Class and Classification: Against, In and Beyond Labour - John Holloway

1 What Labour Debate?
1.1 Class and Classification: Against, In and Beyond Labour

JOHN HOLLOWAY1

This paper explores a simple question: if fetishism is understood as a process of fetishisation, what are the implications for the concept of class?

Fetishism and Fetishisation

The distinction between fetishism and fetishisation is crucial for a discussion of Marxist theory. It is the difference between seeing the world in terms of domination and seeing it in terms of struggle.

Marx’s discussion of fetishism is at the centre of his whole theory. It is at once a criticism of what is wrong with capitalism, a critique of bourgeois thought and a theory of how capitalism reproduces itself. It points at once to the dehumanisation of people, to our own complicity in the reproduction of power, and to the difficulty (or apparent impossibility) of revolution.

The theme of dehumanisation is constantly present in Marx’s discussion of fetishism in Capital and elsewhere. In capitalism there is an inversion of the relation between people and things, between subject and object. There is an objectification of the subject and a subjectification of the object: things (money, capital, machines) become the subjects of society, people (workers) become the objects. Social relations are not just apparently but really relations between things (between money and the state, between your money and mine), while humans are deprived of their sociality, transformed into ‘individuals’, the necessary complement of commodity exchange: ‘In order that this alienation be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as private owners, and by implication as independent individuals’ (Marx, 1965: 87).

In the long and detailed discussion of conditions in the factory and the process of exploitation, the emphasis is constantly on the inversion of subject and object:

Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman who employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality’ (Marx, 1965: 423).

It is not only for the physical misery that it brings, but above all for the inversion of things and people that Marx condemns capitalism: for the fetishisation of social relations in other words.

Inextricably linked with the condemnation of the inversion of subject and object in bourgeois society is the critique of bourgeois theory which takes this inversion for granted, which bases its categories on the fetishised forms of social relations: the state, money, capital, the individual, profit, wages, rent and so on. These categories are derived from the surface of society, the sphere of circulation, in which the subjectivity of the subject as producer is completely out of sight and all that can be seen is the interaction of things and of the individuals who are the bearers of these things. It is here, where social subjectivity is hidden from view, that liberal theory blooms. This sphere of circulation is ‘a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’ (Marx, 1965: 176). The whole three volumes of Capital are devoted to a critique of political economy, that is, to showing how the conceptions of political economy arise from the fetishised appearances of social relations. Political economy (and bourgeois theory in general) takes for granted the forms in which social relations exist (commodity-form, value-form, money-form, capital-form and so on). In other words, bourgeois theory is blind to the question of form: commodities and money (and so on) are not even thought of as being forms, or modes of existence, of social relations.

Bourgeois theory is blind to the transitory nature of the current forms of social relations, takes for granted the basic unchangeability of capitalist social relations. Bourgeois thought, however, is not just the thought of the bourgeoisie, or of capitalism’s active supporters. It refers rather to the forms of thought generated by the fractured relation between doing and done (subject and object) in capitalist society. It is important to see that the critique of bourgeois theory is not just a critique of ‘them’. It is also, and perhaps above all, a critique of ‘us’, of the bourgeois nature of our own assumptions and categories, or, more concretely, a critique of our own complicity in the reproduction of capitalist power relations. The critique of bourgeois thought is the critique of the separation of subject and object in our own thought.

The fetishism which is so highly elaborated in the work of the political economists and other bourgeois theorists is equally the basis of everyday ‘common-sense’ conceptions in capitalist society. The assumption of the permanence of capitalism is built into the daily thought and practice of people in this society. The appearance and real existence of social relations as fragmented relations between things conceal both the basic antagonism of those relations and the possibility of changing the world. The concept of fetishism (rather than any theory of ‘ideology’ or ‘hegemony’) thus provides the basis for an answer to the age-old question, ‘why do people accept the misery, violence and exploitation of capitalism?’ By pointing to the way in which people not only accept the miseries of capitalism but also actively participate in its reproduction, the concept of fetishism also underlines the difficulty or apparent impossibility of revolution against capitalism.

Fetishism is the central theoretical problem confronted by any theory of revolution. Revolutionary thought and practice is necessarily anti-fetishistic. Any thought or practice which aims at the emancipation of humanity from the dehumanisation of capitalism is necessarily directed against fetishism.

There are, however, two different ways of understanding fetishism, which we can refer to as ‘hard fetishism’ on the one hand, and ‘fetishisation-as-process’, on the other. The former understands fetishism as an established fact, a stable or intensifying feature of capitalist society. The latter understands fetishisation as a continuous struggle, always at issue. The theoretical and political implications of the two approaches are very different.

The more common approach among those who have emphasised the concept of fetishism is the ‘hard fetishism’ approach. Fetishism is assumed to be an accomplished fact. In a capitalist society, social relations really do exist as relations between things. Relations between subjects really do exist as relations between objects. Although people are, in their species-characteristic, practical creative beings, they exist under capitalism as objects, as dehumanised, as deprived of their subjectivity.

The constitution or genesis of capitalist social relations is here understood as a historical constitution, something that took place in the past. Implicitly, a distinction is made between the origins of capitalism, when capitalist social relations were established through struggle (what Marx refers to as primitive or original accumulation), and the established capitalist mode of production, when capitalist social relations are in place. In the latter phase, fetishism is assumed to be established in a stable condition. In this view, the importance of Marx’s insistence on form is simply to show the historicity of capitalist social relations. Within this historicity, within the capitalist mode of production, fetishised social relations can be regarded as basically stable. Thus, for example, the transition from feudalism to capitalism involved a struggle to impose value relations, but it is assumed that, once the transition has been accomplished, value is a stable form of social relations. Value is seen as struggle only in relation to the transitional period; after that it is regarded as simply domination, or as part of the laws which determine the reproduction of capitalist society.2

There is a central problem for those who understand fetishism as accomplished fact. If social relations are fetishised, how do we criticise them? The hard understanding of fetishism implies that there is something special about us, something that gives us a vantage point above the rest of society. They are alienated, fetishised, reified, suffering from false consciousness, we are able to see the world from the point of view of the totality, or true consciousness, or superior understanding. Our criticism derives from our special position or experience or intellectual abilities, which allow us to understand how they (the masses) are dominated. We are implicitly an intellectual elite, a vanguard of some sort. The only possible way of changing society is through our leadership of them, through our enlightening them. If it is taken that social relations really are fetishised in this sense (if fetishism is seen as an established fact), then Marxist theory and practice become elitist: we, the enlightened, think and act on behalf of the unenlightened. The idea of revolution as the self-emancipation of the workers then becomes nonsensical, as Lenin quite logically pointed out.

The second approach, what we called the ‘fetishisation-as-process’ approach, maintains that there is nothing special about our criticism of capitalism. As theorists or Marxists, we occupy no privileged position above the throng, but simply have a peculiar way of articulating our participation in the conflict in which all participate. If that is the starting point, however, then there is no way that fetishism can be understood as ‘hard fetishism’. If fetishism were an accomplished fact, if capitalism were characterised by the total objectification of the subject, then there is no way that we could criticise fetishism.

The fact that we criticise points to the contradictory nature of fetishism (and therefore also to the contradictory nature of our selves), and gives evidence of the present existence of anti-fetishism. The point is made by Ernst Bloch:

Alienation could not even be seen, and condemned of robbing people of their freedom and depriving the world of its soul, if there did not exist some measure of its opposite, of that possible coming-to-oneself, being-with-oneself, against which alienation can be measured (Bloch, 1964: 113).3

The concept of alienation, or fetishism, in other words, implies its opposite: not as essential non-alienated ‘home’ deep in our hearts, but as resistance, refusal, rejection of alienation in our daily practice. It is only on the basis of a concept of anti-alienation or anti-fetishism that we can conceive of alienation or fetishism. If fetishism and anti-fetishism coexist, then it can only be as antagonistic processes. Fetishism is a process of fetishisation, a process of separating subject and object, always in antagonism to the opposing movement of anti-fetishisation, the struggle to reunite subject and object.

Once fetishism is revealed as process of fetishisation, the hardness of all categories dissolves and phenomena which appear as things or established facts (such as commodity, value, money, the state) are revealed as processes. The forms come to life. The categories are opened4 to reveal that their content is struggle.

Once fetishism is understood as fetishisation, then the genesis of the capitalist forms of social relations is not of purely historical interest. The value-form, money-form, capital-form, state-form etc. are not established once and for all at the origins of capitalism. Rather, they are constantly at issue, constantly questioned as forms of social relations, constantly being established and re-established (or not) through struggle. The forms of social relations are processes of forming social relations. Every time a small child takes sweets from a shop without realising that money has to be given in exchange for them, every time workers refuse to accept that the market dictates that their place of work should be closed or jobs lost, every time that the shopkeepers of São Paolo promote the killing of street children to protect their property, every time that we lock our bicycles, cars or houses – value as a form of relating to one another is at issue, constantly the object of struggle, constantly in process of being disrupted, re-constituted and disrupted again.

All of those apparently fixed phenomena which we often take for granted (money, state, power: ‘they are there, always have been, always will, that’s human nature, isn’t it?’) are now seen to be raging, bloody battlefields. It is rather like taking a harmless speck of dust and looking at it through a microscope to discover that the ‘harmlessness’ of the speck of dust conceals a whole micro-world in which millions of microscopic organisms live and die in the daily battle for existence. But in the case of money, the invisibility of the battle it conceals has nothing to do with physical size, it is the result rather of the concepts through which we look at it. The banknote we hold in our hand seems a harmless thing, but look at it more closely and we see a whole world of people fighting for survival, some dedicating their lives to the pursuit of money, some (many) desperately trying to get hold of money as a means of surviving another day, some trying to evade money by taking what they want without paying for it or setting up forms of production that do not go through the market and the money-form, some killing for money, many each day dying for lack of money. A bloody battlefield in which the fact that social relations exist in the form of money brings untold misery, disease and death and is always at issue, always contested, always imposed, often with violence. Money is a raging battle of monetisation and anti-monetisation.

Seen from this perspective, money becomes monetisation, value valorisation, commodity commodification, capital capitalisation, power powerisation, state statification, and so on (with ever uglier neologisms). Each process implies its opposite. The monetisation of social relations makes little sense unless it is seen as a constant movement against its opposite, the creation of social relations on a non-monetary basis. Neoliberalism, for example, can be seen as a drive to extend and intensify the monetisation of social relations, a reaction in part to the loosening of that monetisation in the post-war period and its crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. These forms of social relations (commodity, value, money, capital and so on) are interconnected, of course, all forms of the capitalist separation of subject and object, but they are interconnected not as static, accomplished forms, but as forms of living struggle. The existence of forms of social relations, in other words, cannot be separated from their constitution. Their existence is their constitution, a constantly renewed struggle against the forces that subvert them.

Fetishisation and Class

All that I take as a starting point. The question to be addressed here is what implications this understanding of fetishisation as a process has for our understanding of class.

Most discussions of class are based on the assumption that the fetishised forms are pre-constituted. The relation between capital and labour (or between capitalist and working class) is taken to be one of subordination. On this basis, understanding class struggle involves, firstly, defining the working class and, secondly, studying whether and how they struggle.

In this approach, the working class, however defined, is defined on the basis of its subordination to capital: it is because it is subordinated to capital (as wage workers, or as producers of surplus-value) that it is defined as working class. Indeed it is only because the working class is assumed to be pre-subordinated that the question of definition can even be posed. Definition merely adds the locks to a world that is assumed to be closed. Once defined, the working class is then identified as a particular group of people, who can then be made the object of study. For socialists, ‘working class’ is then treated as a positive concept and working class identity as something to be prized. There is, of course, the problem of what to do with those people who do not fall within the definitions of working class or capitalist class, but this is dealt with by a supplementary definitional discussion on how to define these other people, whether as new petty bourgeoisie, salariat, middle class or whatever. This process of definition or class-ification is the basis of endless discussions about class and non-class movements, class and ‘other forms’ of struggle, ‘alliances’ between the working class and other groups, and so on.

All sorts of problems spring from this definitional approach to class. Firstly, there is the question of ‘belonging’. Do we who work in the universities ‘belong’ to the working class? Did Marx and Lenin? Are the rebels of Chiapas part of the working class? Are feminists part of the working class? Are those active in the gay movement part of the working class? In each case, there is a concept of a pre-defined working class to which these people do or do not belong.

A second consequence of defining class is the definition of struggles that follows. From the classification of the people concerned there are derived certain conclusions about the struggles in which they are involved. Those who define the Zapatista rebels as being not part of the working class draw from that certain conclusions about the nature and limitations of the uprising. From the definition of the class position of the participants there follows a definition of their struggles: the definition of class defines the antagonism that the definer perceives or accepts as valid. This leads to a blinkering of the perception of social antagonism. In some cases, for example, the definition of the working class as the urban proletariat directly exploited in factories, combined with evidence of the decreasing proportion of the population who fall within this definition, has led people to the conclusion that class struggle is no longer relevant for understanding social change. In other cases, the definition of the working class and therefore of working class struggle in a certain way has led to an incapacity to relate to the development of new forms of struggle (the student movement, feminism, ecologism and so on).

Defining the working class constitutes them as a ‘they’. Even if we say that we are part of the working class, we do so by stepping back from ourselves and by classifying ourselves or the group to which we ‘belong’ (students, university lecturers and so on). On the basis of this definition, it is possible to pose the question of their class consciousness and to study it. What consciousness do they have of their class position and their class interests? Is this consciousness what it ought to be? Is it a true consciousness or a false or limited (trade union) consciousness? If, as is usually argued, it is a false or limited consciousness, then the conclusion is usually that the revolutionary transformation of society is impossible or that it must be led from outside, by a Party or by intellectuals.

The fundamental problem is that if the working class is defined on the basis of subordination – and there is no other way of defining it – then the theoretical circle is closed: there is no way out except by complementing a fictional objectivity with a fictional subjectivity.

If, on the other hand, we do not start from the assumption of the fetishised character of social relations, if we assume that fetishisation is a process and that existence is inseparable from constitution, then how does this change our vision of class? The argument in the first part of this paper would suggest that class, like money, like state, like value, has to be understood as a process, as a process of class-ification. Capitalism is the ever renewed generation of class, the ever renewed class-ification of people. Marx makes this point very clearly in his discussion of accumulation in Capital:

Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation: on the one side the capitalist, on the other, the wage-labourer (Marx, 1965: 578).

In other words, the existence of classes and their constitution cannot be separated: to say that classes exist is to say that they are in the process of being constituted.

The constitution of class can be seen as the separation of subject and object. Capitalism is the daily repeated violent separation of the object from the subject, the daily snatching of the object–creation–product from the subject–creator–producer, the daily seizure from the subject not only of her creation but of her act of creation, her creativity, her subjectivity, her humanity.

The violence of this separation is not characteristic just of the earliest period of capitalism: it is the core of capitalism. To put it in other words, ‘primitive accumulation’ is not just a feature of a bygone period, it is central to the existence of capitalism. The violence with which the separation of subject and object, or the class-ification of humanity, is carried out suggests that ‘reproduction’ is a misleading word in so far as it conjures up an image of a smoothly repeated process, something that goes around and around, whereas the violence of capitalism suggests that the repetition of the production of capitalist social relations is always very much at issue.

Class and Classification

The understanding of class as classification5 has implications for all aspects of the discussion of class.

(1) Class struggle is the struggle to class-ify and against being classified at the same time as it is, indistinguishably, the struggle between constituted classes.

More orthodox discussions of class struggle tend to assume that classes are pre-constituted, that the subordination of labour to capital is pre-established, and to start from there. In the approach suggested here the conflict does not take place after subordination has been established, after the fetishised forms of social relations have been constituted; rather, it is a conflict about the subordination of social practice, about the fetishisation of social relations. The conflict is the conflict between subordination and insubordination, and it is this which allows us to speak of insubordination (or ‘dignity’, to borrow the Zapatistas’ phrase) as a central feature of capitalism. Class struggle does not take place within the constituted forms of capitalist social relations: rather the constitution of those forms is itself class struggle. This leads to a much richer concept of class struggle in which the whole of social practice is at issue. All social practice is an unceasing antagonism between the subjection of practice to the fetishised, perverted, defining forms of capitalism and the attempt to live against-and-beyond those forms. There can thus be no question of the existence of non-class forms of struggle. Class struggle, then, is the unceasing daily antagonism (whether it be perceived or not) between alienation and dis-alienation, between definition and anti-definition, between fetishisation and de-fetishisation.

We do not struggle as working class, we struggle against being working class, against being classified. It is the unity of the process of classification (the unity of capital accumulation) that gives unity to our struggle, not our unity as members of a common class. Thus, for example, it is the significance of the Zapatista struggle against capitalist classification that gives it importance for class struggle, not the question of whether the indigenous inhabitants of the Lacandon Jungle are or are not members of the working class. There is nothing positive about being members of the working class, about being ordered, commanded, separated from our product and our process of production. Struggle arises not from the fact that we are working class but from the fact that we-are-and-are-not working class, that we exist against-and-beyond being working class, that they try to order and command us but we do not want to be ordered and commanded, that they try to separate us from our product and our producing and our humanity and our selves and we do not want to be separated from all that.

(2) We are/are not working class. To say that class should be understood as classification means that class struggle (the struggle to classify us and our struggle against being classified) is something that runs through us, individually and collectively. Only if we were fully classified could we say without contradiction ‘we are working class’ (but then class struggle would be impossible).

We take part in class struggle on both sides. We classify ourselves in so far as we produce capital, in so far as we respect money, in so far as we participate, through our practice, our theory, our language (our defining the working class), in the separation of subject and object. We simultaneously struggle against our class-ification in so far as we are human. We exist against-in-and-beyond capital. Humanity is schizoid, volcanic: everyone is torn apart by the class antagonism. We are self-divided, self-alienated. We who struggle for the reunification of subject and object are also we who produce their separation. Rather than looking to the hero with true class consciousness, a concept of revolution must start from the confusions and contradictions that tear us all apart. There is no pure, revolutionary subject. The linking of the purity of the subject with revolution, very clearly in the case of Lenin’s idea of the Party, but also in the case of Negri’s ‘multitude’, is part of the tradition of the left, part of its tendency towards puritanical authoritarianism.

Does this mean that class distinctions can be reduced to a general statement about the schizoid character of humanity? No, because there are clearly differences in the way in which the class antagonism traverses us, differences in the degree to which it is possible for us to repress that antagonism. For those who benefit materially from the process of class-ification (accumulation), it is relatively easy to repress anything which points against or beyond classification, to live within the bounds of fetishism. It is those whose lives are overturned by accumulation (the indigenous of Chiapas, university lecturers, coal miners, nearly everybody) in whom the element of againstness will be much more present. It remains true, however, that nobody exists purely against or against-and-beyond: we all participate in the separation of subject and object, the classification of humans. Notions of class composition, decomposition and recomposition should be understood, therefore, not as the changing position of different groups but as the changing configuration of the antagonism that traverses all of us, the antagonism between fetishisation and anti-fetishisation, between classification and anti-classification.

(3) Is work central to classification? Yes-and-no.

Work is an ambiguous term. It can be understood either as labour (alienated work) or, more broadly, as purposive, creative activity. To avoid the ambiguity, we shall refer to labour as doing rather than to ‘work’. Labour is the production of capital and the production of capital is the production of class, classification. The production of capital is at the same time the production of surplus-value, exploitation. If there were no exploitation, there would be no production of class.

However, the statement ‘labour is the production of capital’ is tautologous and misleading in so far as it assumes the pre-constitution of labour, the prior abstraction of human doing. The argument so far suggests that we cannot understand capitalism simply in terms of the conflict between labour and capital for, to do so, is to start from pre-constituted categories, from an assumed existence-in-abstraction-from-constitution. Exploitation is not just the exploitation of labour but the simultaneous transformation of human doing into labour, the simultaneous desubjectification of the subject, the dehumanisation of humanity. This does not mean that doing, the subject, humanity exist in some pure sphere waiting to be metamorphosed into their capitalist forms. The capitalist form (labour) is the mode of existence of doing/ subjectivity/ humanity, but that mode of existence is contradictory. To say that doing exists as labour means that it exists also as anti-labour. To say that humanity exists as subordination means that it exists also as insubordination. The production of class is the suppression(-and-reproduction) of insubordination. Exploitation is the suppression(-and-reproduction) of insubordinate doing. The suppression of doing does not just take place in the process of production, as usually understood, but in the whole separating of subject and object that constitutes capitalist society.

Thus: labour produces class, but labour pre-supposes a prior classification. Similarly, production is the sphere of the constitution of class, but the existence of a sphere of production, that is the separation of production from human doing in general also presupposes a prior classification.

The answer, then, to our question about the centrality of work is surely that it is not labour that is central but doing, which exists in-against-and-beyond labour. To start from labour (as in ‘labour studies’ or ‘the labour debate’) is to enclose oneself from the beginning within a fetishised world, such that any projection of an alternative world must appear as pure fancy, something brought in from outside.

In–Against–Beyond

Underlying this discussion of class is an attempt to understand the current development of capitalism. Capitalism is in overt crisis in most of the world and in a situation of fragility in the rest, a situation in which the open outbreak of crisis is deferred through the ever-increasing expansion of credit. The crisis of class domination, however, does not correspond in any obvious way to a surge in the strength of the working class. This is a central question for anti-capitalist theory: if the world is a world of class struggle, how is it that when one side (labour) is weakened, the other (capital) is nevertheless in crisis? Elsewhere,6 Werner Bonefeld and I have suggested that credit expansion brings about a temporal dislocation between the surge of struggle and the manifestation of crisis (as in 1917–1929, 1968–1974, 1999–). The discussion here suggests a second approach: the weakness of capital is the result not of the strength of labour (as constituted class, as movement), but of the strength of anti-classification, of non-identity.

Capital accumulation is voracious. It requires an ever more complete subordination of humanity, an ever more profound classification of existence. This is surely the significance of Marx’s discussion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: if exploitation and the dehumanisation which it implies is not intensified, there is crisis. Crisis then is the result not of the strength of the working class or of the labour movement, necessarily, but of the strength of the general resistance to capital’s drive for an ever more profound subordination of humanity (dignity, as the Zapatistas say).

That in us which exists against-and-beyond capital is not our existence as working class but our struggling against being working class. We are the anti-class, those who are in-against-and-beyond being working class. That is what we need to explore and articulate.

References

Adorno, T. W. (1991), Negative Dialectics, Routledge, London.
Bloch, E. (1964), Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie (Bd. 2), Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.
Bonefeld, W. (n.d.), ‘Capital, Labour and Primitive Accumulation: Notes on Class and Constitution’, Unpublished paper.
Bonefeld, W. and J. Holloway (eds) (1991), Post-Fordism and Social Form, Macmillan, London.
Bonefeld, W. and J. Holloway (eds) (1995), Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, Macmillan, London.
Bonefeld, W., R. Gunn and K. Psychopedis (eds) (1992), Open Marxism, Volume I: Dialectics and History, Pluto Press, London.
Gunn, R. (1987), ‘Notes on Class’, Common Sense, no. 2. pp.
Holloway, J. (1991), ‘Capital is Class Struggle (And Bears are not Cuddly)’, in W. Bonefeld and J. Holloway (eds), Post-Fordism and Social Form, Macmillan, London..
Jessop, B. (1991), ‘Polar Bears and Class Struggle: Much Less than a Self-Criticism’, in W. Bonefeld and J. Holloway (eds), Post-Fordism and Social Form, Macmillan, London.
Marx, K. (1965), Capital, Volume I, Progress, Moscow.

• 1In writing this, I have had two other papers very much in mind: Richard Gunn’s ‘Notes on Class’ (1987) and Werner Bonefeld’s chapter in this book [‘Capital, Labour and Primitive Accumulation: On Class and Constitution’]
• 2For examples of this approach, see Bob Jessop (1991); for a critique, Holloway (1991).
• 3Adorno makes the same point (1990: 377–378): ‘Greyness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbour the concept of different colours, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole.’ But he immediately gives the point a pessimistic, reactionary twist quite different from Bloch by adding, ‘the traces always come from the past and our hopes come from that which was or is doomed.’ The different colours do not come from the past: they come from present resistance.
• 4This is the core of the approach often referred to as ‘Open Marxism’: see Bonefeld W et al. (1992).
• 5Is classification the same as classification in general? I think so, but this is an argument that would take us beyond the bounds of this paper.
• 6On this, see Bonefeld W and Holloway J 1995.