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Class politics are on the rise. Insurgent teachers have brought the word “strike” back into the political lexicon, and Bernie Sanders is attracting millions with his jeremiads against the “billionaire class.” Some liberals, however, insist that there is nothing new to see here — that “class politics is just another form of identity politics.” The writer Jill Filipovic recently laid out this stance in a series of tweets, arguing “‘Working class’ is an identity. ‘Worker’ is an identity … None of these are neutral, universal defaults. Running on them is also identity politics.” Filipovic’s argument, directed against “red rose twitter,” has obvious roots in the split between Sanders supporters and the rest of the Democratic Party. In the 2016 primary, Hillary Clinton sought to undermine Sanders’s claim to represent the left of the party by attacking him for supposedly ignoring issues of race and gender oppression. As she put it in one infamous sound bite, If we broke up the big banks tomorrow … would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight? The argument that class politics is simply another kind of identity politics is, in essence, a continuation of this polemic. More fully articulated, it goes something like this: class is an identity like race or gender, but socialists wrongly think it’s the most important identity. So when they claim to be against liberal “identity politics,” they aren’t actually rejecting it, but simply promoting their favored version of it — while denigrating the fight against racial or gender oppression. This is a powerful and effective argument, for a few reasons. First, given the continuing salience of racial, gender, and other forms of non-class oppression in the US, any politics that doesn’t have a clear strategy for destroying them has no claim to the loyalty of the Left. Second, if one starts from the prevailing understanding of class in American liberalism, encapsulated in the social science term “socioeconomic status,” the argument is hard to disagree with. But socialists mean something quite different when we talk about class: rather than just the education or money someone has, class refers to an entire structure that imposes very specific logics of action on people in society. And because of the power the capitalist class holds in society, any significant redistribution of power requires confronting that class. These arguments have massive implications for thinking about politics in general, and undoing the structures of racial and gender oppression in particular. Socialists, in other words, have good reasons for insisting that class is more than another identity.

Class in the Liberal and Socialist Imaginations The liberal understanding of class as socioeconomic status tracks closely with everyday uses of the word. Here, class is conceptualized as some combination of things like wealth, income, and education, which combine to form a kind of aggregated ranking. Classes, in this sense, are akin to rungs on a ladder — some people are higher, some are lower. In some versions, “cultural capital” is added to the mix, including things like knowing which fork to use for what food. When class is defined like this, it’s not hard to see why liberals see it as conceptually symmetrical to race or gender. Class locations are essentially gradational, with degrees of advantage or disadvantage. People who have similar levels of advantage or disadvantage could easily be imagined to form some common identity based on their shared situation, whether it’s upper-class people valorizing their lifestyle or working-class people valorizing theirs. The socialist view of class, going back to Marx, is very different. While the liberal view of class is like a ladder, with a potentially infinite number of rungs depending on how narrowly one wants to define the groups, the socialist view is famously polarized, with overwhelming emphasis on two classes: capitalists and workers. Those structural positions, in turn, impose two things on members of a given class: common logics of action and common interests. The late Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright summed up the socialist theory of class in two pithy rules: “What you have determines what you get” and “What you have determines what you have to do to get what you get.” “What you have” refers to the kind of property you have at your disposal. Do you own the means of production, either in the form of, say, a factory, or enough equity in productive property that you can live off of the returns? If so, congratulations — you’re a capitalist. If, on the other hand, you don’t own productive property, and in order to make money to buy the necessities of life (food, shelter, etc.), you have to sell your labor to someone who does, too bad for you — like most everyone else, you’re a worker. What you have determines what you get. It’s the second rule, though, that really makes the socialist theory of class distinct. Both capitalists and workers achieve their positions by virtue of the kind and quantity of property they possess. But these positions aren’t guaranteed for life. Workers and capitalists risk losing their position if they don’t follow the logic of action their position imposes on them, and these logics are quite different. Capitalists must compete on the market against other capitalists to sell their product most efficiently. While the fable of the invisible hand suggests this process benefits everyone, socialists argue that its more common form is exploitation. Capitalists are driven by competition to maximize output per worker, and this compulsion brings them into direct conflict with the interests of their workers. From agricultural workers in the fields and line-workers in the factory to tech workers at Facebook, the drive to maximize profit is bad news for workers. Workers confront a very different situation. Forced to compete with other prospective employees to even get a job, workers must convince the capitalist hiring them that they will work at the required level of productivity. Once brought on, they have to maintain a high enough productivity to keep their job. When capitalists, driven by the need for profit, impinge on their interests, workers face a choice: they can pursue individual solutions — keep their head down, be a good worker, hope they can get ahead — or they can organize collectively and push back against the capitalist together. This is what Wright meant when he wrote “what you have determines what you have to do to get what you get.” Capitalists and workers pursue very different strategies to advance their interests by virtue of their different positions in the class structure, and these strategies inevitably make the two groups lock horns. What’s good for capital is bad for labor, and vice versa. For socialists, then, class is less about common status and more about interests and actions. Workers with very different levels of education and income — for example, a registered nurse and a tomato-picker — occupy a common position in the class structure because they face similar decisions about how best to improve their working conditions, and because their employers are driven by similar imperatives to attack their well-being.

Class and Other Forms of Oppression The socialist theory of class says a lot. What it doesn’t say, however, is that other forms of oppression don’t matter. Movements fighting race and gender hierarchies have reshaped American society at different points, winning massive redistributions of power. Even when such movements are dormant, these forms of oppression shape the distribution of power in society and the degree of material oppression in ways large and small. These forms of oppression have an existence every bit as brutal and concrete as class exploitation. What’s more, liberals like Filipovic aren’t entirely wrong when they say class is an identity. Clearly, class can be a basis for identities every bit as salient as race or gender. In fact, a core component of the socialist project is encouraging working people to identify with their class politically — and take action on that basis. But what the liberal critique misses are two ways that a class structure is different from other forms of hierarchy. First, class structures are built around a close form of dependency. Second, the basis of capitalist class power — their control over society’s productive assets — forces all of society into dependence on them. Take the first point. It’s become common to remark that whiteness, for example, is dependent on blackness for its meaning. But class is different, insofar as it is not just the concept of “worker” that is dependent on the concept of capitalist for meaning. It’s that to be a worker means, necessarily, to be dependent on a given capitalist or firm for a job. Similarly, to be a capitalist means to be engaged in the ongoing exploitation of particular workers in order to maintain that position. A white person’s whiteness, by contrast, isn’t dependent on any particular relationship with or actions by nonwhite people. An antiracist and a racist are equally white. Class structures, then, rest on a particularly close form of interdependency. This interdependency means that to be a worker is to always and everywhere be in a position of having your interests at least threatened by the capitalist that employs you. But it also means that workers everywhere have the potential power to force their employers to the table by threatening their ability to remain capitalists. The close interdependency of the class structure at once threatens workers’ interests and provides the source of the power by which they can beat back that threat. The particular form of power capitalists possess reproduces a similar kind of dependence on a societal scale. The kind of property capitalists control — productive property — is what everyone in a society depends on. In this sense, it is not only workers who are dependent on capitalists. Because capitalists can choose not to produce or invest if they don’t think profits will be high enough, all of society is compelled to ensure that their profitability stays high enough to keep them producing, no matter the costs to the rest of society. Socialists, in short, don’t deny that class is an identity among others. They just argue that it’s much more than that. The socialist view of class points out that capitalists hold a form of power that, more than any other, forces all of society to depend on them. Yet because capitalists also depend on workers, workers have the power to resist capitalist prerogatives. Liberals overlook this crucial point. Because they see class as a ladder, in which positions are differentiated from one another more quantitatively than qualitatively, they deny that class concerns any particularly special kind of social power. For them, it’s an identity like any other, and any special focus on it can only be the result of special pleading or a desire to ignore other forms of oppression.