Reconceiving class in contemporary working-class studies

This chapter argues that the global expansion and diversification of capitalist production and the laboring population since the 1970s make it imperative for working-class studies to develop new, complex ways to conceptualize the social differences, tensions, and contradictions of working-class collectivity. Such conceptual rethinking can help style more fully grasp the heterogeneity of work and workers, the always-shifting nature of class composition, and the relationality of class with other with other dimensions of capitalist power and collective identity. To do this, the chapter contends, class should be approached not as an already-established category or identity, but as a problem that must be continually interrogated and recast in the context of particular struggles. Rather than drawing lines between theoretical approaches and traditions, working-class studies should adopt a willfully creative and promiscuous approach to conceptualizing class formation and struggle. Drawing on Marx’s notion of living labor, on Sartrean notions of seriality, and on feminist notions of social reproduction, the chapter directs attention to lines of thought and theory that underscore the contingency of class formation, the social divisions and differences internal to the working class, and the larger circuits of social life and struggle beyond the workplace.

Class (philosophy) · Epistemology · Sociology · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism