Reconstructing Class Analysis
Yochai Benkler, Talha Syed · Journal of Law and Political Economy · 2024
This article offers a reconceptualization of class-in-capitalism and its articulation with racialization and gender that builds on critical strands of Marxian thought and integrates insights from Black radical and feminist socialist traditions. Rather than a transhistorical materialist conception of class simpliciter , we develop a historically-specific conception of class embedded within an analysis of capitalist social relations . The result is an account of class based not on the appropriation of a “material surplus,” but on asymmetrical social relations in the division of labor and disposition of its fruits . Developing this conception along three key axes of asymmetries—property, production, and personhood—we show how the dynamics propelled by capitalist social relations are co-constitutive with those of racialization, while both the privatization of reproduction and gender-based super-exploitation are systemic features of these dynamics. We emphasize law’s role in the history of these relations, and end with implications of our analysis for their transformation.