Lots of people talk about class reductionism. Most people seem to agree it’s a bad thing, and that some other group of people does it. But few people talk about what ‘class reductionism’ means. It’s simply assumed or unstated. I, on the other hand, find the term extremely unclear. And unclear in both its parts. That is to say I think it’s unclear what ‘class’ means and what it means to reduce something to it.
What we have, then, is a useful project for an analytic philosopher. What does ‘class reductionism’ mean? Is it a political or explanatory project of some kind? What’s it all about? Some thoughts on that…
What’s the Point?
When I’m thinking about these issues, I often take Ian Hacking‘s advice in ‘The Social Construction of What?‘. Hacking tells us to “don’t first define, ask for the point.” Hacking’s right. What’s at stake here? Why are people worried about this?
They’re worried about a particular sort of politics. They see certain groups of leftists, or pseudo-leftists, tackling issues narrowly related to the concerns of (often) white, male, and working class audiences. Or they see leftists or pseudo-leftists building political coalitions out of those groups. They’re worried, quite rightly, that such a narrow political vision excludes people of color, especially black people. Along with members of other oppressed or marginalized groups. Groups from tenants, to black youth, to trans people of color, to Latina workers, and so on.
Some authors, for example, seem to totally reject the notion that identity should play a key role in leftist political discussion. Walter Benn Michaels’ book The Trouble with Diversity seems to exemplify this position rather well. And Adolph Reed makes statements that, while not explicitly in this camp, we could reasonably interpret as such. Plenty of people also accuse Bernie Sanders of making this move. Apparent failure to connect abortion directly to issues of economic inequality is another source.
And so, a good understanding of ‘class reductionism’ has to account for the issues at stake. That’s not a sufficient condition, but it’s a necessary one. When we lay out the terrain, our account must address the kinds of views people condemn. And if we advocate in favor of some form of class reductionism, we have to distinguish it from those views.
Class
To get all this right, we’re going to have to talk about this ‘class’ thing. What is it we’re supposedly reducing things to? I’ve written on this before, and I promise not to rehash that post. You can go check it out.
What’s relevant here is that you can define class in terms of socioeconomic status (SES) categories like education, income, and wealth. Or you can define it in terms of relationship to the ownership and control of certain economic resources, e.g., companies, the tools and instruments of work, the use of one’s labor-power, et al. If you choose the former route, you’ll define ‘class’ in terms of things like whether one has a high level of wealth or income, whether one has a college degree, etc. And if you choose the latter route, you’ll define it in terms of whether one is a business owner, manager or executive, rank-and-file worker, temp employee, unemployed person, and so on.
The choice here makes a big difference. Sometimes people with a college degree work rank-and-file jobs. Sometimes small business owners make very little income. I’ve talked in the past about how this impacts our understanding of ‘working class’. And I’ve made it clear that I think there’s more value in defining class in the latter sense, namely as a group of people who relate to the ownership and control of economic resources in particular ways.
I’ll proceed accordingly, but I’ll point out along the way that many of the problems people have with alleged ‘class reductionism’ is the kind that narrowly defines class in terms of income. And I agree with the people who object to that. Defining class in terms of income is a bad idea, and any politics organized centrally around income inequality, without a broader understanding of the class system, is bound to fail.
Reductionism
We’re left with the issue of ‘reductionism’. What are we talking about here? This is all rather fraught language in the field of philosophy, where I was trained. In particular, the issue of whether reductionism is about explanation is fraught territory. But in discussion of class reductionism, that’s exactly what it’s about. What we’re talking about is how to explain things that are going on in the world. Particularly things like concentration of power and wealth, our woefully inadequate democratic system, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression.
There’s a common worry out there, and it goes something like this: the class reductionist seeks to explain these things entirely in terms of class while ignoring identity categories like race, gender, sexual orientation, et al. And, moreover, the class reductionist also wants to address these issues entirely by addressing class issues. Thus, it’s a worry about both explanation and political strategy. Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, draws a distinction in his writing between the issues addressed by social democratic programs like Social Security and the particular issues of economics and race faced by black agricultural workers in the 1930s. He thinks the class reductionist, by advocating for social democratic programs built around class, simply fails to get at what’s happening in the latter case.
Is That What’s Going On?
And then there’s the accuracy question. I say it depends. There are lots of different kinds of reductionism, but what concerns us here is what philosophers often call ‘theory reduction’. The idea here is that a theory describing a phenomenon can be absorbed entirely into a theory describing a different phenomenon, and that latter theory retains all the explanatory power of the former while explaining an even wider range of things. You reduce one theory to a second when the first is derivable from the second, perhaps with the help of various bridge laws. Philosophers might formalize this with something like: x reduces to y iff x is a theory & y is a theory & ∃z (y, z ├ x).
We’re not going to worry about that. The point is that if class reductionism is right, it means that you can start with class alone and derive all the explanatory power you might get were you to start from race, gender, sexual orientation, and other identity categories. There’s nothing that race, gender, sexual orientation, et al. can explain independently from whatever it is about these things that originates in class relations.
While this all sounds neat and tidy, it’s controversial in both philosophy and the sciences. There are few, if any, uncontroversial cases of theory reduction of this sort. They’ve argued for decades, for example, about whether we can reduce chemistry to physics. And even in more targeted and intuitive reductions, such as classical genetics to molecular genetics, people still argue about the level of success of theory reduction. But that’s the basic idea.
Varieties of Class Reductionism
OK, here’s what we’ve got so far. Classes are groups of people who relate to the ownership and control of economic resources in similar ways. And reductionism is a view that says you can derive one theory from a more fundamental one. This all suggests a certain direction in which we might take these things.
But I’d like to draw a distinction here between a couple of varieties of class reductionism. One that identity-based political groups with anti-capitalist leanings are very much right to be concerned about. And a second that’s much more complicated (and interesting). I’ll call the two varieties Inequality Class Reductionism and Class Struggle Class Reductionism.
Inequality Class Reductionism
The first variety adopts the bad definition of class in terms of SES categories like education, income, or wealth. It’s exactly the sort people are talking about when they’re condemning what they call ‘class reductionism’.
Why is it so bad?
In short, these categories rarely ever tell the full story. In a sense, this is obvious. And obvious for several reasons. One, we know plenty of people who do quite well in the world, even if their education, income, or wealth levels are low. Two, we know that categories like education, income, and wealth don’t come close to fully accounting for differential outcomes by categories like race or gender. Third, there’s nothing about SES categories on their own from which we can infer anything interesting about a gendered, raced, or sexualized system of oppression. That is to say, these categories don’t really predict gendered or racialized oppression in any meaningful way.
Here’s a quick example. We have significant data suggesting the income levels of black men are consistently lower than white men, even when correcting for parental wealth and neighborhood. The stats are almost as bad for Native American men. This isn’t just to point to an income gap, but to also point out that there’s little correction across time. Even the young men raised by wealthy black Americans have worse outcomes than whites.
There’s nothing about Inequality Class Reductionism that really accounts for anything like this. It remains obscure without appeal to something beyond income.
Class Struggle Class Reductionism
The second variety, as I said, is more complicated. It accepts that class is about ownership and control of economic resources. And in one sense, it might just be an implication of the base and superstructure thesis this blog is named after. The idea here is that control of the means of production (e.g., tools and machines of work, land, raw materials, workplace infrastructure, et a.) and the relations of production (e.g., capital, commodities, property, et al.) explain apparently identity-based oppression and marginalization. At the very least, these things offer an explanatory system that sets out why identity categories originated and persist.
What’s that explanatory system? The short version of it is that identity categories serve to justify things like primitive accumulation of capital via theft of land from Native Americans and enslavement of Africans. And they offer continuing tags or markers to divide working class people and other marginalized groups from one another and prevent them from working together. Identity-based oppression began in the service of early capital accumulation and continues in the service of accumulation by dispossession.
Is it Correct?
Finally, we have the ultimate question. Is class reductionism correct? As usual, I’ll give a complicated answer. It depends.
Depends on what? It depends, first, on which version we’re talking about. Inequality Class Reductionism isn’t correct at all. But that’s an easy one.
It depends, second, on what you’re trying to do or explain. If you’re trying to get at a very basic, 101-level grasp of society, I think Class Struggle Class Reductionism works perfectly well. It gets at the fact that the class system is the most fundamental explanatory force in society, and it sets out a very accurate story about why identity categories arose in the first place and persist as tools for capital accumulation (and defense of capital). That’s plenty for Society 101.
Identity Emerges From Class?
But if you want to go into more depth, if you want to explain some of the intricacies or niceties of oppression or marginalization on the basis of identity? Well, no form of class reductionism is going to be compatible with that. While the class system explains a lot of the basics, it really doesn’t allow us to get into the details. At least not on our current understanding of class.
In that sense, rather than be a reductionist, we might be emergentists about these aspects of identity. Identity, in some of its aspects, emerges from class relations but sometimes floats independently of them. Class can account for the ways identity shapes the ownership and control of economic resources. But it can’t account for many of the personal experiences of identity people have. Nor can it fully account for things like micro-aggressions or implicit bias. At least, it can’t account for those things particularly well. There are elements both of the empirical status of various groups, and the experiences of various groups, that stretch beyond what a class-based explanatory framework reasonably offers us.
True, But Misleading
And so, I’ll conclude by noting this. When we properly define ‘class’ and we understand ‘reduction’ as some sort of theory reduction cashed out in explanatory terms, class reductionism is correct. But it doesn’t really get anyone to where some hope (and others fear) it gets them. It doesn’t give us license to ignore identity. It just points to a more fundamental force. And it doesn’t give us license to ignore people’s identity-based experience. In fact, it highlights the need for these experiences to act as an additional political force.
For this reason, class reductionism is somewhat beside the point when it comes to talking about how we should build and organize movements. It exists as a good reminder that class relations are fundamental to how the world works. It’s a reminder to ground our understanding of the world, and our means of combating problems with the world and building a better system, in those relations. But it gives us no cause at all for ignoring issues of identity, both in our activist work and our understanding of ourselves and one another.
A Final Note
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Postscript (January 2024)
Readers might be interested in an updated version of this post that I wrote over on Medium!
Click here to read the updated version.
