A Note On The Idea Of Social Class

‪L, we once argued, if remember rightly, over whether there is such a thing as social class. If I remember, you said there isn’t and I said there is. If I’ve got this botched, let me know. Anyway, I’m coming to the very end of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. And from it, a thought has come to me with respect to that argument. The Marxist notion of class is, to put it one way, metaphysical, is deterministic, is rooted in an analysis that class is in an essential part constituted by a necessary idea of social forces moving along a singular path through history that will in the end necessarily fulfill themselves, virtually apocalyptically. Class consciousness is coming to understand the idea of those forces, and embodying it, hastening it. If class is that, then I agree with you: class as that doesn’t exist. But insofar as class is an aggregate of people meeting certain economic criteria and tending generally to exhibit certain attitudes and self consciousness, tending generally to a discernible cultural cluster, then I think it exists. One way of putting it may be that the Marxist conception of class is prescriptive and the more prosaic sociological idea of class is descriptive. Another way may be that the former sees class as a collective and the latter sees it as—the word I just used—an aggregate.