In-itself for-itself: Towards second-generation neo-Marxist class theory

Introduction

Neo-Marxist innovation in the 1970s was centrally motivated by the need to explain empirical realities that diverged from the orthodox reading of Marx’s account of capitalism. In the field of class theory and analysis, in particular, this new generation of Marxist thinkers sought to explain what Wright referred to as the ‘embarrassing’ persistence of the ‘middle class’ that challenged the narrow two-class reading of the Communist Manifesto central to Marxist orthodoxy (Carchedi 1975; Poulantzas 1975a; Wright 1976). Four decades later, class theory needs to be refitted again so that it can respond adequately to other empirical class effects not considered by the first generation but that are now pressingly apparent in the contemporary context of 21st-century neoliberal-led global capitalism. Such a re-fitting is also provoked by Beck’s argument that existing forms of class and stratification analysis are inadequate for identifying or explaining the complexity of contemporary forms of individualised social difference. In 1999, he claimed that ‘class’ is now a ‘zombie category’ (Beck 2002).

Neo-Marxism stands for the continuing relevance of Marx’s intellectual project for explaining contemporary capitalism. Consistently, the neo-Marxist perspective also includes a critical social scientific disposition towards all aspects of Marx’s project. Marx’s methodology, conceptual framework and historical analysis – though unsurprisingly both flawed and incomplete – ground a uniquely powerful social scientific critique of contemporary capitalism. ¹ His rich and far-reaching oeuvre can continue to be mined, supplemented and innovatively adapted to explain contemporary capitalist realities that ground strategic analysis of ‘what is to be done’. Though sharing orthodox Marxism’s political commitment to capitalism’s progressive transformation, neo-Marxism seeks a path beyond orthodoxy. Following Marx, the neo-Marxist disposition, as I see it, is relentlessly self-critical in its project to develop a rigorous Marxist social science adequate to the task of making another world.

Althusser’s (1969) essays collected in For Marx are key to initiating this neo-Marxist project. In this text, Althusser introduces his innovative concept of ‘overdetermination’, and he outlines his ‘epistemological break’ argument that aligns with a commitment to the development of a scientifically rigorous Marxism. Only Marx’s mature works are viewed as approaching scientific status, while the early writings are labelled as ideological, subjective and non-Marxist. Correspondingly, Marx’s mature works are treated as scientific at least partly because, in contrast to the early writings, ‘subjects’ and ‘goals’ are absent. An unstated orthodoxy as to what constitutes science is implied.

Furthermore, as a result of this rigid epistemological demarcation, both the in-itself/for-itself distinction and ‘praxis’ are removed from the first-generation scientific Marxist tool box. Moreover, Althusser’s account fails to offer an explicit critical social scientific analysis of the Communist Manifesto prognostic theory of class development under capitalism despite, or perhaps because of, its centrality to the Marxist world view. When combined with his tacked-on reassertion of the economic as ‘determinant in the last instance’, key elements of orthodox Marxism are circuitously upheld. ² This article’s second-generation neo-Marxist aspiration is both to build on the significant achievements, but also address limitations, of the Althusser-led first generation of neo-Marxist class theorists.

The work of Poulantzas, the leading first-generation neo-Marxist class theoretician, is framed within Althusser’s reading of Marx. ³ ‘Overdetermination’ is innovatively deployed to bring political and ideological conjunctural logic into the structural process of class determination, and structural logic is brought into the conjunctural (‘social formation’) process of class struggle. However, on the first page of the Foreword to Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, Poulantzas (1975a: 9) denies praxis and asserts Communist Manifesto orthodoxy, stating that ‘a systematic theory … could only be the product of the working class’s own organization of class struggle’. Furthermore, he circuitously aligns with the orthodox two-class reading of the Communist Manifesto by arguing that for

modes of production alone, we find each of them involves only two classes … But a concrete society (a social formation) involves more than two classes, in so far as it is composed of various modes and forms of production. (p. 22)

In a way parallel to Poulantzas, Wright retains orthodoxy by treating the capitalist class and the working class, relationally defined by the exploitation relation, as the only genuine classes under the capitalist mode of production (CMP). The ‘middle class’ turns out not to be a class at all but only a set of ‘contradictory locations’ that ambiguously and incompletely incorporate both sides of the exploitation relation (Neilson 2007: 110–115; Wright 1986). Though Wright’s innovative argument points towards the widespread ambiguity and overlapping of class effects, this avenue of investigation appears constrained by vestiges of orthodoxy.

Moreover, Wright’s, and Poulantzas’, progressive innovations are constrained by the circular conflation that capitalism’s principal classes are defined by the exploitation relation, and vice versa the exploitation relation defines capitalism’s principal classes. In short, structurally at least, class and exploitation are treated as equivalent concepts (see Neilson 2007: 91–93). In contrast, this article contends that while exploitation and empirical class effects are practically imbricated, they are conceptually and causally distinct (see Neilson 2007). Following Bhaskar’s (1978, 1979, 1989) ‘critical realism’, the CMP centrally grounded in the capital–labour exploitation relation is understood as the essential ‘generative mechanism’ leading to, but rigorously distinguished from, class ‘empirical effects’, which refer simply to the population’s distribution into similar and different circumstances and forms of consciousness. The Communist Manifesto is based in a similar distinction, in that it predicts the unfolding logic of capitalist production relations will generate empirical class effects of increasing similarity of life circumstances for the ‘immense majority’, and correspondingly, unified forms of consciousness and political organisation. Although facilitated by hindsight, continuing critical empirical investigation of the prognosis is methodologically undermined by conflating capitalist production relations and class effects.

For empirical purposes, positions in the exploitation relation equated with class effects have, in turn, become equated with positions in the labour process. Convergence is thus invited with the Weberian view that, for empirical purposes, classes can be equated with the occupational indicator (see Portes 2000: 251). Especially as class mapping exercises have produced similar empirical results, theoretical differences can seem to be just about preferred terminology (see Livingstone & Scholtz 2016: 9). When such a complacent convergence prevails, embarrassing new empirical realities can be met by a shared silence. Beck is to be commended for trying to break through the silence by claiming provocatively that class is a ‘zombie category’. This article also struggles against this ‘normal science’ (Kuhn 1996). However, in contrast to Beck’s conclusion, it aspires to refit Marxist class theory and analysis in ways, vital for acquiring the knowledge required for rethinking political strategy, that identify, explain and politically respond to the specific realities of this 21st-century capitalist world – in particular, the following:

Addressing these theoretical and analytical challenges raises elementary concerns about how to conceptualise ‘class’. The ensuing rethink of the core problematic of Marx’s class theory focuses on the ‘class-in-itself’/‘class-for-itself’ distinction linked with the integrally related theme of what constitutes the ‘reality’ of classes. Specifically, this article struggles to find a path between Poulantzas’ neo-Marxist objectivism that dismisses the distinction as Hegelian, and Bourdieu’s neo-Weberian subjectivist reworking. Bourdieu confuses what constitutes the reality of class but, ironically, his innovative analysis also aids development of Marxist class theory beyond both first-generation neo-Marxist objectivism and contesting Marxist approaches which descend towards Bourdieu’s subjectivism.

This theoretical discussion underpins innovative development of a more generic and flexible tool for doing empirical class analysis. In particular, I re-categorise a ‘class-for-itself’ as an ideal yardstick against which empirical ‘class effects’ can be measured. In turn, following Bhaskar’s critical realism and contra Wright’s conflation of class with exploitation, empirical class effects are distinguished from the structures, relations and discourses that are purported to generate them. With refitted tools of class analysis in hand, the article turns to address embarrassing realities of the class structure and formation of the labouring population under contemporary capitalism. The final discussion re-considers ‘class-for-itself’ in the light of the preceding arguments, especially in terms of ‘class-making’.

Classes: in and for themselves

Developing Marx’s class theory beyond first-generation neo-Marxist innovation is grounded here in a rethinking of the in-itself/for-itself distinction. Marx’s original project is initially considered and then the discussion turns to consider how the distinction is differently treated by Lukacs (1971), Poulantzas (1975a), Thompson (1968), Hardt and Negri (2004), and McNally (2015). Bourdieu’s (1987) interpretation is finally considered in greater detail; before that in the next section, another way of thinking about it is introduced.

In the Poverty of Philosophy (Marx 1976a [1847]: 211) and then in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx 1973a [1852]: 239), Marx explicitly borrows and adapts Hegel’s conceptual distinction between ‘being-for-itself’, developed reflective consciousness, and ‘being-in-itself’, un-reflective consciousness. Crucially, Hegel (1971) argues that ‘the seed, the tendency, the capacity’ (p. 76) for reflective self-consciousness is ‘maintained in the unity of the original in-itself’ (p. 78). Marx’s materialist reworking of Hegel’s idealist philosophy, as begun in 1846 with Engels in The German Ideology, pushes Hegel’s distinction in a sociological direction. In particular, Marx and Engels struggle to ground being-in-itself in the material and social world, and to cast it as existing independently of living will and consciousness: ‘[I]ndividuals … having their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under it’ (Marx & Engels 1977 [1846]: 82). At the same time, Hegel’s sense of the unity of in-and-for-itself remains in that these material and social circumstances are treated as the source of ideology, ‘ideas are explained from material practices’ (Marx & Engels 1977 [1846]: 58), and corresponding forms of consciousness are treated as social products ‘so as long as men exist at all’ (Marx & Engels 1977 [1846]: 51).

In the ensuing writings including explicitly the Poverty of Philosophy and the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, also directly driving the Communist Manifesto argument and much later in Engels’ (1969 [1880]) Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and as well implicitly present in Marx’s major mature works, this adapted sense of Hegel’s distinction centrally informs Marx’s research agenda. His consistent theoretical praxis is to investigate whether objectively changing material and social circumstances based in the dynamic logic of capitalism will actually generate the ‘immense majority’s’ unity as a class-in-itself both ‘against capital’ and for socialism, and which will manifest subjectively as a class-for-itself in corresponding forms of collective reflective consciousness. ⁴

As if ‘inscribed’ in its dynamically changing material situation as an ‘historical mission’ (Engels 1969 [1880]), the full development of political consciousness is ‘imputed’ (Lukacs 1971: 51) to the whole proletariat. As stated originally by Marx, the proletariat’s ‘aim and historical mission (“what it will be historically compelled to do”) is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life-situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today’ (Marx 1975 [1845]: 37, cited in Lukacs 1971: 46). The revolutionary socialist class-for-itself outcome is expected to arise from the organic overflowing into reflective consciousness of what exists in potentiality in the unfolding objective class-in-itself situation of the proletariat. Thus, Hegel’s idea that ‘being for-itself’ is contained in-itself lives on in the narrative of the proletariat’s ‘historical mission’.

Poulantzas assigns this approach to the non-Marxist Hegelian residue of Marx’s writing. Both in Political Power and Social Classes (Poulantzas 1975b: 76–77) and in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (Poulantzas 1975a: 16), he associates the distinction with Lukacs’ (1971) Hegelian-flawed-Marxism:

[T]he analyses presented here have nothing in common with the Hegelian schema with its class-in-itself (economic class situation, uniquely objective determination of class by the process of production) and class-for-itself (class endowed with its own ‘class consciousness’ and an autonomous political organization = class struggle), which in the Marxist tradition is associated with Lukacs. (Poulantzas 1975a: 16)

Poulantzas is certainly on strong ground when he critiques Lukacs’ (1971) version of ‘class-in-itself’ as defined by labour’s ‘typical’ production relations unadulterated by political and ideological effects (p. 51). However, Poulantzas usefully refines rather than removes the ‘class-in-itself’ concept in that his analysis is still about how the economic structure, though politically and ideologically overdetermined, defines class places. More problematically, while Poulantzas innovatively identifies the structural logic of class struggle for social formation and the state, class-for-itself themes of proletarian subjectivity and conscious agency are not considered. Though Poulantzas views ‘class struggle’ as the motor of history, his treatment marginalises consideration of contingent ‘history making’ by self-conscious human agents including, ironically, the theoretical praxis of communist intellectuals.

In contrast to Poulantzas’ account, Bourdieu incorporates subjectivity into material circumstances in a way that undermines the sense of the truth or objective reality of class-in-itself. Bourdieu (1987) identifies with Thompson against Poulantzas: ‘the title of E.P. Thompson’s book, The Making of the English Working Class, should be taken quite literally: through the words used to name it … and through the organisations supposed to represent it’ (p. 8).

The new ‘social movement Marxists’ also identify with Thompson against Poulantzas and the Althusserians who ‘contributed nothing to Marxism as a theory of emancipation’ (Barker et al. 2013: 11). McNally (2015), in a recent edition of Capital & Class, approvingly quotes Thompson who argues that class is neither a ‘structure’ nor even a ‘category’ (p. 141). Rather, class is a ‘social and cultural formation’ self-made in the process of the movement of people in concrete historical struggle (Thompson, cited in Barker et al. 2013: 2). This understanding parallels, as we shall see, Bourdieu’s argument. As McNally (2015: 140–141) explicitly states, ‘class-in-itself is a “precariously incomplete” “partial and inadequate” form “merely for the observer” [my emphasis]; while a class-for-itself, the “fuller,” “more complete and truthful form” [my emphasis], is the social movement “by which the proletariat attains its truth, as a living and conscious form of becoming …”’.

In a slightly different way, Hardt and Negri’s (2004) Multitude also aligns with Bourdieu’s analysis. The ‘multitude’ is treated both as a ‘singularity and commonality’ because, apparently, there ‘is no conceptual or actual contradiction between [these moments]’ (p. 105). This rendering of a critical social scientific account of the Communist Manifesto prognosis as obsolete, is further reinforced by their blurring of the economic/political distinction which is cast ‘an obstacle to understanding class relations’ (Hardt & Negri 2004). In the end, their strategy allows the multitude to be equated with a political constructivist reading of the Communist Manifesto’s unified proletariat. That is, the reality of the multitude as a class; that is, as the unity of the immense majority is not to be understood as a predicted objective empirical reality, but rather as an expression of ‘Marx’s political project of class struggle’ (Hardt & Negri 2004).

In a reversal of the limitations of the neo-Marxist project, an objective account of structure fades into the background and class-making agency takes centre-stage. The following section focuses on Bourdieu’s version of the class-in-itself/for-itself distinction, which radically demonstrates the dangers but also the relevance in theoretical and historical practice, of these subjectivist class-making approaches that deny objective circumstantial reality.

Bourdieu: the descent into subjectivism

In Bourdieu’s (1987) revealing conference presentation concerning the ‘empirical existence of social groups’ published in Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Marx’s distinction between ‘class-in-itself’ and ‘class-for-itself’ is re-written as one between ‘probable classes’, which are identified as just analytical constructs, and ‘real classes’ ‘named’ and ‘made’ discursively, culturally and ideologically. Bourdieu casts Marx’s class analysis as an ‘objectivism’ that obscures his real project: to ‘make’ the working class. For Bourdieu (1987),

… the ‘working class’ exists … only inasmuch as all sorts of historical agents, starting with social scientists such as Marx, have succeeded in transforming what could have remained an ‘analytical construct’ into a ‘folk category’, that is, into one of those real social fictions produced and reproduced by the magic of social belief. (p. 9)

Bourdieu’s viewpoint is based in a subjectivist view of social reality that superficially articulates the French post-structural project with Weberian methods of classification. The latter’s foundation in a subjectivist variation of methodological individualism conflates the empirical with the real and relatedly, disconnects classification from its historical context.

Bourdieu (1987) dismisses the class-in-itself concept, defined as a ‘real, objectively constituted group’, as a ‘theoreticist illusion’ (p. 4) which, though potentially ‘well-founded’, is to be understood as an ‘analytical construct’. Objectivity, he claims, is ‘relatively indeterminate’ and comprises a ‘plurality of visions’ (Bourdieu 1987: 11). As he states, ‘the social world does not assert itself in a univocal and universal fashion’ (Bourdieu 1987: 11). ‘In the reality of the social world, there are no more clear-cut boundaries, no more absolute breaks, than there are in the physical world … [they] can thus be conceived of as lines or as imaginary planes …’ (Bourdieu 1987: 13). The inherent multiplicity of possible classification frameworks of empirical data is misleadingly conflated with class reality. Bourdieu’s analysis does offer a significant insight into how the subject can construct the object, which in this case articulates with the subjectivity-grounded methodological individualism of Bourdieu’s neo-Weberianism.

Bourdieu transforms the Weberian stratification of individuals by occupation which are status-ranked according to education and income into many forms of ‘capital’ (symbolic/money/social/cultural) that are held by individuals like ‘aces in the pack’ and applied as grouping criteria to identify ‘probable classes’. On an empty abstract multidimensional canvas which Bourdieu calls ‘social space’, individuals are grouped according to their differing capital assets which have no specially stated interconnection or priority. In short, Bourdieu’s (1987) ‘probable classes’ are analytical constructs that comprise a range of various possible sets of ‘neighbouring positions in social space’ (p. 4).

This classification method is trans-historical. That is, it can be applied to all social formations across space and time. This is not a problem in-itself, if it is only the first step of empirical analysis. However, while Bourdieu identifies many trans-historical forms of capital, they are never connected with the historically specific and dynamically changing form of the CMP. In short, while ‘capital’ is everywhere, capitalism is not part of Bourdieu’s analysis. Furthermore, because his approach prioritises the subjective moment and is unconnected with capitalism, there is no way beyond a change in society’s prevailing subjectivity principle of explaining how or why the positions in ‘social space’ and their numerical compositions might change over time. Bourdieu’s neo-Weberian approach recognises a multiplicity of ‘probable’ classifications, each without any more intrinsic validity than any other and all without organic connection to any particular societal form or social structural dynamic.

Bourdieu’s subjectivist treatment of the class-in-itself concept de-anchors Marx’s fundamental sociological principle introduced in The German Ideology that consciousness arises from material and social circumstances. Instead, classes-in-themselves are confused with an indefinite number of probable classifications. The path is cleared for Bourdieu’s final descent into his subjectivist view of class reality.

For Bourdieu (1984), while a shared habitus defined as an objectified subjectivity comprising an embedded social network of ideological values, cultural tastes and practices is only reflexive, a real class ultimately is reflective. Bourdieu’s ‘real class’ thus resonates closely with Marx’s concept of a class-for-itself and can be generically summarised as a shared and self-conscious collective subjectivity expressed in culture, ideology and politics. However, Bourdieu dismisses the materialist view that this consciousness is grounded in class circumstances, which is confused with many possible analytical constructs, and instead identifies ‘real classes’ entirely with cultural construction. Beyond Thompson, he brings into this cultural construction the ‘naming’ activity of the classifiers who compete to socially embed their preferred analytical construct:

… the criteria used in the construction of the objective space and of the well-founded classifications it makes possible are also instruments – I should say weapons – and stakes in the classification struggle which determines the making and un-making of the classifications currently in use. (Bourdieu 1984: 9)

Thus, in Bourdieu’s approach, reflection becomes de-coupled from actual material circumstances.

Bourdieu’s approach leads to startling conclusions. First, the class-in-itself becomes identified with many possible and contesting theoretical, ‘on paper’, ‘probable’ classifications. Second, a ‘real’ class status is assigned to the analytical construction which has culturally infused itself into the social world. In short, Bourdieu’s (1984) ‘real class’ is a ‘real social fiction’ (p. 9) or more provocatively, what his rival Baudrillard would call a ‘simulation’. Treating the well-formed class-for-itself as a ‘real class’ encourages Beck’s ‘zombie category’ claim because it has not, does not, and is not likely to exist empirically.

Towards an alternative approach: recovering class reality in capitalism

Contra Bourdieu, the class-for-itself is not a ‘real class’. Though unlikely to exist empirically, it can still be usefully deployed as a perfect yardstick against which actual class effects can be empirically measured (Neilson 2007, 2015). This kind of ideal type posits high coherence, or commonality and communality, across different material and immaterial circumstances, and a corresponding self-reflective subjectivity centrally including a unified collective consciousness and corresponding ideological and political forms. Such ideal coherence is treated here as the basic reference for investigating actual class effects that are expected to fall short in practice. Empirical class analysis is, in the first place, the project to identify a singular though complex reality of class groupings that are expected to be less than fully formed.

Descriptive observation of class effects is thus about identifying the degree of coherence of empirical patterns of collective unity and difference across key dimensions of people’s life circumstances and subjectivity. Many empirical results are made possible by deploying such an approach, potentially including ones that could falsify the claim of the empirical existence of class effects. Rather than cast as comprising multiple possible classifications, reality is treated as singular even though this analytical tool enables observation of diverse singularities. At one pole, fully coherent class effects could be observable. At the other, an absence of coherent group patterns within and between circumstances and discourses would indicate the absence of class effects. Between the two ideal poles, more or less poorly/well-formed groupings are observable, including variations of complex and ambiguous class structures that may comprise more or less overlapping, contradictory, stratified, heterogeneous and fragmented class effects.

The minimal first test of the degree and form of class effects across a population would be to investigate the level of coherence of circumstantial criteria. Higher coherence refers to the observation of aggregates of individuals each with their own distinctly common material and discursive life situation. Lower coherence refers to more complicated situations where the criteria that together define circumstances do not yield discrete well-formed groups. That is, while one or some circumstantial criteria might be shared yielding a nominal aggregate of individuals, it is a less-than-fully formed group in that people in this aggregate will have other criteria that are divergent and tend to be associated with another group.

Wright’s concept of ‘contradictory class locations’ is an example of this idea in that the ‘new middle class’ shares the wage earning criterion along with factory workers, but shares the capital coordination criterion with business owners. More fundamentally, orthodox Marxist conceptions of the working class deployed as part of the classification struggle to maintain the ‘real fiction’ of a ‘gigantic working class’ (Standing 2014: 3) simply reduce it to the single criterion of waged working, and even those without employment are treated as temporarily out of work waged workers. In a Weberian version of this problem, individuals who share the same occupation may have diverging levels of income and education usually associated with other occupations. In a further variation of this theme, Standing’s (2011, 2012) ‘precariat’ refers to all those who share the circumstantial criterion of insecure employment, but this aggregate of people have seriously diverging levels of precarity when various life conditions are compared.

When connections between different central aspects of circumstances are sufficiently coherent and distinguishable from other groups, one can refer to a discrete even if less than fully coherent class-in-itself. However, the ‘precariat’ and its inverse, what I have called the ‘securiat’, that can be thought of in terms of Gramsci’s concept of ‘social bloc’, presents a slightly different scenario (see Neilson 2015). This kind of class analysis is about deploying a single non-relational principle, that is, precarity, to stratify a whole population. Such a principle is potentially an important indicator of other life conditions and empirically is constructed as a composite variable. However, beyond the problem identified in the paragraph above, and as with Weberian approaches that focus on status as the overriding principle of classification, the problem arises as to where to make the classificatory cuts.

The second test for the empirical existence of classes would be to examine whether, despite the absence of a unified subjectivity, there are nonetheless distinctions in subjectivity that can be associated with and overlap different class-in-itself groupings. This is not a straightforward matter. First, different political ideologies provide (more or less) plausible interest-based, and/or psychologically appealing, accounts of the same set of circumstances. More specifically, as Gramsci (1971) argued, a person can have a ‘contradictory consciousness’ where one dimension sourced in experience can stand in opposition to another uncritically absorbed from the hegemonic discourse, which can result in ‘moral and political passivity’ (p. 333). In sum, experienced discourses do not, and are never likely to, align simply or singularly with a group’s specific material life circumstances. Especially under the contemporary conditions of global communication, people unevenly experience multiple and contesting ideological discourses about the nature of the world.

Second, the CMP unfolds unevenly not just in terms of the spread of capitalist production relations but also in the form of the counter-development of ‘modern’ culture including the contingent advancement of democratic political institutions, liberal ideological forms and also developments linked with ‘post traditional’ individualisation (see next section). Such contingent political, ideological and cultural forms, which are unevenly developing across the nation states of the world, imply a complicated and uneven cultural terrain. In concrete historical practice, class effects interact and overlap with these other unevenly developing institutions and cultural forms not only to contingently determine a culturally and socio-demographically uneven composition across different classes but also by directly generating competing non-class group effects. These can overlap and compete with empirical class effects to further differentiate people and complicate forms of subjectivity. Obvious examples are nation, family, religion, ethnicity and gender. In practice, multiple discourses connected with non-class forces inhabit daily experience. In this view, classes in concrete practice are integrally and unevenly raced, gendered and cultured (Barker et al. 2013).

Actual forms of conscious political agency and ideological subjectivity are the complex effects of many circumstantial factors including class discourses that go beyond the specific class circumstances under consideration, and non-class structures and discourses. Some discourses are universally broadcast across all of the labouring population; some are broadcast (but unevenly) across multiple class positions; and others are specifically connected with people in a particular set of circumstances. Class effects in-themselves are complicated enough to identify empirically. The structure and distribution of refracted perception in forms of social consciousness is even more complicated because it driven not only by varying concrete circumstances and experiences but also by unevenly competing discourses. In the contemporary world, this complex situation is intensified by the neoliberal globalisation of communication; and it is empirically indicated by the patchwork of heterogeneous social movements in space, in focus and in ideological alignment. As Bhaskar (1978) puts it, an actually existing society, as in the physical universe, is an ‘open system’. Many co-existing ‘generative mechanisms’ complicate the identification and explanation of ‘empirical effects’. More importantly, they complicate in reality the formation of the unified social movement of the immense majority, that is, the class-for-itself.

Data can always be experimentally classified in different and contesting ways, but the social science of class analysis can become more productively focused if there is, as outlined above, a common descriptive project. The gap between goal and practice can be further reduced if class analysis is more systematically connected with the specific historical reality of the prevailing form of society. Following Bhaskar, the directly observable world of ‘empirical events’, similar to what Marx referred to as the ‘exoteric’, is only the surface form of the ‘real’. The real includes the ‘esoteric’ drivers of surface forms which refer to less-directly observable sociological processes that Bhaskar calls ‘generative mechanisms’ (Bhaskar 1979; Lipietz 1985).

Marx’s (1973b [1857]) methodological strategy for uncovering this multidimensional reality as a dynamic historical process begins with the search for the necessary universal foundations of all social formations across human time and space that crystallises in his concept of ‘mode of production’. This trans-historical abstraction that varies in concrete historical practice refers, first, to the material core of social life that is grounded in the ongoing process of human production and consumption of the material world, and second, to the social relations that define how this material process is organised. Though within a given historical epoch the prevailing mode of production’s concrete historical form changes as it reproduces across real time and space, it is demarcated by continuity of its essential features.

The CMP, defined as an essential abstraction, is a privatised form of exploitative social relations based on the wage-labour–capital relation and the exchange logic of market competition, materially dominated by industrial form of the labour process. Capital vol. 1 is a stylised history of the future that treats these basic social and material relations as a complex ‘generative mechanism’ that is predicted to unfold into the future as a powerful but unstable trajectory of dynamic social and material reproduction. Though basically global in aspiration, the CMP has developed unevenly across time and geo-political space. Nation states, understood as capitalism’s contingently prevailing form of political organisation, have been unevenly incorporated in time and extent into the CMP. In addition, mid-range eras within the capitalist epoch overlapping with particular economic stages of industrialisation refer to contingently overdetermined political/ideological forms of capitalism’s uneven trajectory (Neilson 2012). At any historical moment, the dynamic of this mid-range inflected essential form manifests empirically as a complex pattern of uneven development.

The steps from essential trans-historical abstraction to historically concrete realities also link with a practical method for dealing with the problem that a concrete empirical social formation is an ‘open system’ which cannot be experimentally disaggregated. Different generative mechanisms implying specific empirical class effects can be ‘imputed’ at different stages of abstraction, while in the open system of a social formation they are in complex interplay. As for example, in Gramsci’s argument (see above), the ‘articulation’ of different imputed tendencies in consciousness derived from different ‘generative mechanisms’ can actually cancel each other out. The following analysis, which seeks to link empirical class effects with different levels of abstract/concrete analysis, is informed by this critical realist Marxist methodological strategy.

Complex class effects in-themselves

Expected empirical class effects associated with the CMP’s labour and employment logic are examined initially as general tendencies stemming from capitalism’s essential relational dynamic and then in terms of capitalism’s presently overdetermined and unevenly developing form. Attention is paid specifically to identifying and explaining basic empirical class-in-itself effects linked with the ‘relative surplus population’ (RSP) in the contemporary era of neoliberal-led global capitalism (Neilson & Stubbs 2011).

First-generation neo-Marxists understood that the middle class represented an embarrassing empirical reality which needed to be explained, not just explained away. In the present neoliberal era, writers such as Mike Davis (2006) and Guy Standing (2011, 2012), similarly, have identified large swathes of the global population who, embarrassingly, are not waged factory workers (or in the middle class) but rather are existing in conditions of precarity on and beyond the peripheral margins of the CMP. An adequate explanation, while not provided by these writers, is present in foundational form in Marx’s analysis of the RSP (Marx 1976b [1867]: 762–802). Capitalism’s uneven development, especially in its present neoliberal format, is generating an unevenly distributed labouring population located at different stages of industrial development that complicates the global composition of the RSP. Especially significant is the surplus population effects of the neoliberal-led imposition of industrial norms of necessary labour on a still-existing peasantry (McMichael 2008; Neilson & Stubbs 2011).

Class and individualisation

Beck (2002) argues that ‘Marx always equated processes of individualisation with the formation of classes’ (p. 33). Specifically, he argues that Marx ‘dismissed as irrelevant the question of how individual proletarians, qua market subjects, could ever form stable bonds of solidarity, given that capitalism systematically uprooted their lives’ (p. 33). As Beck (2007) sums up his position in a later article, individualisation leads to ‘capitalism without classes, more precisely, without classes for themselves [his emphasis]’ (p. 686). Beck’s (2002) conclusion, reinforced by his implicit identification with Bourdieu’s subjectivist interpretation of class reality, is that class has become a ‘zombie category’. This is a devil advocacy designed to provoke debate; but nonetheless, Beck’s argument contains a serious challenge to Marxist class theory that needs to be addressed. Indeed, though underplayed, Marx is clearly aware of the individualising effects of capitalist social relations. Here, Beck’s argument is critically discussed in relation to Marx’s own account of individualisation.

Individualisation refers to processes which first, disconnect humans from communal and solidaristic ways of living, and second, instead, structure social life in frameworks of individual exchange, employment, choice and responsibility. The first aspect includes both the overcoming of regressive forms of communality, cooperation and habitus that restrict independent thought and lock-in pre-determined courses of action, and the breakdown of progressive forms of solidarity that bind us together in secure and confirming relations of social exchange and mutual support. The second aspect refers to social processes that facilitate independent individual thought and action, but also to those that actively individualise in ways that undermine solidarity. In particular, this later effect refers to overlapping social processes that, first, mystify our actual and organic social connection with each other; second, distance and alienate us from each other; and third, especially through competition, divide us against each other.

Marx’s account can be connected with most of these diverse aspects of individualisation. The peasantry’s dispossession which begins the process of proletarianisation involves loss of specifically communal forms of living centrally including those arising from production for direct consumption and which can be linked with social bonds of community, mutual aid and collective material security. Socially disconnected from their previous mode of established communal living, dispossessed peasants trudge without community into the cities. Here, they must seek means to live within individualised production and consumption relations that are grounded in the exploitative, instrumental and fetishising cash nexus of the capital–labour wage relation. Employment is scarce, insecure, inadequately rewarded, undersupplied and there is an absence of institutions and social networks of solidarity and collective welfare, all implying the competitively individualistic nature of the basic struggle to stay alive in a capitalist world.

Marx’s writings demonstrate the essential argument that capitalism negatively individualises us. Individualised wage dependence, commodity fetishism, alienation, competition for scarce jobs and individualised material insecurity replace organic bonds of social solidarity and collective economic security. In particular, the jungle-like mode of competition to stay alive intrinsic to the insecurity-driven nature of the CMP from the outset that is intensified by the growing ranks of the RSP, is highly relevant to the present period of capitalist development. The neoliberal project has aggressively unleashed on to the peoples of the entire planet the core insecurity and competition logic of the CMP’s unevenly developed but technologically advanced form.

In his account of ‘second modernity’, or what can be associated with present neoliberal-led unleashing of capitalist relations and forces on a global scale, Beck identifies a celebratory ‘post-traditional’ dimension of individualisation. Particularly in the advanced capitalist countries, individualisation is connected with greater self-reflexivity and opportunities for personal development and autonomy, around ‘control of one’s own money, time, living space, and body’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 33). In conjunction with the globalisation of culture and knowledge via the Internet, this personal autonomy also undermines a common habitus integral to solidarity. A pluralisation of individualised lifestyles is promoted that Beck equates with a non-society of ‘average deviationists’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 1996).

Beck also critically recognises that this form of individualisation is a ‘precarious freedom’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 1996). That is, though blind to the structural process that determines changing sets of work and employment opportunities in the first place, Beck does recognise the variegated and complex structures that underpin individual trajectories within it. In particular, he observes a complex system of maze-like institutional structures particularly pertaining to education and employment, which contain multiple opportunities, but also dangers and dead-ends. Diverse but precarious individual life paths are implied. In particular, and basically following Marx’s argument, with precarious individualisation ‘community is dissolved in the acid bath of competition’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 33).

These processes of individualisation central to the long-term and contemporary form of the CMP, when combined especially with internationally uneven heterogeneity of circumstances and deepening competition for scarce employment, challenge the orthodox Communist Manifesto argument. Not only does capitalist industrialisation NOT generate for the immense majority a homogeneity of circumstances but it also does NOT generate the conditions of solidarity. Rather, the CMP generates circumstantial heterogeneity, deepening employment scarcity and individualisation. Does this process, as Beck claims, make class (for-itself) a zombie category?

In actuality, in the Holy Family (1975 [1845], Marx demonstrates that the relationship between individualisation and the ‘bonds of solidarity’, contra Beck, is not at all straightforward. In particular, on p. 36 he outlines how the collective conscious struggle to meet human needs occurs in response to their denial under capitalism. In other words, solidarity arises out of the struggle against its absence.

In support of this position, the Trade Union movement, the welfare state and liberal democratic ‘civil society’ can be thought of as institutionalised forms of social solidarity (as social insurance, as egalitarian political participation, as collective security) that push against individualised capitalist forms of social insecurity and subordination. Even if stabilising for capitalist social relations, they are nonetheless alien social forms that directly counter such relations. Even though limited and distorted by their capitalist integument, they nonetheless can be viewed as pre-figurative and embryonic institutions of democratic socialism. The neoliberal global market project, which is consciously attacking these socialist forces and institutions as central to the restoration of global capitalist power, heightens and makes more urgent the counter-hegemonic struggle for the further development of such institutions of solidarity on a global scale.

Marx takes a further step in a line of analysis which again in contrast to Beck demonstrates the complexity of the relation between individualisation and solidarity. In texts including the Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels 1969 [1848], 55–56, 64–65), the Grundrisse and Capital vol. III, Marx contrasts the false promise and negative forms of individualisation under the CMP with genuine forms of individual autonomy premised on its socialisation. As a collective project of social transformation, proletarian emancipation is about creating a world in which people can genuinely be individuals. Solidarity among workers under the capitalist labour process is not simply a positive solidarity, but is a solidarity in opposition to de-individualising (as in removing any room for individual creativity) regimentation to a machine logic. Furthermore, individual emancipation is about transforming capitalist constraints on autonomy into a material plenitude and thus security and increasing free time beyond the ‘realm of necessity’ for everyone. Socialising the CMP, which facilitates social solidarity, collective security and free time for all, drives individual emancipation.

In sum, solidarity arises to oppose the experience of individualisation, and more, solidarity is the condition of genuine individual emancipation for everyone. Though solidarity is certainly inspired by the struggle against negative forms of individualisation and social fragmentation, it is a stretch to think that such solidarity will arise spontaneously or organically. More pessimistically, as Gill (1995: 400) argues in the present context, the mid-range neoliberal project continues to prevail not because it is hegemonic but because it is ‘supreme’ (Gramsci), that is, because it divides the labouring population and thus undermines a coherent oppositional movement.

From theory to praxis

The orthodox Marxist narrative is that the proletariat, the ‘immense majority’, has an ‘historical mission’ ‘inscribed’ in its common material circumstances which will manifest consciously in its collective vision, will and action. This narrative confronts the actually complex and heterogeneous class effects of capitalism’s dynamic development in historical practice. Bourdieu’s naming and making perspective unintentionally addresses this problem by implying that historical significance lies not with objective accuracy but with the capacity to call forth into subjectivity the fiction of a ‘real class’. This article is aggressively positioned against Bourdieu’s denial of a singular objective reality of dynamic class-in-itself effects, but the idea of ‘class making’ deserves further consideration.

The orthodox Marxist narrative can be understood, following Bourdieu’s specific angle, as a reassuring imaginary which has helped generations of socialist activists keep faith with the ‘working class’. However, willing into existence a ‘real social fiction’ that denies ‘what is’ implies a faulty analysis of ‘what needs to be done’. The orthodox narrative now stands in the way of an accurate assessment of the theoretical, political and ideological challenges of ‘making history’ in the 21st century. In contrast to the reassuring but faulty orthodox formula, the reality (‘what is’) is that the CMP has generated contradictory, internationally uneven, negatively individualising and less-than-well-formed objective and subjective class effects. ‘What needs to be done’ is identify and communicate this reality as the pessimistic grounding of an optimistic project to construct a unity of will and purpose around a global socialist project. This theoretical praxis aligns with Bourdieu’s sense of the politically committed, rather than neutral and dis-interested, role of social science in making history. However, in contrast to Bourdieu’s subjectivism, Bhaskar’s (1989) critical realist interpretation of praxis identifies this political project with the excavating and revealing of reality understood as pre-existing singular objectivity. ⁶ Such revelations do directly change reality, not by constructing it as a social fiction, but insofar as they successfully promote a previously non-existing self-reflective consciousness of what actually exists. However, to achieve the goal of a unified socialist movement, more is required. This knowledge of the world needs to be deployed creatively and strategically to change it. Without mystifying what actually exists with fictions, awareness of the objective reality of the labouring population’s complex circumstantial heterogeneity needs to be transformed into a unity of solidarity and purpose. This is the essence of Gramsci’s position.

His ‘philosophy of praxis’ implicitly retains the class-for-itself goal of the ‘immense majority’ movement towards socialist transformation. But in contrast to the orthodox view, Gramsci argues that the counter-hegemonic movement needs to be deliberately designed to unify diverse ‘subaltern classes’. The project is to systematise and transform the best of diverse and contradictory forms of ‘common sense’ via a common critique of actually existing capitalism articulated with a consciously designed practical mid-range project of its socialist reformation. In essence, playing with Gramsci’s (1971) words, ‘heterogeneous’ ‘subaltern classes’ with ‘contradictory’ forms of consciousness implying ‘a multiplicity of dispersed wills with heterogeneous aims’ need to be ‘welded together’ into a ‘counter-hegemonic’ ‘social bloc’.

From this Gramscian perspective, the ‘good sense’ essentialism of Marxism is not redundant. Understood as an integral and dynamic whole based in the capital–labour exploitation relation, capitalism generates diverse and contradictory – but nonetheless interconnected – class effects. Though in different ways, diverse class groupings are linked together by this central relation. In the present neoliberal era, capitalist-driven dispossession of the peasantry drives growth of the RSP that puts pressure on the employment security and wage levels of the working class, and the middle class ‘securiat’ as well. Though not facing up to the full reality of class structural diversity, the social movement Marxists further specify the class-for-itself project in a powerfully complementary way: as the unity of interconnecting diverse identity movements with each other and with the social movement of the class-for-itself (McNally 2015: 141–144). Instead of ‘making’ a class as a ‘real fiction’, the Gramscian approach struggles to promote the deliberate and strategic construction of a counter-hegemonic social bloc by interconnecting diverse class and non-class effects with the conscious and deliberate formulation of a post-neoliberal global socialist project.

Conclusion

Multiple perspectives from within and beyond the Marxist tradition have been brought in to renovate neo-Marxist class theory and analysis in the context of contemporary capitalism. Rather than residual Hegelianism, however, the problems constraining the neo-Marxist project in the 21st century are to do both with the first generation’s praxis-free conception of science and their retention of key elements of the orthodox reading of the Communist Manifesto. In contrast, it has been argued in this article that the Manifesto provides essential social scientific foundations for Marxist class theory. These centrally include its grounding in a materialist reworking of Hegel’s in-itself/for-itself distinction and its assigning of a praxis role to communist intellectuals. However, at the same time, the Manifesto’s specific prognostic conclusions need to be continuously subjected to rigorous critical social scientific interrogation in the light of capitalism’s ongoing historical development.

The innovative method of class analysis introduced in this article – which following Bhaskar separates ‘generative mechanisms’ from ‘empirical effects’ – was deployed to discuss class effects of contemporary capitalism. Key contemporary in-themselves effects were sketched that though consistent with Marx’s discussion of the RSP in Capital vol. 1, fundamentally challenge the Communist Manifesto prognosis. The contemporary RSP driven unevenly by the contemporary neoliberal-led globalisation of capitalism is linked also with the overall heterogeneity of class circumstances among the world’s labouring population and the intensification of individualisation. Urgent political and strategic questions are raised.

Though aggressively opposed to Bourdieu’s subjectivist denial of objective in-itself class structure, his argument nonetheless brilliantly reveals forms of Marxist class theory and analysis which, in contrast with the neo-Marxist aspiration, also deny contemporary capitalist reality. This article has sought an empirically adequate reading of contemporary capitalism’s objective class effects. This ‘pessimistic’ analysis is central for the grounding of an ‘optimistic’ and consciously deliberate counter-hegemonic project, linked with the formation of a ‘social bloc’, which are needed if the contemporary capitalist-driven descent towards barbarism is to be averted.