Abstract

The article focuses on class in the singular, which means on the exploited class. Taking Marx’s writings in the second half of the 1840s as a point of departure, the author contends that class in this sense becomes the name of a specific politics of liberation. Far from being objectively rooted in the relations of production, class appears in Marx as a split concept, which lays the basis for the problem of the “constitution of the proletariat into a class,µ famously analyzed in the Manifesto. Against the background of this problem the article discusses the relations and tensions between the two main names of class in Marx’s work, which means “proletariatµ and “working class.µ What emerges from this discussion, even beyond Marx’s intention, is a field of tension within which class and class politics can be thought in our present. What is underscored in the last section of the article is the strategic relevance of “differenceµ in this respect, both from a theoretical and from a political point of view.