3. Class as the relational explanation of economic life chance: Third, class may be offered as part of the answer to the question: “What explains inequalities in economically-defined life chances and material standards of living of individuals and families?” This is a more complex and demanding question than the first two, for here the issue is not simply descriptively locating people within some kind of system of stratification -- either subjectively or objectively -- but identifying certain causal mechanisms that help determine salient features of that system. When class is used to explain inequality, typically, the concept is not defined primarily by subjectively-salient attributes of a social location but rather by the relationship of people to income-generating resources or assets of various sorts. Class thus becomes a relational, rather than simply gradational concept. This concept of class is characteristic of both the Weberian and Marxist traditions of social theory. Class, in this usage, is contrasted to the many other determinants of a person’s life chances – for example, geographical location, forms of discrimination anchored in ascriptive characteristics like race or gender, or genetic endowments. Location, discrimination, and genetic endowments may, of course, still figure in the analysis of class – they may, for example, play an important role in explaining why different sorts of people end up in different classes – but the definition of class as such centers how people are linked to those income-generating assets.

4. Class as a dimension of historical variation in systems of inequality: Fourth, class figures in answers to the question, “How should we characterize and explain the variations across history in the social organization of inequalities?” This question implies the need for a macro-level concept, rather than simply a micro-level concept capturing the causal processes of individual lives; and it requires a concept that allows for macro-level variations across time and place. This question is also important in both the Marxist and Weberian traditions, but as we will see later, here the two traditions have quite different answers. Within the Marxist tradition, the most salient aspect of historical variation in inequality is the ways in which economic systems vary in the manner in which an economic surplus is produced and appropriated, and classes are therefore defined with respect to the mechanisms of surplus extraction. For Weber, in contrast, the central problem of historical variation is the degree of rationalization of different dimensions of inequality. This underwrites a conceptual space in which on the one hand class and status are contrasted as distinct forms of inequality, and on the other hand class is contrasted with non-rationalized ways through which individual life-chances are shaped.

5. Class as a foundation of economic oppression and exploitation: Finally, class plays a central role in answering the question, “What sorts of transformations are needed to eliminate economic oppression and exploitation within capitalist societies?” This is the most contentious question for it implies not simply an explanatory agenda about the mechanisms that generate economic inequalities, but a normative judgment about those inequalities – they are forms of oppression and exploitation – and a normative vision of the transformation of those inequalities. This is the distinctively Marxist question and it suggests a concept of class laden with normative content. It supports a concept of class which is not simply defined in terms of the social relations to economic resources, but which also figures centrally in a political project of emancipatory social change.