4 - The Ontology of Class: Moving beyond Inequality and Identity

Summary

Segmentation versus class identity

In Part I of this volume, I argued that there is a normative foundation for labour studies, which consists in the assumption that class domination is an obstacle to human flourishing. Furthermore, I problematized how scientific knowledge production is implicated in capitalist class domination, and I criticized the proponents of the PRA for not sufficiently recognizing the relevance of class relations in their attempts to develop a framework for empirical research. I argued that it is impossible to assess whether union activities improve the lot of workers without considering how they affect class relations of forces. All of this calls for firmly linking global labour studies in general, and strike research in particular, with class theory. This is what I do in this part of the book. Drawing upon authors writing about class theory from a Marxist angle and about questions of ontology, epistemology and methodology from a critical realist perspective, I take a somewhat irreverent approach. I build an argument that is my own, but that is still indebted to ideas that I have inherited from these other authors.

I proceed in this part by systematically developing the concept of class. In this chapter, I discuss the ontological question of what kind of entity it refers to. I contrast two different conceptions, one centred on socioeconomic resources, and the other on identity, and explain to what extent they subscribe to a form of material and ideational reductionism, respectively. As an alternative, I present a critical- realist, materialist conception of class that highlights its intransitive dimension and the fact that it is an effect of the organization of work. From this very general issue, I first move, in the next chapter, to the issue of class in capitalism, and then to working- class formation, in the two remaining chapters contained in this part.

‘Class’ is a term that can be heard fairly frequently in everyday conversations, but more so at certain times and in certain spaces than in others. Accordingly, an easy way to start conceptualizing class is to examine everyday understandings of the term. When people refer to ‘class’, they often imagine society in analogy with tangible physical objects composed of several layers, for example, rock formations, soils or cakes. In these descriptions, people are classified as belonging to one of those layers – usually with reference to their income and wealth.