The specific definitions and elaborations of the concept of class that have been explored in this book are shaped by the diverse kinds of questions class is thought to answer. A concept whose task is to help answer a question about broad historical variations in the social organization of inequality is likely to be defined quite differently from a concept used to answer a relatively narrow question about the subjective identity of individuals in contemporary society. These questions, in turn, are embedded in broad theoretical frameworks. This is one of the things which theoretical frameworks do: they help pose questions. Questions are not generated simply by curiosity and imagination encountering the empirical world; they are generated by curiosity and imagination, organized by theoretical assumptions and animated by normative concerns, encountering the empirical world. These assumptions and concerns are what give specific questions salience and demarcate the tasks that the concept of class is called upon to accomplish. One way of trying to sort out the various perspectives on class explored in this book is thus to map them onto the salient inventory questions posed within class analysis. This will be the task of this chapter.

Six questions are particularly important for which the word “class” often figures centrally in the answers:

1. Distributional location: “How are people objectively located in distributions of material inequality?”

2. Subjectively salient groups: “What explains how people, individually and collectively, subjectively locate themselves and others within a structure of inequality?”

The concept of class has greater explanatory ambitions within the Marxist tradition than in any other tradition of social theory and this, in turn, places greater burdens on its theoretical foundations. In its most ambitious form, Marxists have argued that class – or very closely linked concepts like “mode of production” or “the economic base” – was at the center of a general theory of history, usually referred to as “historical materialism.” This theory attempted to explain within a unified framework a very wide range of social phenomena: the epochal trajectory of social change as well as social conflicts located in specific times and places, the macro-level institutional form of the state along with the micro-level subjective beliefs of individuals, large-scale revolutions as well as sit-down strikes. Expressions like “class struggle is the motor of history” and “the executive of the modern state is but a committee of the bourgeoisie” captured this ambitious claim of explanatory centrality for the concept of class.

Most Marxist scholars today have pulled back from the grandiose explanatory claims of historical materialism (if not necessarily from all of its explanatory aspirations). Few today defend stark versions of “class primacy.” Nevertheless, it remains the case that class retains a distinctive centrality within the Marxist tradition and is called upon to do much more arduous explanatory work than in other theoretical traditions.

In March 2001, on the BBC Radio 4 Today program, a report was presented discussing a new seven-category class scheme being used in the British Census. Listeners were invited to the BBC website to see what class they were in. Within a few days there were over 50,000 hits on the site, a record for this sort of thing. At least for the segment of the British population that listens to the BBC morning news, class remains a salient issue.

In the broadcast a number of people were interviewed. One police inspector responded to being told that he was now classified in class I along with doctors, lawyers, and chief executives of corporations, by saying, “Does it mean now I have to wear tennis whites when I go out to do my gardening? … I don't see myself socially or economically in the same class as them.” In a subsequent “live chat” program with Professor David Rose of Essex University, the principal designer of the new Census categories, many people called up complaining about the coding scheme. A truck driver objected to being in class VII on the grounds that his job was quite skilled and he had to use new information technologies and computers in his work. David Rose explained that the classification was meant to capture differences in the nature of the employment contract and conditions of work, not the skill level of jobs, and truck drivers typically had quite insecure conditions of employment.

Class analysis, in the Marxist tradition, stands at the center of a sweeping analysis of the dilemmas of contemporary society and the aspirations for an egalitarian and democratic future for humanity. Class is a normatively charged concept, rooted in ideas of oppression, exploitation and domination. This concept underwrites both an emancipatory vision of a classless society and an explanatory theory of conflicts, institutions and social change rooted in intrinsically antagonistic interests. The ultimate ambition of this kind of class analysis is to link the explanatory theory to the emancipatory vision in such a way as to contribute to the political project of transforming the world in the direction of those ideals. Marxist empirical research of whatever kind – whether ethnographic case studies, historical investigations or statistical analyses of survey data – should further this ambition.

At first glance, it may seem that the empirical studies in this book have little to do with such grand visions. The topics we have explored have revolved around narrowly focused properties of contemporary capitalist societies rather than the epochal contradictions which dynamically shape social change. While I have invoked the themes of transformative struggles, only a pale reflection of “class struggle” has appeared in the actual empirical analyses in the form of attitudes of individuals. And, while the concept of class we have been exploring is conceptualized in terms of exploitation, none of the empirical research directly explores the problem of exploitation as such.

The empirical research in this book covers a wide range of substantive topics: from friendship patterns and class mobility to housework and class consciousness. What unites the topics is not a preoccupation with a common object of explanation, but rather a common explanatory factor: class. This is what class analysis attempts to do – explore the relationship between class and all sorts of social phenomena. This does not mean, of course, that class will be of explanatory importance for everything. Indeed, as we will discover, in some of the analyses of this book class turns out not to be a particularly powerful factor. Class analysis is based on the conviction that class is a pervasive social cause and thus it is worth exploring its ramifications for many social phenomena, but not that it is universally the most important. This implies deepening our understanding of the limits of what class can explain as well as of the processes through which class helps to determine what it does explain.

The most elaborated and systematic theoretical framework for class analysis is found in the Marxist tradition. Whatever one might think of its scientific adequacy, classical Marxism is an ambitious and elegant theoretical project in which class analysis provides a central part of the explanation of what can be termed the epochal trajectory of human history. The aphorism “class struggle is the motor of history” captures this idea.

6.1 The debate over class primacy

In many ways, the most sustained challenge to class analysis as a central axis of critical social theory in recent years has come from feminists. Class analysts, especially in the Marxist tradition, have often implied that class was a “more important” or “more fundamental” dimension of social structure than gender. While such claims to explanatory primacy have rarely been explicitly defended, the relative inattention to gender in the Marxist tradition is taken by many commentators as a de facto denigration of gender as a significant explanatory factor.

To some extent this suggestion that class is “more important” than gender is simply a by-product of a specific set of theoretical preoccupations. To focus on class as a causal mechanism in social explanations implies bracketing other concerns. Class analysis is an “independent variable” specialty, and of necessity this means focusing on class and its ramifications and giving relatively less attention to other causal factors. This does not absolve class analysts from the criticism of sometimes overstating the explanatory power of class for certain problems, but it does imply that the sheer fact of focusing on class and its effects is not a legitimate basis for indicting class analysis.

There are times, however, when the claim that class (or closely associated concepts like “mode of production” or “economic structure”) is “more important” than other factors is a substantive thesis, not a heuristic device. Classical historical materialism is the most elaborated instance of such an argument.