English integrated edition · v003
The class plane is formed by class theory, interpreters, and institutional procedures of interpretation: they organize locally extracted differences into a single main axis, then expand this image into the base map of society as a whole. The discussion here concerns not the generation of objective class entities, but the formation of an explanatory plane.
I. The Capacity for Local Distinction Extraction and the Structure of Total-Image Subsumption
Wages, employment, working hours, rent, debt, risk, and resource buffers are all hard relations extracted by class theory. They do exist, and their consequences can be severe. Class theory has grasped a set of real differences; this cannot be passed over. Denying these differences would leave theory without ground beneath its feet, and the consequences of relations involving labor, income, resources, and risk would once again be downplayed. A social theory blind to these differences would also readily rewrite structural pressures as individual failures once again. A person's income, assets, labor position, employment relations, resource buffers, and capacity to bear risk profoundly alter his circumstances. Especially in problems involving wages, housing, debt, educational opportunities, and the risk of illness, this set of differentiating units extracted by class theory is often not background: these differences are intensely amplified and do carry high weight in such problems.
Analysis of labor, wages, employment, debt, risk, and relations of domination can be limited, concrete, and bounded. What is truly difficult to handle is locally valid explanation: real differentiating units such as labor, wealth, employment, and resource distribution, together with the processes of their extraction, weight assignment, connection, and compression, form class theory's local explanatory capacity. Yet class theory's basic structure organizes this portion of explanatory power into authority over all explanation, compresses and projects the extracted differences and names them a class image, then installs this image in the place of what society fundamentally is.
The move from “there is a set of real differentiating units here” to “other relations are merely appendages of the class image” reveals class theory's procedure of total-image subsumption: from the outset, the capacity for local distinction extraction is organized into the total image's structure of subsumption. Class theory connects the extracted differences into a measure for all explanation and carries this line into the family, locality, nation, religion, culture, education, memory, private sphere, community, region, language, faith, body, identity, shame, responsibility, familial affection, and local standing. Other relations may still appear, but they can be mentioned only as explanations subordinate to the class image.
High weight does not mean always having the highest weight, still less does it justify becoming the sole main axis. A society does not have only one kind of difference at work. Family, region, language, institutions, the body, age, gender, memory, religion, education, occupation, local standing, legal status, and migration experience can all alter a person's position. They carry different operative weight in different problems: sometimes they recede into the background, sometimes they are amplified, and sometimes they determine how a person is seen, excluded, protected, or harmed even more directly than the set of differences extracted by class theory.
For example, a worker from elsewhere is seen first and foremost as a laborer in the factory. His wages, working hours, contract, and risk of workplace injury are indeed closely related to differences in labor, employment, resource buffers, and risk-bearing. But when he applies to enroll his child in school, household registration, proof of residence, a rental contract, available school places, and local institutions reposition him. Resources, income, and the family's safety net remain present, because they affect whether he can rent suitable housing and pay additional costs; but what determines his position at this point is no longer labor relations alone.
When the same person enters different problems, the differences he carries are reordered. Class theory turns a set of high-weight differentiating units into the sole main axis through low-dimensional projection, thereby forming the class plane. Interpreters who adopt this image no longer ask about these units' operative weight in concrete problems, but assume in advance that this class image has already supplied the final explanation. Thus, the family is written as class reproduction, locality becomes the surface layer of economic structure, the nation becomes an outer garment for the mobilization of interests, religion becomes a tool of the order of domination, and culture becomes a shell of ideas. They may appear, but they lose their own explanatory standing.
This is like projecting a three-dimensional object onto a wall. A projection can show contours and can also show direction. The class image can indeed reveal certain real relations in society. But the projection is not the thing itself, and the shadow cannot replace the actual object. People can infer some relations from a shadow, but they cannot leave the object's thickness, sides, back, and internal connections entirely to the shadow to explain. The problem is that interpreters who adopt class theory mistake the projection for the actual object. An image can present part of reality, but it cannot present every relation; when the procedure of interpretation permits reality to appear in only one shape, the projection masquerades as society itself.
Many errors first grasp part of reality and then expand it. This does not mean that class theory is merely an ordinary limited explanation whose application is occasionally expanded later; rather, its capacity for local distinction extraction is organized into the procedure of total-image subsumption from the outset. Class theory does not get every fact wrong: families do transmit resources, local disputes involve interests, religion may serve order, and national narratives may also be mobilized. The problem is that the procedure of interpretation directly rewrites “presence” as “exclusivity,” elevates these facts to the status of all facts, and connects the extracted differences in advance into a decisive measure for all explanation. Although other differences can still be mentioned, the procedure of interpretation strips them of the standing to alter judgments independently. They are no longer treated as real differences capable of altering social positions, but can appear only in a demoted capacity as shells, surfaces, disguises, or supplements of the class image. Society is thereby compressed into a plane.
There is nothing absurd about saying that differences in income, real estate holdings, educational attainment, personal connections, and occupational position exist within families. Parents' real estate holdings, income, education, and connections do alter their children's opportunities; whether a family can provide tutoring, a stable home, room for trial and error, and emotional support also materially affects the next generation's opportunities. The family has never been only about familial affection; it does transmit resources, habits, fears, and boundaries. But if one goes further and concludes that these differences have proved the family to be essentially nothing but a machine for class reproduction, explanation has crossed a line. The family is also a place of bodily care, a place where past relations accumulate, a place of emotional dependence, and a place where favoritism and silences are preserved over the long term. Illness, indebtedness, inheritance, the ordering of elders and juniors, and memory also operate concretely within the family.
When an elderly family member falls ill, who pays, who steps back at the sight of the bill, who stays at the bedside, who takes leave from work, who remains silent before the sickbed, who received more parental care in the past, and who among the siblings has always been thought responsible for shouldering the burden—none of this can be fully explained by interpreters who adopt class theory and rely solely on the class image. Money is present, but it cannot substitute for the consequences that care, memory, responsibility, and emotional dependence produce at this moment.
When a person cares for his sick parents, economic position alone cannot explain why the responsibility falls to him. He may be the one who lives closest to home, may have been expected since childhood to be sensible, may be the sibling most afraid to refuse, may have been wronged in the past, or may, precisely because he has the lowest income, be the one whose time is most readily claimed. Class theory can extract the resource pressures involved, but the resulting class image cannot show why these responsibilities fall to him.
The same is true of local relations. There is nothing absurd about saying that local land disputes involve struggles over resources. A plot of land has value; when its boundaries change, interests change. But a local dispute often also draws out past relations, marriages, personal obligations, funerals, reputations, generational seniority, and trust or distrust accumulated over many years. A shifted field ridge may call up a land exchange twenty years earlier; a record of wedding and funeral exchanges may record who was absent from whose family funeral; an elder's words carry force not because of formal power, but because he still carries operative weight in local memory. Interests are present, yet past relations, reputation, generational seniority, and local memory still alter how the dispute unfolds.
Local society likewise cannot be reduced to a table of resources. Land, housing, shops, school places, and job opportunities certainly matter, but relations among acquaintances, standing, reputation, dialect, past events, wedding and funeral etiquette, pathways of mutual assistance, and mechanisms of exclusion also arrange people's positions. When someone returns to their hometown for a wedding or funeral, the amount of gift money, seating precedence, who takes the initiative to greet them, who avoids seeing them, and even who brings up a debt from ten years ago may all redefine that person's position. If the class image occupies the center in advance, these details are easily demoted to the surface layer; often, it is precisely these details that determine whether a person can be accepted, can ask for help, and can preserve their dignity.
The same is true of nations, religion, rites, and customs. National discourse may be used by political forces, religion may serve the order of domination, and rites and customs may oppress people; none of this can be denied. But language, migration, memories of war, shared experiences of harm, sacrificial rites, funerals, forms of address, rituals, and taboos also actually alter people's identifications, fears, boundaries, and ways of forming alliances. Domination is present, but language, shared memory, rituals, and taboos also concretely alter identification, boundaries, and alliance formation.
Shared memory works in the same way. Why does a group remember a particular migration, a particular conflict, a particular language, a particular festival, a particular boundary? These memories may of course be related to resources and power, but once they enter concrete life, they are no longer mere decoration for resource relations; they materially alter people's closeness and distance, alter trust and fear, and alter who is seen as one of us and who is seen as an outsider.
The class plane formed by class theory appears to have explanatory power because interpretive procedures that adopt it can rapidly recast complex relations as a set of predetermined questions: on seeing a family, they ask how resources are reproduced; on seeing a locality, they ask how interests are distributed; on seeing religion, rites, and customs, they ask what kind of domination these serve; on seeing nations and culture, they ask what economic contradictions these conceal. These questions have value in themselves, yet the answers have often already been predetermined when the questions are asked. This flattening explanation does not necessarily delete these relations entirely, but it depresses their independent operative weight, stripping them of the standing to govern their own meaning.
Class theory rewrites relations and, in the process of interpretation, also compresses nodes into group labels. When interpreters who adopt class theory see scholars, clans, academies, chambers of commerce, and local organizations, they often ask first: Which class do they belong to? Which class interests do they represent? Are they remnants of an old class? These labels cannot replace inquiry into concrete relations. Scholars may hold cultural qualifications, clans may uphold an order based on seniority and male authority, chambers of commerce may serve local capital, academies may exclude certain people, and local organizations may also keep power in the hands of a few; these are the concrete issues that need examination.
If analysis stops at class labels, nodes are directly compressed into group labels. Network analysis asks not which label they fall under, but what differences they have taken up, what memories they have preserved, which relations they have connected, which channels they have opened or monopolized, whom they have oppressed, and what they have protected.
Characterizing a clan as a “landlord clan” or an “old force” does not explain what it has taken up and sustained. It may preserve genealogies and mediate disputes; it may also arrange sacrificial rites and distribute resources while preserving structures that exclude women or oppress younger generations. In certain periods, it may also take in orphans, the sick, migrants, and people who have lost access to state relief. The label “cultural institution of the scholarly stratum” likewise cannot substitute for analysis of an academy. It may restrict access to knowledge, but it may also preserve texts, train people in expression, sustain teacher–student lineages, and connect local standing with public discussion. Calling a chamber of commerce a “merchant-class organization” does not explain its concrete workings either. It may defend commercial interests, but it may also take up and sustain functions involving credit, mutual guarantees, dispute mediation, and local public affairs.
These nodes can of course oppress people, but their oppressive character is not the whole of their structure. The class plane makes oppression, whose interests are served, and group labels visible, yet struggles to show how nodes take up and sustain what passes through them, what functions those nodes perform, and how differences are preserved, filtered, interpreted, and passed on within nodes. By ignoring the concrete mechanisms of nodes, this perspective further occludes the concrete channels on which people depend when learning to read and write, expressing themselves, seeking redress, migrating, entering commerce, and participating in local affairs.
Class theory's flattening explanations also erase channels. Describing all channels for education, expression, law, and migration, and all entry points into commerce and politics, as “outer shells of class oppression” obscures their concrete nodes, entry points, rules, those who take up and sustain their functions, and blockages. Whether a person can learn to read and write, whether they can express themselves, whether they can seek redress, whether they can migrate, whether they can enter commercial networks, and whether they can participate in local affairs—all depend on passing through concrete channels. This plane can present oppression and the replacement of groups, but it cannot present channels and the migration of functions. Scholars, academies, clans, chambers of commerce, and local organizations may be oppressive; in different relational fields, they may also take up and sustain functions such as literacy, mediation, credit, public expression, local mutual aid, and privately sustained cultural and intellectual traditions. Judging modernization requires examining whether these functions have migrated successfully; the claim that “new classes replace old classes” cannot answer this question.
If the old academies are abolished, who takes up and sustains literacy, expression, teacher–student lineages, and local public discussion? If clans are broken apart, who takes up and sustains dispute mediation, assistance among kin, care for the elderly, and local memory? If chambers of commerce are eliminated, who takes up and sustains commercial credit, mutual guarantees, industry rules, and local public affairs? If local organizations are uniformly incorporated into a higher level, do channels for expressing local problems, negotiating, and self-correction still exist? These questions cannot be answered by replacing labels for groups of people. Replacing the labels does not necessarily mean that the functions have migrated. Dismantling one entry point does not mean that a new one has already formed; eliminating an old node does not mean that the differences it once took up already have new parties to take them up and sustain them. Class theory readily writes social change as the replacement of low-dimensional positions marked out by the class image, so that channels, the right to take up and sustain these functions, and the migration of functions cannot enter into the main judgment.
This makes it necessary to clarify the private sphere and intermediate nodes. The private sphere is the space in which a person, a family, and local society can live, accumulate, judge, pass things down, form associations, and speak without being wholly swallowed by the state, organizations, movements, or ideology. The private sphere is not necessarily warm, nor is it necessarily equal. Families and clans may produce oppression, academies may exclude people, and chambers of commerce may defend the interests of a few; teacher–student lineages may create barriers to entry, and local public expression may also be controlled by structures of prestige. Analyzing the private sphere and intermediate nodes does not mean glorifying them.
The problem is that society cannot consist solely of vertical relations between individuals and the highest organization. Intermediate nodes such as clans, academies, chambers of commerce, teacher–student lineages, and local public expression may oppress people, but they may also preserve the root system of society’s self-generation. These intermediate nodes may also preserve memory, train people in expression, or sustain credit arrangements; dispute mediation, the organization of mutual aid, and the maintenance of privately sustained cultural and intellectual traditions are sometimes also accomplished through them, forming social connections that do not depend entirely on the state and the market. Class theory readily treats all these nodes as outer shells of old classes. Doing so can sometimes reveal real oppression, but it also flattens society’s intermediate layer along with it. What is flattened is not only the old forces, but potentially also a society’s capacity for self-repair, self-expression, and sustaining its own relations and carrying them forward. The real questions are which functions must be retained, which forms of oppression must be dismantled, which channels need to migrate, and which intermediate nodes need to be transformed—rather than simply compressing all intermediate nodes into class labels.
The class plane is not clumsy. It appears clear because class theory has accomplished a strong compression. A complex society contains too many differences: income, occupation, family, region, language, education, legal status, the body, debt, trust, shame, memory, religion, local standing, and experiences of migration are interwoven. If each were unfolded, society would become a tangle of details difficult to judge. Every theory must compress; without compression, there is no understanding. The problem is not compression itself, but that class theory and the interpretive procedures that adopt it mistake the compressed result for society itself and use it to arrange subsequent material.
Class theory compresses complex society onto a single axis. Along this axis, the questions concern a fixed set of positions: who possesses and who labors, who receives the gains and who bears the costs, who holds a buffer of resources and who has no way out left. This line is powerful: interpretive procedures use it to organize material quickly and deliver clear judgments. Clarity itself brings pleasure. Many relations in reality are mixed: a family may both protect and oppress people; a tradition may both preserve memory and exclude others; the members and organizers of a local community may both provide mutual aid and punish those who do not fit in; a market opportunity may both release capacities and create new vulnerabilities.
Mixed states are difficult to handle. Class theory offers a quicker reading: interpreters who adopt it compress mixed relations into antagonism, multiple differences into a principal contradiction, and uncertain judgments into a definite stance. This is its attraction, but also its danger, because clarity may come from insight or from deletion. Class theory can extract the hard structures of labor, wealth, resources, and risk, and the resulting image presents some of the relations within them. When class theory then organizes all relations back onto the same axis, clarity comes to depend on deletion; what is suppressed is sometimes precisely the relations that make society what it is.
Criticizing the class plane must not lead to the opposite extreme of treating complexity as supreme and assuming that the more complex a theory is, the better. If a theory refuses compression and tries to retain everything, it will ultimately lose its capacity for judgment; society certainly contains countless differences, but not all differences are equally significant for every problem. A model that includes everything may seem comprehensive while actually making nothing clear. The error of the class plane does not lie in using compression or remaining simple, because every explanation must be simple enough to use. The real point of disagreement is that a limited model should know that it explains only part of reality, captures certain high-weight differences, and occludes others, and therefore needs to be tested against concrete problems and acknowledge its own boundaries.
The basic structure of class theory, however, directly organizes its own simplicity into a complete total image of society. As it captures certain high-weight differences, it immediately fixes them in the highest position forever, demanding that all reality must ultimately return to this scale and relegating other differences to appearances, outer shells, or disguises. This certainly allows it to incorporate more phenomena quickly into an established image, but in this self-enclosure it loses the capacity to be corrected by real consequences. It is precisely through this plane that class theory trains people to view society in a low-dimensional way, so that explanation is no longer merely a tool for looking at society, but instead permits society to appear only in the form prescribed by the class image.
The class plane is not formed by a single act of naming. Interpreters first extract differences such as labor, income, property, debt, housing, risk, exit costs, and domination from existing relations; extraction itself is not fabrication, because these differences are already at work in concrete consequences. Next, interpretive procedures assign a higher explanatory standing to one set of these differences, making them the clues sought first when reading the material. This step may still yield valid judgments, because certain relational fields do indeed make these differences especially weighty.
The key lies in connection. The extracted differences originally operate through different relational chains: income connects to housing, care, and waiting; property connects to ways out, qualifications, and the bearing of risk; labor relations connect to time arrangements, possibilities of exit, and domination. Class theory gives priority to connecting these different chains into a single main line. Connection makes scattered material readable, while also changing the relative positions of the materials; relations that could originally alter a judgment on their own are now required to explain first how they relate back to this main line.
Compression follows. Compression does not delete the material entirely, but reduces multiple relations capable of changing the conclusion to an image with fewer dimensions. Family, locality, shared memory, qualifications, the body, and channels still appear, but they are positioned in advance as background, transmission mechanisms, or subordinate outcomes. Projection makes positions at different nodes and in different relational fields appear comparable along the same axis; naming then calls this set of results, which has undergone extraction, weight assignment, connection, compression, and projection, “class.” The name is thus easily mistaken for an entity that has long existed beneath the surface of society.
This formation chain must always return to the actors. It is not the class plane that extracts materials on its own, nor the class image that subsumes other explanations on its own; it is class theory, the interpreters who adopt it, organizations, and institutional procedures that select materials, arrange weights, establish connections, and use names. These actions may be dispersed across textbooks, slogans, research, organizational language, and institutional classifications, yet they point toward the same result: granting an already compressed line of explanation the standing to adjudicate other differences in advance.
The formation process changes the point of entry into the problem. If an explanation first treats the class image as a total image, materials will be selected from the outset according to whether they can substantiate the predetermined main axis: wages, possession, labor, and risk are readily recognized as fundamental materials; kinship responsibilities, local recognition, memory, qualifications, care, and intermediate organizations are often retained only when they can supplement the main line. The selection and rejection of materials affect not only the length of an article but also causal judgments. Relational chains that needed further questioning are shortened, nodes that might have brought about a turning point are treated as surface phenomena, and channels that had to be checked are rewritten as incidental results of predetermined positions.
Flattening also changes the objects of subsequent action. If a node is first compressed into a group label, dealing with it can easily become nothing more than replacing, abolishing, or classifying it, without further asking what it has borne, what it has blocked, what it has preserved, or whom it has harmed. If a channel is first deemed the outer shell of an old image, then who will take up and sustain literacy, expression, mutual aid, credit, mediation, and local public discussion after that channel is dismantled ceases to be a question that must be answered. The point here is not to defend old nodes, but to refuse to let labels bypass the examination of functions, relations, and consequences.
Likewise, the private sphere is not a pure zone detached from social relations. Families, teacher–student lineages, local life, and intermediate organizations may all preserve oppression, exclusion, and inequality; they may also give people ties, memories, and room for judgment that are not wholly dictated by the highest organization or the market. When class theory assigns these spaces in advance to a single main axis, it may grasp the real resources and domination within them, but it may also fail to see how they take on responsibilities, sustain expression, or provide paths toward repair. Judgment should retain this two-sidedness rather than naturalize the private sphere or uniformly treat it as a disguise.
The class plane is readily treated as social structure partly because class theory grasps real pressures, and partly because the compressed image is easy to name, disseminate, and institutionalize. Once a name stabilizes, interpreters can easily treat it as the source of the materials, forgetting that it was originally the result of organizing some of those materials. Thus, “class” is misrepresented as a subject that determines relations, action, and history on its own, rather than as a compressed explanatory image. Reconstructing the formation chain means dismantling this inversion: concrete differences and their relational consequences come first; only afterward do interpreters perform the analytical operations of extraction, weight assignment, connection, compression, projection, and naming on material from reality. The final name must not be projected backward as what society fundamentally is prior to these operations.
Class theory therefore cannot be treated as an ordinary limited explanation, with the problem attributed to occasional extensions of its use later on. A limited explanation acknowledges the range of materials it draws on and allows materials it has not addressed to force adjustments in judgment through concrete consequences. By contrast, the total-image structure inherent in class theory organizes locally extracted differences into a predetermined scale of adjudication: other materials are recognized as having explanatory value only when translated back onto this scale. Both may use compression. The difference lies not in whether compression occurs, but in whether compression still accepts correction by boundaries, consequences, and relations that have not been subsumed.
Dismantling does not mean refusing to judge, nor does it mean laying out every difference as equally important. This chapter does not deny that class theory captures real differences; questions of wages, employment, debt, rent, educational opportunities, medical risks, domination over labor, and exit costs cannot be addressed without this set of differences. Interpreters who adopt class theory can indeed extract a set of real differentiating units. That local explanatory capacity comes precisely from concrete differentiating units such as labor, wages, employment, property, debt, resource buffers, risk-bearing, and relations of domination, and from the processes of extraction, weight assignment, connection, and compression applied to them. But showing that class theory captures a set of real differentiating units does not mean treating the class image as what society fundamentally is, much less allowing the class image to monopolize society.
Dismantling the class image requires returning the already named image to its formation process, reducing it back to concrete differentiating units, and asking anew within which relations and concrete relational fields a given difference gains weight, if it does, how it connects, what consequences it produces, through which channels it enters into consequences, and which materials have been downweighted yet are sufficient to change the judgment. Interpreters must not let this image predetermine the meaning of all relations, nor demand that all other differences become subordinate to the class image. The problem with class theory is not that it sees wages, labor, employment, property, debt, risk, and relations of domination, but that its structure of total-image subsumption does not allow society to extend beyond the class plane.
Nor does this book replace the class axis with another main axis; replacing class with the state, the market, culture, the nation, the family, or institutions merely substitutes one plane for another. What needs to change is the way questions are asked: in a concrete problem, which limited explanations can explain the current consequences? What real differences has class theory extracted? In forming the class image, what has the interpretive procedure that adopts it downweighted, and what standing to explain has it revoked?
It is the class image that needs to be dismantled, not remade into an ordinary limited explanation open to calibration. Only then can the extracted real differentiating units—labor, wages, property, debt, housing, risk, and so on—together with their relational consequences reenter concrete explanations that have boundaries and are open to calibration. Only by dismantling the class image back into concrete differences and concrete relations can downweighted materials reenter judgment. Only when interpreters no longer treat the class plane as society itself can concrete explanations accept calibration by consequences, counterexamples, and changes in relations.
The formation of the class plane involves an inversion of explanatory order: are differences first repeatedly extracted from events, or does the image first prescribe which differences should be seen in those events? Wages, debt, property, or housing may gain weight together in different events. This recurrence can support local comparisons between concrete situations, but it cannot, in reverse, prove that a class plane exists prior to events. The class plane's structure of subsumption is not an occasional overstepping of bounds in history. The criterion for identifying this structure, and the meaning of its closure, lie in the following: the interpretive procedure uses the image to predetermine the positions of other differences and allows counterexamples to be rewritten only as supporting evidence subordinate to that image.
Turning differences into an image also changes their temporal order. Family care, local interactions, medical histories, and educational qualifications sometimes operate before economic pressures arise, and sometimes are pushed to the fore only after unpaid wages, unemployment, or debt. If the class image organizes every temporal sequence into the same kind of reproduction or relation of interests, it will overlook when differences emerge, who preserves them, and which node brings them into consequences. Once time is flattened, the theory appears more orderly but actually loses its power to explain changes in events.
The key to dismantling the class image is to place compressed concrete differences back into relational fields, nodes, and relational chains, thereby preserving the capacity for local comparison. People can compare differences in wage payment deadlines, evidence, housing pressures, and the capacity to wait between two cases of unpaid wages; they can compare why two families with the same income obtain different school admission outcomes; they can also compare the consequences of the same policy in different places. These comparisons focus on the unfolding of concrete relations. They are by no means a return of the class plane, much less an indication that class theory, with its structure of subsumption, can be patched into a suitable limited model.
When new materials enter judgment, whether the plane can give way is an important clue for identifying Model C. If new materials show that what families take up and sustain, national memory, or legal qualifications have changed the original causal path, limited analysis should supplement or narrow its conclusions; if users can only say that these materials are actually still expressions of class position, and use this claim to refuse revision, the image has already digested the counterexamples. The problem with the plane is not that it is drawn simply, but whether it still allows reality to change the image anew.