Beyond Structural Marxist Debate over the Class “Boundary Problem” : Bringing Agency into Class Analysis

Abstract

Twentieth-century Marxist scholars advanced highly sophisticated theories of class structure and debated class boundaries. The dispute centered on the class location of burgeoning whitecollar workers and their relationship with other classes—the so-called boundary problem. Membership heterogeneity and ideological variance among white-collar workers rendered the polemic over the boundary problem intricate, but their numerical increase and political significance made the debate important and controversial. This paper contends that the deterministic and reductionist bias of structural Marxist analysis of the boundary problem is liable to infer that class structure leads to class struggle and class consciousness because it views class as a structural derivative. Conceiving of class as being historically formed and collectively constructed instead, I suggest bringing agency into class analysis by incorporating social movement theories and blending synchronic and diachronic approaches. This type of analysis can be used to elaborate the detailed processes of class consciousness construction and class struggle mobilization—class formation—which predates class structuration.