Class in Marxism is a differential, relational concept rather than an isolated substance

Evidence

We may therefore say that what distinguishes the Marxist from the sociological notion of class is that, for the former, class is precisely a differential concept, that each class is at once a way of relating to and of refusing the others. Whatever its philosophical presuppositions, the sociological view is formally wrong to the degree that it allows us to think of the individual classes in a kind of isolation from each other, with the almost physical separation of social groups in city or countryside, or as “cultures” somehow self-developing and independent from each other: for the notion of the isolated class or social group is just as surely a hypostasis as the notion of the solitary individual in eighteenth-century philosophy. In history also there are no substances tranquilly persevering in their own essence, but rather a relationality and struggle of every instant, in which the class is no more free than the individual not to be engaged. So it is that each class implies the existence of all the others in its very being, for it defines itself against them and survives and perpetuates itself only insofar as it succeeds in humilating its adversaries. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 738

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines class as differential/relational against the hypostasiating sociological view.
• XREF: The differential definition of class mirrors the differential perception the reader tracked in ch.4 on literary form. — connects to: Marxism itself varies by the socio-economic system it reflects — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 27; Whether art reflects class passively or actively depends on the critic’s historical distance — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 739; The social linguistic notion of distinction generalizes Bourdieu’s class-based concept to all differentiation. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 125