The Problem of Class Abstractionism

Abstract

With renewed interest in Marxism, class is back on the intellectual agenda. But so too is the familiar charge of “class reductionism.” This charge conflates two distinct claims regarding what we term the structural and political primacy of class. Structural primacy refers to the determinant role of class in social explanation, whereas political primacy refers to its centrality in radical politics. Crossing these distinct claims, we identify four possible positions on the primacy of class. Here, we focus on the two that affirm the structural primacy of class. What we call “class abstractionism,” which presumes to derive the political primacy of class from an account of its structural primacy, ultimately relies on an abstract conception of class that effectively presupposes its political primacy. In contrast, a more adequate account of structural primacy—what we call “class dynamism”—requires us to abandon the presupposition of class’s necessary political primacy.

Capitalism and the Organization of Displacement: Selma James’s Internationalism of the Unwaged

“…Hartmann 1979) and class abstractionism (c.f. McCarthy and Desan 2023) and anticipating efforts of social reproduction theorists to build a unitary theory of capitalism and gender oppression (Arruzza 2016) and to explain social difference by analyses of divisions of labor and labor market dependency (Cicerchia 2022; Young 1981). The third section locates James’s thought alongside contemporaneous theories of surplus populations and explains the view of wagelessness as a situation of organized displacement.…”