Class is a key category and concept in political economy. In saying this, I am not saying that class is the totality or the cause of all inequality, or the base of all economic processes. The days of seeing all history as the history of class struggle are long gone, but the distribution of wealth among different classes of people, and the understanding of class behaviour, mobilisation and power remain of critical importance – both to political economy and to society generally.

Yet despite (or because of) this importance, the concept and analysis of class is hotly contested and muddied by different meanings and analytical frameworks. In this context I recently came across a reference to Erik Olin Wright’s attempt to bring together Marxist, Weberian and Durkheimian definitions and theories of class into a coherent (rather than competing) multi-layered framework. (While Wright is famous, I have not read much of his work – not sure why!) The following is my summary and reflections – informed as always by some concrete campaign problems I am currently thinking about.

Understanding Class

In one of his last books, Understanding Class (2015), American sociologist Erik Olin Wright starts with the broadest of framing of different class traditions:

• Marxist: where class is a system of exploitation structured around the accumulation of wealth based on the ownership of capital;
• Weberian: where class is a location within market relations built on the hoarding of economic privileges to the exclusion of others (think: education credentials or licencing requirements for middle-class jobs, union closed shops or the exclusive rights of private property);
• Durkheimian: where class is a collection of attributes and life conditions which determine people’s position in society (e.g. geographic location, occupation, cultural traits, health, housing conditions – all of which impact on access to income and resources).

My first experience of these differences was a long time ago when a mad activist sought to verify my proletarian credentials by grilling me about my parents’ occupation and where I went to school. I replied that I did not own the means of production and had to sell my labour power. Talking at cross-purposes.

However, Wright brings these broad approaches together by seeing them as simply operating at different levels and asking different questions. This is best explained by a metaphor of a game. Marxism is interested in what game is being played (capitalism or socialism). Weberian class is about the rules of the game (how the system is regulated and maintained – with various regulatory regimes being possible within capitalism). The Durkheimian tradition is about moves within the rules of the game – with individuals or interest groups vying within a given set of rules to get a better slice of the pie.

I have adapted one of Wright’s tables (and associated discussion) to summarise the framework.

Level	Game Metaphor	Political Focus/Issues	Class Analysis
Systemic	What game to play	Revolutionary v counter-revolutionary politics	Marxist
Institutional	Rules of the game	Union regulation, employer rights/control, role of the state	Weberian
Situational	Moves in the game	Government spending, tax rates, subsidies	Durkheimian

Wright takes his analysis in a strange sociological direction with lots of graphs of class politics and political strategy. However, applying his multi-layer model to local politics, I would suggest a mud map of left-of-centre class politics as follows:

• the NGO left operates mostly at the level of situational inequality (in part because they are formed and funded around particular issues),
• left-leaning economists, the “industrial left” and the majority of those identifying as “socialist” operate mostly at the institutional level (eg. social democracy v neoliberalism), while
• everyone claims to be operating at the systemic level!

Critique

As a tool of class analysis, I have a few issues with Wright’s framework. It implies that Marxism has little role in institutional struggles around tax, distribution and regulatory regimes. Yet an analysis of the processes of accumulation is surely central to such politics.

Further, it reduces the “systemic” choice to whole of society changes (revolution or counter-revolution), rather than seeing capitalism as just one particular set of production relations among many – albeit the dominant set (although as noted in an earlier post, even this hegemony is debatable in a digital age). From this perspective, the system-choice politics at the top level of Wright’s analysis may be less than revolutionary – everything from debates over public ownership/privatisation of utilities (i.e. production by the state or by capitalist businesses), to whether a forest is protected (i.e. kept outside production) or felled as a commodity for a capitalist production process. And, most mundanely, the question of whether to cook dinner at home (non-commodified household production) or to eat out (capitalist production) is a system-choice.

Finally, some things will have some characteristics or elements which could fit in to different categories. For instance, a minor concession reform to extend support to someone with a particular attribute (e.g. low paid, precarious work) may simply be a situational move which does not change the position or power of the recipient. However, it still implies and calls for a particular redistributive role for the state – which is an operation at the institutional level. And as Wright notes, the cumulative impacts of a number of situational moves/policies at some point could amount to or force institutional reform.

The Usefulness of the Analysis

However, despite these concerns, the multi-layered framework in Wright’s Understanding Class is important and useful for a number of reasons. Firstly, it reminds us that while we may be using similar terms, such as “class”, we may mean very different things and have very different understandings of what that means. But more importantly, it highlights the incompleteness of any of the paradigms.

This has very direct implications for policy development and what to do about inequality. To focus simply on systemic issues and institutions which promote or challenge class inequality is to ignore the very different ways those structures and institutions impact on people in different situations. Conversely, to simply focus on the attributes of people or their differing situations risks victim-blaming (it is about their attributes) and not challenging the institutions and structures which drive inequality.

As an example, I am thinking about my current work developing a campaign for more public housing. It seems to me that if we simply argue on the basis that certain groups are excluded from housing, then even if we can identify these groups by particular attributes (e.g. older women, ex-prisoners, unemployed youth), we will not get more public housing unless we also win the institutional campaign around the role of the state in providing housing – and perhaps we won’t win that debate without making inroads into the systemic ideology around the limitations of a capitalist market. That said, if we are too focused on big picture debates about economic systems, people won’t see a relevance to their particular circumstances and we won’t mobilise the support needed to change anything. And of course, most organisations/campaigns simply don’t have the resources to operate at all three levels.

Further, it is not even as simple as which level to focus on. There are also questions about the language and data we use. To take a different example, if we define poverty or inequality as being based on household income (the mainstream definitions) and then to do analysis of the dis/proportion of women in poverty, or on different educational levels or sources of income within the poverty cohort, we are talking (often unintentionally) a Durkheimian language of attributes rather than systems (in the Marxist sense) or the institutional arrangements (in the Weberian sense) which drive that poverty and inequality. To talk about those things, we may need different data (e.g. the wage share of GDP, but much more besides) and a different language.

Conclusion – of sorts

Like Erik Olin Wright, I originally came from a particular camp in the great class debate, but now want to acknowledge the power and potential of different perspectives – even if I don’t quite know how to develop this in practice. How can we organise politically at multiple levels – especially if we don’t have a shared language or understanding? What might class alliances look like if they are splintered by the different (and potentially conflicting) attributes and situations that people bring to confronting the institutions and structures of class (and other inequalities for that matter)? Indeed, according to one reading of his last book (2019), Wright himself came to believe that the working class had become too fractured to play the role Marxism traditionally assigns to it.

Or there is the question I ask myself most often at work: how do we address structural inequality if the language, data and rules of the game (including views of what is possible) are already set to a limited field of situational inequality?

I occasionally see opportunities to use data differently, to ask different questions or challenge orthodoxies or unconscious theoretical propositions, but I don’t have a macro-theory or big answers – particularly to the question of organising diversity.

However, despite my questions and lack of answers, I think Wright’s approach in Understanding Class is interesting and provocative. It will be the background I will bring to reading a forthcoming book edited by Steven Threadgold and Jessica Gerard on Class in Australia, which I have just pre-ordered. I look forward to seeing what frameworks are engaged and at what level we might progress. UPDATE: Post on Class in Australia here.

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