There are really only two ways of thinking theoretically about class: either as a structural _location_ or as a _social relation_. The first and more common of these treats class as a form of "stratification," a layer in a hierarchical structure, differentiated according to "economic" criteria such as income, "market chances" or occupation. In contrast to this geological model, there is a social-historical conception of class as a relation between appropriators and producers, determined by the specific form in which, to use Marx's phrase, "surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers."
If the second of these conceptions is specifically Marxist, the first covers a broad spectrum from classical sociology up to and including some varieties of Marxism. So, for example, class defined as "relation to the means of production" can take a form not so very different from the income differentiation of conventional stratification theory; and some of the most recent and influential theories of class elaborated under the rubric of "Rational Choice Marxism" have deliberately shifted the relations of _surplus extraction_ to the distribution of "assets" or "endowments." Here, as in theories of stratification, the operative principle is relative advantage or _inequality_, not direct social relations between appropriators and producers but indirect relations of _comparison_ among people differentially situated in a structural hierarchy. [1] By contrast, for "classical" Marxism the focus is on the social relation itself, the dynamic of the relation between appropriators and producers, the contradictions and conflicts which account for social and historical processes; and _inequality_, as simply a comparative measure, has no theoretical purchase.
[1] I ha e discussed Rational Choice Marxism and its conception of class at great length in an article which I contemplated including in this volume: "Rational Choice Marxis : Is the Game Worth the Candle?" _New Left Review_, 177 (1989), pp. 41-88. In the end, I decided to extract only a small section of it (in the next chapter), partly because it is already being included in a volume on rational choice Marxism edited by Paul Thomas and Terrell Carver, to be published by Macmillan, but also because the debate with this school of theory tends to take discussion off on tangents which seem to me not very fruitful outside their own fairly self-enclosed game-theoretic universe.*******
Ellen Meiksins Wood, _Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism_ (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 76-77
I have usually in posts to LBO _not_ assumed that the discussion proceeds within the framework of Marxist principle -- that is, whatever arguments I advance I assume must not presuppose the acceptance of Marxism. It seems to me, however, that on the subject of Class it is impossible (except in discussions totalling hundreds of pages) to proceed except on at least a nominal acceptance of Marxism. In this and following posts, therefore, I have no argument with those who do not at least _call_ themseles Marxists, because we share no principles in terms of which such an argument can proceed.
Carrol