I have to admit that it seems odd to see the charge of class reductionism thrown around in a debate between scholars, none of whom seem unduly committed to the Marxist tradition, to which this accusation is typically attached. If we want to have an argument about class and how it relates to other social categories—a good argument to have, always—it might benefit us to bring to bear some of the theoretical resources that already exist, wrenched into concepts through decades of intense debate.
What, then, is class reductionism? As Michael McCarthy and Mathieu Hikaru Desan argue, the charge conflates different problems that arise out of the concepts and practice of historical materialism. On the one hand, there is class reductionism as a political problem: the idea that only class enjoys the objectivity, the stability, or the universality to serve as a standpoint for effective political struggles for emancipation. On the other hand, there is class reductionism as an analytic concern: the notion that class is causally prior to other social categories. These two critiques have been systematically run together in the term “class reductionism,” and I’d venture that this problem is live in the debate we have at hand.
As McCarthy and Desan show, however, there’s no necessary relationship between the analytic status of class and its political saliency. One can accept that the class question is the first one should ask to understand a given social formation—through what relations is the social product created and distributed?—without taking on board any particular idea about the saliency or specific configuration of class as a political identity or relationship. For example, a society we identify as a class society—that is, as a society in which the class structure uniquely determines the production and division of goods—might, nonetheless, bring race to the fore as a more significant political category. And the political salience of race might even be due to the working of its own class mechanisms: such is, in fact, the standard story of how slavery emerged in America, as an attempted resolution to the class conflicts between planters and indentured servants in colonial Virginia. Furthermore, class mechanisms might work by means of race to reproduce the class structure. For instance, the labor regime of apartheid South Africa organized the working class into racial tiers, creating formal racial statuses separating groups of workers from each other, introducing antagonisms between them and limiting their ability to jointly confront the capitalist class.
With this disambiguation in hand, we can turn to confront Samuel Moyn’s propositions about age as a mediator of class. (I am responding here only to the blog post and associated short–form exchanges, as I haven’t read the book that prompts the debate.) Moyn argues that age “helps make American class today.” The case presented is for a classical form of mediation, akin to the ways that race and gender mediate class. Yet with these modalities of class, what we see in sophisticated accounts of mediation is that the result is a fractionated class structure, with fractions determined by the articulation of multiple social categories; indeed, the pioneering work in this vein from the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham had age as a central component of its analysis, albeit focused almost entirely on youth. The payoff of confronting class reductionism, in other words, is a conceptual toolkit for overcoming the structure of division in the working class, as that division is organized by the relevant category.
This is not to say that naming the relevant mediating social category itself banishes the division, or relegates struggles carried out under that category’s name to a secondary level. Let’s consult a classic of Cultural Studies, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, co-authored in 1978 by Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Considering the construction of a moral panic around the figure of the black mugger, Hall et al. take on the particular way that black labor is inserted into British society—shaped, obviously, by the history of slavery and colonialism, and additionally by gender and age—to produce the phenomena of wagelessness and criminalization, as well as a racist ideological figuration of those phenomena. “The constitution of this class fraction as a class, and the class relations which inscribe it, function as race relations,” they write.
The result is that struggles conducted in the name of race reflect a first-order reality, and—in the case of the black working class—enjoy a certain theoretical validity, but also face a limit: “The sectional struggles which continue to appear are the necessary strategies of a class which is divided against itself, face to face with capital. They are, therefore, also the site of capital’s continuing sway over it.” Indeed, they argue, capital “reproduces the class as a whole, structured by race. It dominates the divided class, in part, through those internal divisions which have ‘racism’ as one of their effects.” The point, they emphasize, is not to move instead to a simple call to unite across racial lines—their equivalent of the critique of class reductionism. The effects of race are real, and so cannot be reduced away. The point is to identify the specific situations of different class fractions, in order to generate an analysis and program that could work away at the source of the division, from within that division as it is currently constituted.
Moyn of course recognizes that age does not work in the same way as other categories, such as race. One isn’t born into an age group and stuck there forever—quite the contrary. And as with gender, one’s everyday relationships bring one into regular contact with those in other groups, but the relationship is less intrinsically interpersonally antagonistic than patriarchal relationships between women and men. Each of these facts makes age a weaker mediation than race or gender, but neither means it cannot be one at all. Its roots, too, lie not nearly as deep in modern history as those of race, or even deeper still, as with gender. Rather they are found in the reorganization of the life course carried out over the twentieth century, through the institutions of social and housing policy, and the particular way our housing market is designed.
Those are enough, clearly, to produce a pattern, and at least in that respect it seems inarguable that age has some fractionalizing effects in our society. From a materialist perspective, a pattern that is observable at the political and ideological levels should have some basis in the economic, and the correspondence and connection among these levels does indicate a class fraction dynamic. More even than in terms of wealth—the economic level, in the analysis of Hall et al.—we can see it clearly at the level of the political. If the extremely stark pattern of age polarization that obtained a decade ago has softened somewhat (with over-65 voters now a notch more progressive than the cohort beneath them), the overall aggregate picture clearly still holds: young to the left, old to the right. It only makes sense that this would correspond to an economic structure on one hand and a system of ideological expression on the other: over here, indebted socialist voters who watch TikTok; over there, property-owning MAGA supporters who watch Fox News.
But the logic of age-as-fractionator is clearly weaker. It is newer in provenance; internally dynamic rather than static, because each individual traverses the life cycle; interpersonally woven of relationships of interdependence much more than antagonism, which applies more clearly at the structural level; and when it functions in an exploitative fashion, often does so indirectly, via the mediation of housing markets or similar impersonal structures. None of this means that age cannot mediate class. But these caveats do condition what it means to say that it does so.
While Hall et al. were emphatic that “black and white, unite and fight” was a reductionist and insufficient answer to the challenge of the mediation of class by race, at the same time they saw the fundamental task of their analysis as the identification of a vehicle of working-class division. They granted the necessity and potential productiveness of the struggles and practices that arose spontaneously from the black working-class fraction, including even crime itself, which they granted a proto-political character. But it was only this—proto-political—and could not become more than that without deliberate politicization, which would of necessity bring it up against its fractional limit.
This, it seems to me, gets us to the problem with the dueling polemics in the case of gerontocracy. On the one hand, Moyn is right that the response to his book that he labels class reductionism, equivalent to “black and white, unite and fight,” makes no contribution to actually understanding the differentiation along the generational gradient—something that is clearly manifest in economics, politics, and ideology, if not uniformly so. Although we can observe it, we’re told to ignore it, because it’s divisive.
On the other hand, what a clear picture of age as a mediator of class would show us is not actually gerontocracy, but capitalism and the fractionated class system it produces. Moyn argues for an “intersectional optic,” but an intersectional optic without a clear account of causal hierarchies is notoriously prone to collapse into reductionism—and indeed Moyn seems in the end to answer one reductionism with another, arguing that gerontocracy is even responsible for old-age poverty, its seeming counterpoint. Rather than simply adding another intersection, and choosing emphasis at will, such that any category might seem to be the master category when examined closely (this would be the reductionism), what a structural class analysis would do is illustrate when and how different social categories articulate with each other, with what results. Rather than oscillate between this or that master, the alternative is as always, as Louis Althusser put it, to “hold the chain at both ends.”
