Friday April 2nd, 2-4pm
Jeremy Cohan - Why We Should Care
About Class: Class and Freedom
This paper analyzes Marx’s account of the relation between social class and freedom. I detail five limitations on freedom that capitalism and its class relations pose: the despotism of the workshop, the dull compulsion of the market, incapacity-freedom, classlessness in ideology but not in fact, and the heteronomy of antagonistic interests. In turn, the politics associated with each of these limitations is addressed. Attentiveness to these forms of unfreedom, then, clarifies the challenge Marx’s thinking on class poses to the liberal tradition of political philosophy, addresses some common doubts about class posed in the social science (objectivitism vs. subjectivism, for instance), and differentiates Marx’s use of class from a more common use that focuses on evoking sympathy for the oppressed class and condemning all-powerful oppressors. Marx’s account of what I call “structural unfreedom” is highlighted throughout, with the limitations it entails for both the proletariat and the ruling class. The end of the necessarily antagonistic relations of classes to one another–and the unfreedom that that represents–is the vision of politics for which Marx sets his sights, and one of the reasons he does not stop at reform. Finally, the paper briefly considers why sociologists should be concerned with considerations of freedom when they think about class.