Class

Gradational concept of class

 * Class is just more of a given undividal attribute (e.g. income)

Marxist

 * Relations are attributes of positions, not persons
 * Relations of production: rather than a technical definition (a production function=how much input and what types are necessary & how they fit together), the Marxian definition defines relations of production in terms of the powers and rights of actors over the inputs - the right and power a person has over the MoP is really a claim about the social relationship between that person and other people, i.e. about your ability to exclude other people from using them
 * Relations of production become class relation of production when these rights and powers are unequally distributed

The concept of class

 * The Marxist concept of class is built around four basic structural properties: classes are relational; those relations are antagonistic; those antagonisms are rooted in exploitation; and exploitation is based on the social relations of production
 * What it means to say that class is a mechanism that explains something: to the extent that class is explanatory of empirical phenomena, it is explanatory by virtue of the way class mechanisms generate material interests, or lived experiences, or collective capacities

Class structure

 * Class relations may establish limits on possible variations
 * Model of determination to distinguish:
 * Limitation in which one element imposes limits of possible variation on another
 * Selection, in which one element imposes narrower limits of variation on another element within a range of already established broader limits
 * Transformation in which a practice by social actors transforms a given element within the constraints of limitations and selections
 * Class structures don't define a unique path of social development but constitute the lines of demarcation in trajectories of social change. Along the road leading in different directions, the critical junctures are specified by changes in the class structures.

Class struggle

 * Contrast class struggle as a driver of societal change with other processes such as cultural diffusion, technological change
 * Three basic ways in which class struggle has been defined:
 * By the nature of the agents in conflicts: are the lines of opposition in the conflict class lines?
 * By the objectives of conflict: consciously contesting over balance of power or distribution of resources
 * By the effects of conflict: it's class struggle if conflict has systematic effects on class relations
 * Class struggles are the central mechanism for moving from one class structure to another. If the map of history is defined by class structures the motor of history is class struggle. It is conflict between actors (rather than objectives or effects of class struggle) defined by their location within class structures which explains the qualitative transformations that demarcate epochal trajectories of social change

Exploitation

 * Exploitation defines a set of mechanisms which help to explain both the distribution of economic welfare and the distribution of economic power
 * That is, by virtue of appropriating the surplus, exploiters are able both to obtain much higher levels of economic welfare (by consuming part of the surplus) and to have much higher levels of economic power (by retaining control over the social allocation of the surplus through investments).
 * Within Marxism, therefore, to say that what members of a class hold in common is a common set of material interests is to argue that they have common interests with respect to the process of exploitation.
 * Marxists analyze the linkage between class and material interests through the concept of exploitation while Weberians analyze this through the types of market capacities that generate common life chances. For Marxists, common material interests are relationally linked in a specific way to the interests of other classes through exploitation, i.e. not only different but opposed material interests → and this explains why class structure is associated with class conflict
 * The absence of systematic conflict, therefore, would imply the presence of some powerful mechanism which prevents the interest mechanisms from generating empirical conflicts.

Interests

 * Interests as "what do I have to do to improve my standard of living?"
 * What happens to you when you do what you have to do to get what you get is your lived experience
 * Objective interests of actors interests exist independently of the subjective understandings of those interests held by the actors themselves
 * Common material interests (as shaped by the social relations of production) = to face similar dilemmas and trade-offs in the pursuit of economic welfare and economic power → it's not distributional outcomes but the available choices and strategies with respect to those outcomes (choices within the game as well as choices about the type of game)
 * A s an individual, to be a capitalist means that economic welfare depends upon extraction of surplus labor from workers, technical innovation, successful investment strategies, market competition with rival capitalists
 * As an individual, to be a worker means that economic welfare depends upon successfully selling one's labor power to a capitalist and competing with other workers for better jobs.
 * To talk about the common material interests of workers is not to make a claim about which of the actual potential choices listed above are "best" for workers as individuals.