Class Consciousness or Class Composition?

Class is perhaps the most central concept in the Marxist tradition. But it is also one of the most ambiguous. Part of the difficulty stems from Marx's own creative use of the concept to refer to both economic categories as well as political subjects. The tension between these two definitions of class is central to two models that have been historically mobilized to productively resolve that tension: the model of class consciousness, on the one hand, and that of class composition, on the other. The latter model is ultimately the more fruitful of the two, although some recent uses of the model of class composition have come very close to implicitly reassessing some of the virtues of the rival model of class consciousness.