Theory is indispensable, for there is no way to commune directly with reality in the wild. The trouble with theories, lenses or reference frames, is that they must necessarily leave large parts of reality out of focus. When we speak of class, the tendency is strong to reach for the Marxian frame. As Foucault reminds us, Marx and Engels borrowed the notion of class struggle from the notion of race struggle. The point was to reframe history as the struggle for hegemony between rising and falling social classes. That was all well and good. But as good German thinkers, what they tried to do was to explain social structure by appealing to material reductionism. The mode of production, in this schema, determined social structure. More precisely, the key structuring reality that was isolated by Marx was the centrality of property relations: social classes were defined by their relationship to the means of production; on the one hand, you had the owners of the means of production, the capitalists, and on the other, wage laborers, dependent on the capitalists for access to the means of production. Once capitalism had advanced far enough, these would be the only two classes left, archaic landlords and suchlike would've long since disappeared, and all politics would come down to the struggle between the two Marxian classes. Or so it was thought.
The 5 Social Classes in America
The 5 Social Classes in America
The 5 Social Classes in America
Theory is indispensable, for there is no way to commune directly with reality in the wild. The trouble with theories, lenses or reference frames, is that they must necessarily leave large parts of reality out of focus. When we speak of class, the tendency is strong to reach for the Marxian frame. As Foucault reminds us, Marx and Engels borrowed the notion of class struggle from the notion of race struggle. The point was to reframe history as the struggle for hegemony between rising and falling social classes. That was all well and good. But as good German thinkers, what they tried to do was to explain social structure by appealing to material reductionism. The mode of production, in this schema, determined social structure. More precisely, the key structuring reality that was isolated by Marx was the centrality of property relations: social classes were defined by their relationship to the means of production; on the one hand, you had the owners of the means of production, the capitalists, and on the other, wage laborers, dependent on the capitalists for access to the means of production. Once capitalism had advanced far enough, these would be the only two classes left, archaic landlords and suchlike would've long since disappeared, and all politics would come down to the struggle between the two Marxian classes. Or so it was thought.