makes it distinct relative to other structures does not necessarily entail the primacy of class at a political level. In short, a Marxist framework that affirms the foundational role of capitalism and class relations need not conclude class subjectivities are the immediate or exclusive basis for the development of socialist politics.

Our argument rests on three theses. The “class differentiation thesis” argues that what makes class structure causally unique and fundamental is not that the static constraints it lays down generate actors’ basic interest set but is, rather, its developmental dynamism within capitalist social relations. The structural primacy of class is not due to it alone governing people’s material well-being, as other social structures do as well, but is based on it being endogenously dynamic such that it generates differentiation of interests within and between class and nonclass groups. Next, the “conjunctural class structure thesis” argues that class has explanatory salience across multiple levels of abstraction on the vertical dimension and that the lower levels are most crucial for understanding class formation because they bring into view the segmentations and divisions within the working class in particular historical conjunctures, which are the concrete conditions under which class formation occurs. Finally, the “multiple subjectivities thesis” argues that dynamic changes in the class structure generate cultural changes, not solely at the level of class culture but also along the horizontal dimension of nonclass subjectivities. If nonclass structures are also encoded with cultural meanings about what people do to realize their basic interests, capitalism’s dynamics disrupt and change these meanings. There is, in other words, a material basis for multiple collective formations, both class and nonclass.

Because the class structure operates at multiple levels of abstraction, the structural primacy of class does not necessarily entail its political primacy, in the sense of making the abstract category of “worker” the immediate and exclusive subjective basis for class formation specifically and socialist politics more broadly. On the contrary, under certain conditions, ratcheting up class struggle on the vertical dimension, that is, scaling up class struggle beyond a segment of the working class in a single workplace to the level of politics, may require the mobilization of people on the basis of nonclass subjectivities if those subjectivities are most salient conjuncturally. Building cultures of solidarity is indeed essential to class formation. But given a working class that is already highly differentiated, it is forms of solidarity that cut across differentiations within the working class, on both the vertical and horizontal levels, that are the building blocks for class formation that can move from the economic to the political.

Class Solidarity without Political Primacy

What does the framework of class dynamism mean for the relationship between the structural and political primacy of class? Orthodox Marxism, old and new, presumes that the political primacy of class is entailed by its structural primacy. However, as we argued, its account of structural primacy already effectively presupposes political primacy. But if we locate the structural primacy of class in its dynamism, rather than in the presumption that it alone governs people’s material well-being, then it does not follow that abstract class interpellations necessarily have primacy in the process of class formation at a political level. 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.

Segmentation within the working class, which generates differentiation in interests along both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, is a fundamental materialist barrier to class formation that class abstractionism fails to address. Class abstractionism only theorizes the relationship between class structure and class culture fixed at a high level of abstraction. However, members of the working class will have subjective orientations that implicate a range of understandings that do not simply boil down to the position of wage-earner (Therborn 1980:54).

Class formation is also a classification struggle over the imposition of class as the primary principle of collective identification and action. This is all the more relevant as class formation ascends the vertical dimension and widens to include more segments of the working class. To put it another way, class formation is not just about consolidating preexisting economic groups on a corporate basis, as is assumed by the reduction of class formation to a collective action problem with a binary outcome. Instead, class formation in Marxist social theory is about the constitution of a political subject oriented toward socialist politics. As Przeworski (1977) pointed out, class struggle is a struggle over the existence and salience of class before it is a struggle between classes. But class formation is not merely an additive exercise made possible by altering the risk/reward matrix for participation, that is, the class matrix. The class matrix may shed some light in explaining the conditions necessary for collective action on the shopfloor given a relatively homogeneous workforce, but it has much less to offer in terms of explaining the process of class formation at a broader, political level. The basic dilemma in widening formations on the vertical dimension of class is that because the dynamism of class structure differentiates the working class through combined and uneven development, the starting point is a working class that is today already segmented not simply in terms of its material situation related to exploitation, authority, and skills but also, precisely because of this material differentiation, in terms of nonclass subjective attachments.

Offe and Wiesenthal (1980:78–79) pose the problem as such:

The logic of collective action of the relatively powerless differs from that of the relatively powerful in that the former implies a paradox absent from the latter—the paradox that interests can only be met to the extent that they are partly redefined. Therefore, the organizations [of the relatively powerless must always] simultaneously express and define the interests of their members.

That this requires a culture of solidarity is well understood even within the terms of what we call class abstractionism, but it takes on a particular meaning when understood in relation to the dynamics of structural differentiation that define capitalism. Because workers are differentiated along both economic and noneconomic lines across various levels of abstraction, their shared interests are not self-evident but need to be worked out through a dialogic process. Solidarity, in other words, cannot be presupposed.

That solidarity must be forged because otherwise people tend toward individualized resignation is recognized by Chibber, but at stake in class formation is not just the fact of solidarity but also its form. Class formation does not boil down to a collective action problem with fixed players. If we consider class formation as a conjunctural process and not just a binary outcome, it becomes clear there is no way around the problem of articulating the different segments of the working class into a common political project (see De Leon, Desai, and Tuğal 2009; Eidlin 2016). Indeed, class formation does not occur in a vacuum; it does not find workers fully atomized and devoid of collective attachments as if resignation and consent were mutually exclusive. Moreover, the problem of class formation cannot be solved by discursive fiat, that is, by simply affirming the political primacy of an abstract concept of class. These other solidarities that make up the texture of workers’ lived experience are the raw materials upon which class formation must work, a fact that follows precisely from the fundamental dynamics of the class structure itself.

By simply positing the political primacy of class as the subjective basis for collective action, as if this were given by the class structure, class abstractionism therefore puts the cart before the horse. The dynamism of the capitalist class structure instead poses political primacy as a conjunctural problem. Class formation is not reducible to the aggregation of individuals inserted into a singular abstract structure but necessarily works itself up from a conjuncture, starting from the subjective bonds that people have already built through various concrete relations (Gould 1995:18). Counterposing individual resignation to collective action as if that were the central problem of class formation is, far from being materialist, a fiction.

Through an exploration of the final position in the debate about the significance of class, what we term class dynamism, we conclude that a proper appreciation of the structural primacy of class does not necessarily entail its political primacy. Instead, political primacy is better understood as a problem solved conjuncturally, not prescriptively. One should not assume that class formation requires mobilizing people exclusively through an appeal to their class subjectivities. Indeed, political class formation might also require mobilizing people on alternative bases that they find more immediately salient if a collective socialist subject is to be forged from the complex determinations of contemporary capitalism.