What do we talk about when we talk about class? Is it economic or is it cultural? Is it the working poverty of a nurse and single mother in Washington County, Pennsylvania, whose household is poisoned and small homestead ruined by fracking? Or is it the identity politics of a white Wisconsinite flying a Confederate flag from his pickup truck a short drive from the Canadian border? Is class an open wound in American life, evident in Bernie Sanders’s denunciations of “the billionaire class” and Donald Trump’s images of “American carnage,” or is it the country’s secret shame, constantly shuffled aside with reassurances that poor Americans are simply “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” as John Steinbeck put it?

For Karl Marx, whose 200th birthday passed this year, class named a person’s role in the way a society wrests its living from the earth and divides the value. Class described the difference between a sharecropper and a plantation owner, between the enslaved person being worked to death in a Caribbean sugar field and an investor living in London on dividends from the sugar trade. It was the only nonarbitrary way to begin a description of human life, because we are our bodies, productive and need-ridden. As God told Adam and Eve, and as John Smith reminded the starving colonists at Jamestown, those who do not work do not eat. By the same token, those who do not find some stand-in to work for them—a machine, a draft animal, or another person—do not get much chance to rest, play, or learn. So to understand any group of people, you must know who does the work and who gets the goods. You can expect that a great deal of politics, law, culture, and religion will be shaped in response to these material patterns—sometimes against them but more often in an attempt to give them the appearance of inevitability and justice.

Marx’s emphasis on class was not exactly new. Adam Smith wrote that government was “instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor.” Much of his intricate social psychology concerned how wealth and power attract esteem, while “the poor man goes out and comes in unheeded.” John Stuart Mill devoted chapters of Principles of Political Economy to the class structure of the modern economy and its premodern predecessors and observed that “all privileged and powerful classes, as such, have used their power in the interest of their own selfishness.” He even argued that, if the market economy continued to give the wealthy who did no work “the largest portions,” while those who performed “the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour” struggled to get by, then the right thing could only be to try communism instead. The philosophical fonts of modern theories of the self-regulating market and the self-defining personality, Smith and Mill found it impossible to talk about collective life without putting class at its center.



A decade ago, there was little discussion of class in the mainstream of American politics or culture, except as anathema when some hapless redistributionist was accused of “class warfare.” Then the 2008 financial crisis showed the fault lines in a superficially prosperous economy, Occupy Wall Street crystallized the diffuse class consciousness of “the 99 percent,” and Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century spread the word that humanity is divided into the many who are treading water, the few who are getting more comfortable, and the very few whose household budgets might as well be midsize university endowments or midsize national economies. In 2016, the two presidential campaigns that became movements, Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’s, both rallied popular indignation against elite control. Class is back, but its meanings range from anti-oligarchy to racially coded just-folks nationalism, and it is cross-cut by race, gender, and migration in ways that earlier generations found much too easy to minimize. Long a silent presence in American life, class has lately raised a cacophony.

Three new books go beyond recent assumptions about class in America and attempt to grasp a new situation. Phil Neel, a graduate student at the University of Washington, draws attention to the geography of class in Hinterland, identifying both a new working class and the global forces that have shaped it. Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity (deftly named for two side-by-side towns with little of either) meanwhile emphasizes lived experience, as she closely depicts the lives of the rural Western Pennsylvanians whom she visited off and on for seven years as they were worn down by fracking pollution and the grind of working poverty. To these reports Steve Fraser, a labor historian and product of 1950s suburbia and 1960s radicalism, brings a longer perspective. In Class Matters he traces Americans’ reluctance to talk in terms of class and tendency instead to favor the myth of “the pristine free individual.” This long history of what one might call class denialism is an essential complement to Neel’s and Griswold’s portraits of the present and future of class identity and experience. Understanding class today means taking in its material, emotional, and ideological reality at scales that are both global and intimate, historical and immediate.