Neville Kirk - Social Class and Marxism: Defences and Challenges

In recent years scholars working in the humanities and social sciences have widely questioned the continued methodological, philosophical and substantive utility of the notion of social class. Whether as historical relationship, sociological and historical means of analysis and structure, or as a major practical influence upon political ideas and behaviour, class has increasingly been seen as deficient; as mainly incapable of meeting the epistemological and disciplinary tests of empirical adequacy and comprehension and theoretical rigour and consistency.

This questioning process has manifested itself in a number of ways and in a variety of areas. For example, welcome, and in many cases long overdue, current attention to identities revolving around race, gender and ethnicity is not infrequently accompanied by the claim that such identities have, in both past and present, largely taken precedence over that of class.1 In related fashion, post-structuralist and post-modernist concerns with discourse and subjectivity frequently lead to a denial of the existence of a reality out there, as external to consciousness and intention, and as situated in mainly unwilled class and social structures and interests.2 On a more concrete level, the very successes of the Conservative Party since 1979, combined with the weaknesses and failures of the labour movement, have moved several historians and political scientists fundamentally to reconsider the general nature of connections between the social and the political and the specific relations between the working class and socialist and Labour politics.3 Furthermore, differential experiences concerning patterns of opportunity, choice and consumption within social classes in post-1979 Britain have also induced many journalists and academics to posit a loosening or even the dissolution of traditional class collectivities and solidarities and the triumph of modern individualistic attitudes and behaviour. As was the case with embourgeoisement theorists of the 1950s and 1960s, affluence is seen as the necessary harbinger of a mass, middle-class society rooted in the politics of choice, opportunity and the relentless pursuit of private interests.4

To pose questions and raise serious doubts concerning the continued utility and explanatory power of class is of course not an invention of the 1980s and 1990s. Historians, for example, have long debated the extent to which concerns such as levels of income and skill and allegiances rooted in occupation, locality, religion, politics, culture and consumption, united rather than divided nineteenth-century British workers.5 Within the social sciences the relative merits and frequently competing claims of class and status, class and power, class and nation, and production- and distribution-based theories of class have been hotly debated for much of this century.