Class and constitution

Abstract

When Marx died, he had not yet finished his chapter on “class” in the third volume of Capital, so no complete determination of class can be found in his work. Since then, generations of Marxists have tried to provide the Marxist “definition” of class. The term is used here critically: how could class be defined within a theoretical project that emphasizes not static role definitions but dynamic social relations? Moreover, defining the working class would require at least a further definition, that of capital. Marx’s critique of political economy showed that definitions of capital were contradictory and tautological. Might not the definition of the working class suffer a similar fate?