Chapter 01 Why Class Theory Has Power: How a High-Compression Model Captures Real Social Pressures
I. Why a False Theory Can Still Capture Suffering
A theory that relies on fabrication alone can hardly gain a firm foothold in people’s daily lives. Unpaid wages, looming rent, borrowing after illness, unemployment, and workplace injuries are not created by theory; they first fall upon people’s bodies, time, and living arrangements. This is precisely why a false theory can still have power: it touches something in reality that carries immense weight. Touching reality is not enough to prove that the entire explanation holds.
Class theory has precisely this appeal. It brings wages, working hours, employment, property, debt, housing, protections, risk, and relations of domination to the fore, revealing pressures that are not purely personal within predicaments previously dismissed as “poor planning,” “not trying hard enough,” or “bad luck.” Some people cannot wait for their wages, and not just because they are impatient; some dare not quit their jobs, and not just because they lack courage; some must keep working after illness, and not just because they are unwilling to rest and recover.
These pressures must be acknowledged; a social entity called “class,” however, cannot be acknowledged on that basis. What actually enters into consequences are concrete differences and how they operate within relations: when wages are paid, whether a contract is recognized, who can schedule shifts, when debts fall due, and who can obtain medical records, evidence, or care. The so-called class image is an explanatory image that class theory produces through the low-dimensional compression, projection, and naming of one set of these differences. It is not society itself.
This chapter addresses only why this image is appealing. Many accounts prefer to push predicaments back onto the individual: unpaid wages mean a lack of savings, unemployment means insufficient diligence, borrowing after illness means a lack of planning, workplace injuries mean carelessness, and being unable to pick up a child means poor family arrangements. Such judgments sometimes touch on part of the situation, yet they often gloss over how labor, time, evidence, protections, and buffers produce consequences.
When rent has not been paid on time, asking only whether spending has been restrained sidesteps who delayed the wages, whether documentation can establish the unpaid wages and the employment relationship, how long asserting one’s rights will take, and whether the next job can follow without a gap. A mother’s inability to pick up her child cannot be reduced to whether she fulfills her responsibilities either; who schedules the late shift, whether taking leave means losing pay, and whether refusing a shift will cost her next month’s shifts also determine whether she can be there. Debt after illness must be traced to interrupted income, medical expenses that must be paid up front, and gaps in protections; the inquiry cannot stop at accusatory questions about whether precautions were taken in advance.
The explanatory appeal of class theory comes from its ability to consistently bring a set of weighty differences to the fore. It enables people to see that many things attributed to character and choice are in fact already constrained by relations of employment, resources, time, and risk. Bringing one set of differences to the fore does not mean that one has already seen society itself. Any set of differences brought to the fore must still confront the other materials, relations, and responsibilities at work in an event. Grasping one hard line does not entitle class theory to assign all remaining differences in advance to the role of subordinate explanations. The weight it grasps is real; organizing that weight into the sole image of society is another matter.
Class theory cannot be placed alongside ordinary limited explanations, nor can it be described as an ordinary model that only later overstepped its bounds. Its ability to capture suffering is precisely what makes it easier for its basic structure—organizing the selected differences into a total class image—to operate.
II. Two Kinds of Deadlines and the Width of Available Exits: The Mechanisms of Unpaid Wages and Unemployment
In cases of delayed wage payments, we must first examine how two kinds of deadlines collide. The employer can postpone payment, but the worker’s rent, food costs, children’s expenses, medication costs, and loan-related dates keep advancing on their own schedules. When wages arrive a day late, life does not pause for a day; the cost of waiting falls first on those who need the money.
There is also an asymmetry in the ability to wait. The party able to withhold wages may treat delayed payment as a way to manage cash flow, negotiate, or arrange costs; the party waiting for wages, however, may have no alternative income and cannot persuade the landlord, creditors, school, and hospital all to wait. One party can push the deadline back; the other must respond immediately. The actions available to the two parties already differ.
Unpaid wages are not just a matter of a verbal promise, either. Whether materials can establish the fact of unpaid wages and the employment relationship affects whether the case can enter subsequent procedures. Suffering and discontent may be real, yet they may not immediately translate into materials recognized by those procedures. The time spent defending one’s rights then feeds back into daily life: pursuing procedures requires taking leave, and while waiting for an outcome, one still has to pay rent, repay debts, and look for work. If a conflict arises with the original employer, whether one can move into the next job also becomes a problem. Unpaid wages do more than leave a sum of income unreceived. Evidence, time, housing, debt, and employment opportunities are joined into a relational chain, and the transmission of consequences continues along it.
Unpaid wages also change how people draw on relationships with relatives, colleagues, and local contacts. Some can turn to family for money to tide them over; others have no one to borrow from. Some can withstand the interval spent looking for their next job; others lose both income and existing support the moment they leave. These differences do not cancel the pressure of the employment relationship, but they determine how that pressure is borne, deferred, or passed on.
Failure to resist immediately cannot be taken as proof that one’s existing position reflects one’s character. The conditions for action are jointly constituted by payment deadlines, whether materials hold up as evidence, whether the chain of daily life permits waiting, and whether future employment can follow without a gap. By drawing out employment, income buffers, asymmetries of time, and the bearing of risk, class theory does prevent “not daring to make a fuss” from being reduced to weakness of character. This is the basis of its appeal. Yet those owed wages still differ in their physical condition, responsibilities to relatives, local relationships, existing debts, and available work. Class theory cannot, merely because it has drawn out the preceding factors, rule in advance that the remaining differences deserve to be no more than footnotes to the same image.
In unemployment, this mechanism manifests itself in differences in the width of available exits. Unemployment cannot be reduced to a single point in time. Questions of rent, deposits, social insurance, debt, family responsibilities, and the next job all open up at once. Once income stops, matters that could previously be handled separately begin to crowd together: whether one can keep one’s housing, how to cover children’s expenses, when creditors will demand repayment, and whether institutional eligibility will become precarious because employment has been interrupted.
A person with a resource buffer is not free of pressure, but he still has time to wait, screen, and compare. He can send out a few more résumés, reject work he knows will harm his health or cannot sustain his livelihood, and give himself some time to recover before making the next choice. This time is not abstract freedom; it is sustained jointly by savings, housing, support from relatives, protections that can continue, and existing work experience.
Nor do people without a buffer lack the ability to choose. The problem is that their choices take place within a narrower span of time. When rent, repayments, and daily expenses press in, accepting or rejecting unsuitable work, accepting or rejecting worse conditions, often does not present two equally bearable options. Some can wait a few months; others can wait only a few days. Both are choosing, but they are not choosing under the same conditions for waiting.
The ability to refuse poor-quality work therefore cannot be understood solely in terms of personality or discernment. It also depends on how many rounds of failure one can withstand after losing income, whether one can avoid moving for the time being, and whether one can keep care, debt, and social insurance from breaking down all at once. A failed interview may merely delay plans for someone with a buffer, but for someone without one, it may immediately change housing, borrowing, and family arrangements.
Age, industry, city, health, institutional status, and family responsibilities also change the consequences of unemployment. Age affects the work available; industry affects the speed of transition; health limits what work one can take; and family responsibilities determine whether one can relocate or wait a long time. These differences need not be central every time, yet they can lead the same period of unemployment toward different outcomes. By drawing out resource buffers, the ability to wait, the width of available exits, and the bearing of risk, class theory can strip the claim that “the unemployed do not try hard enough” of its function of occlusion. It cannot, on that basis, presuppose a class entity, still less compress the time, bodies, families, and institutional relationships of all unemployed people into a single fate.
III. Branching Relational Chains: Family Responses, Bodily Reality, and Procedural Determination
Whether people can wait and choose under a deadline is one question; how working-time arrangements change care is another. Decisions about shift scheduling often take place outside the family. Workplace managers arrange early and late shifts, overtime, and days off; workers receive a timetable that has already been set. Yet the times when someone needs to pick up children after school or take on care within the family do not automatically fit that timetable.
A shift schedule enters the family along a temporal chain: late shifts cause drop-off and pick-up arrangements to fall through, last-minute overtime breaks prior commitments to provide care, and taking leave reduces income or affects the following month’s shifts. Working hours are not clock times confined to the workplace; they change who cooks, who stays with a sick person, who explains things to the school, and who bears the burden of children waiting and older people complaining. Refusing a shift assignment is not simply a matter of declaring what one wants, either. Taking leave may mean a pay deduction, refusing assigned shifts may affect the following month’s schedule, and changing jobs may bring an interruption in income and the risks of looking for work again. Workers know the arrangements are unreasonable, yet income and job opportunities have already raised the cost of refusal.
The consequences for care also accumulate. Failing to pick up a child once may be only a temporary difficulty; repeatedly coming home late and repeatedly asking others to pick up the child, however, change judgments among relatives about who owes whom, who is reliable, and who must give way. The pressure created by a shift schedule is therefore not just a sum of lost income; it also enters family memory and arrangements for responsibility.
The family’s immediate response to this pressure first changes the care and housework arrangements at hand. Arguments, compromises, requests for help from relatives, reallocations of housework, or decisions about who must give up one of their jobs—if the outcomes of these responses are preserved in family memory and arrangements for responsibility as differences that can be retrieved again later, write-back has already taken shape.
Only when these contents are identified again, retrieved, interpreted, or subjected to weight assignment in subsequent handling will they again change whether leave can be taken next time, whether anyone is willing to help, and how much more uncertainty the family can bear. Responses outside the workplace may thus, in turn, constrain or support choices at work.
Class theory can see here how the power to schedule shifts reaches into the family, and this is no small matter. But the family is not a passive container. Whether relatives can handle drop-offs and pick-ups at short notice, who thinks care should be whose responsibility, who has helped whom in the past, and how the family remembers one absence after another will make the same shift schedule produce different results in different families. These relations do not arise unidirectionally from labor relations, nor can they be written as appendages of labor reproduction.
Work arrangements affect family care, but illness is first of all a bodily event. Pain, treatment, recuperation, and limitations on activity do not lose their own reality because of income or job titles. How much recovery time a patient needs, whether they can continue their previous work, and whether they need care from others are all direct questions arising from the condition of the body. The same illness does not produce the same social consequences for everyone. People with savings, more stable jobs, protection, or access to care support may still be able to sustain treatment and recuperation for a time; for people with few resources, unstable work, and heavy family responsibilities, other links in life begin to loosen more quickly as soon as something goes wrong with the body. Illness is not produced by class. Yet once it enters existing relations, the ways it is borne diverge.
Once bodily impairment meets daily pay, pay deductions for leave, or unstable work, an interruption in income immediately enters the picture. Hospital bills arrive first, while wages may fall; people who need to recuperate must also face pressures concerning absence, performance, their position, and returning to work. The body needs time, but income arrangements are often unwilling to wait. Once medical expenses, interrupted income, and loan deadlines are linked, the transmission of pressure continues along debt and kinship relations. Repayment dates will not give way to treatment, so whether one can quit a job or recover fully from an illness may be constrained anew by a sum of money falling due.
Protection, savings, and support from relatives form different buffers. Having protection does not mean that all expenses and pressures from missed work are covered; having savings does not mean that the pressures of care and missed work disappear; having relatives willing to lend money may also bring future responsibilities and changes in relations. These buffers cannot be summed up by saying that someone has “somewhat better conditions”; rather, different relations absorb or amplify consequences at different times. Debt following illness also makes treatment choices and arrangements for daily life constrain one another. Some people can recuperate first and then decide whether to return to work; others must secure their income before they can even discuss treatment. Some can distribute part of the costs across relatives and the relations that provide protection; others can only keep all the pressure on themselves. The difference lies not only in having more or less money, but also in what kinds of support can be sustained as deadlines approach.
Debt after illness cannot be summed up along a single economic line, also because the same pressure changes shape across different relations. Savings may initially absorb medication costs, which later turn into loans from relatives; missed work may first reduce income and then bring care and repayment arrangements into conflict; whether an employment relationship can be maintained also affects the possibilities for protection, returning to work, and seeking further help. The type of illness, age, degree of recovery, medical system, marital relationship, urban eligibility, and care arrangements can also lead the same interruption of income to different outcomes. These factors do not serve to deny the weight of resources and protection, but to prevent any single line of compression from being treated as a complete explanation of illness, the body, and family relations.
Class theory extracts gaps in protection, resource buffers, interruptions of income, and the bearing of risk, and can thus point out that the consequences of illness do not fall evenly. But illness, the body, the family, and medical relations cannot be reduced to expressions of a class image. Each enters into the consequences through treatment, borrowing, care, institutional recognition, and recovery time, and may change where the burden of the same debt ultimately falls. Class theory can point out the uneven distribution of resources and risks within these consequences, but it cannot indiscriminately conscript the onset of illness, bodily recovery, what families bear, and medical procedures as evidence of one and the same underlying class reality. Only by placing each back within actual relations can we see where pressure can be absorbed and where it is pushing people into debt.
Illness shows that bodily processes are not the same as economic arrangements, while work injuries further demonstrate that the fact of bodily harm does not automatically amount to procedural recognition or the actual bearing of responsibility. Work injuries likewise bring bodily harm and organizational responsibility directly before us. The consequences of a work injury do not stop at the moment of the accident. If it is described merely as an operating error, insufficient attention, or bad luck, attention becomes fixed on the instant of injury, while the labor arrangements before and after the accident are obscured. Whether a contract exists, whether the worker has received training, whether working hours are excessive, whether machinery has protective safeguards, and who is responsible for keeping records at the site are all conditions shaping how the injury is understood.
After an injury, medical records, proof of the employment relationship, site records, and coworkers’ testimony determine whether bodily harm can be recognized through formal procedures. Evidence does not automatically stand on the injured person’s side. Who controls the records, who is willing to testify, and whether the materials can be obtained can mean that the same pain sometimes enters the recognition process and sometimes remains only a private statement. Whether responsibility can be confirmed still depends on recognition, assessment, compensation, and waiting. Who advances the medical expenses, who bears the burden of daily life while work is suspended, who can still afford to wait when assessment is delayed, and whether the employer acknowledges the fact of employment all affect the transmission of the accident along different relational chains. The consequences of a work injury are not an allocation of responsibility on a sheet of paper, but how the body, income, materials, and time support one another or push one another away.
Class theory extracts the organization of labor, the allocation of responsibility, and the shifting of risk from this, and can thus oppose attributing work injuries entirely to individual carelessness. This extraction draws on real-world material: some people do indeed find it harder to preserve evidence and harder to bear the wait, and are more likely to lose their income after work stops. But bodily harm does not disappear within the recognition procedure. Family care, loans from relatives, relations with coworkers, local help-seeking, and the legal system all enter into the consequences of treatment, compensation, and returning to work. They do not serve to dilute the weight of the organization of labor, but to reveal why responsibility may still be borne by different people in similar accidents.
IV. How Dispersed Suffering Acquires a Common Language: Connection and Its Limits
No theory can do without compression, because the people, materials, time, and relations implicated in unpaid wages, scheduling, debt after illness, unemployment, and work injuries are too complex. Without extraction and connection, people can hardly see clearly which pressures repeatedly alter the consequences; compression serves precisely to place scattered experiences within comparable contours, so that people need not treat every event anew as an isolated accident. But these five domains enter life at different nodes, and the mechanisms each brings into play also differ: unpaid wages involve payment and deadlines; scheduling involves working time and care; debt after illness involves the body and borrowing; unemployment involves waiting and fallback options; and work injuries involve evidence and responsibility. Since they enter at different nodes, their concrete consequences in life will not be entirely the same. Thus, although theoretical compression is necessary, it cannot flatten out the actual paths through these different nodes.
Class theory and the interpretive procedures that adopt it extract resource possession, the sale of labor, control over time, the bearing of risk, buffering capacity, and differences in fallback options from these events. Class theory connects the power over payment, the power over scheduling, income buffers, debt pressure, the determination of responsibility, and differences in fallback options into a single line, revealing asymmetries within relations and pointing out that some suffering is not a private failure. This connection enables people who had previously borne their burdens separately to see similar pressures and recognize how others’ difficulties and their own can illuminate one another.
On this basis, class theory gathers the extracted differences under names through which people can identify one another, allowing wages, working hours, risks, property, and fallback options to be seen as evidence of the same social position. This public naming can swiftly counter accounts that make the consequences entirely private, and thereby provide a ready-made language for organization, mobilization, and public judgment. Without having to fabricate unpaid wages, illness, unemployment, or work injuries, class theory can use a single explanatory line to organize dispersed suffering into what appears to be a common situation. This is precisely the source of its powerful appeal.
Yet what is connected consists of similar differences that may carry high weight, not an already existing class subject acting as a unified whole. Society is not first neatly divided into a few classes for people then to enter with their respective lives. People live within intersecting relations of body, occupation, income, debt, household registration, accent, kinship, locality, medical history, housing, institutional eligibility, and care responsibilities. When a child enrolls in school, household registration, social insurance, rental registration, school documents, and whether the parents can take leave may carry great weight; when borrowing money, creditworthiness, kinship relations, past dealings, and local reputation may carry great weight; in debt after illness, interrupted income, medical expenses, recovery time, and loan deadlines may all close in at once. Wages, employment, resource buffers, and the bearing of risk do indeed carry great weight in many relational fields, but this does not give them a fixed priority over all relations.
Repeated connection of differences still does not form an entity. The fact that certain differences often appear together can only show that they jointly alter consequences in some relational fields; it cannot support the reverse inference that a preexisting class entity is arranging them.
A class image can indeed present some circumstances in compressed form, but it cannot replace the differentiation position of concrete people within relations. Even people with the same income may face different consequences in their lives because of differences in medical history, household registration, care responsibilities, residential address, support from relatives, and institutional recognition; the rough position marked by the image cannot replace the actual position jointly formed by these differences within concrete relations. When the same set of economic pressures recurs, class theory appears especially solid, but however solid the image may be, it does not exist prior to relations. Even when wages, housing, debt, and domination jointly grow heavier across several events, they still bear on concrete people through contracts, residential addresses, qualifications, care, records, and time arrangements; to take recurring outcomes alone and turn them into proof that an entity exists is precisely to retreat from relations to a total image.
The product must be distinguished from the subject performing the operations: the class image is merely the result of this compression, projection, and naming, and cannot be written as an actor that actively connects events. It is class theory, interpreters, organizations, or institutionalized procedures that carry out extraction, weight assignment, organization, naming, and the arrangement of interpretive positions. For the same person, labor relations may come to the fore when wages go unpaid; residential address, documents, and qualifications may have a more direct bearing when their child's school enrollment is blocked; and when they cannot recuperate after illness, they encounter different barriers involving medical treatment, care, and debt. If all these problems are adjudicated in advance under the same name, the relations that should have been identified anew are left merely to supply further evidence for that name.
When class theory extracts shared pressures, it causes these different circumstances to be translated first into the same kind of position. Translation is not without use; it can make visible some of the weight that was previously concealed. But class theory establishes a shared language as the only exit, allowing mechanisms of divergence to appear only as examples of an already established image. Once translation becomes the only entrance, residential address, medical history, care, local recognition, and institutional eligibility—which could otherwise change the judgment—are forced first to prove that they still ultimately serve the same image. This is precisely the threshold at which the capacity for connection turns into total-image subsumption. Two things must be separated here: concrete differences do indeed grow heavier within relational fields; compressing them into a single entity posited as what society fundamentally is, however, strips each of its eligibility to reenter explanation. The former must be preserved; the latter must be taken apart.
V. The Structure of Total-Image Subsumption and Limited Economic Differentiation Analysis
The danger of compression does not lie only in someone occasionally misusing an originally neutral tool. The structure of total-image subsumption inherent in class theory does not emerge only later or after excessive use; its basic structure is to organize high-weight differences extracted within a limited scope into a total image of class and allow other differences to be understood only in ways this image permits. This structure makes compression cease to be merely a temporary task of explanation and begin to prearrange for society what is fundamental, what is superficial, and what can serve only as subordinate material. Concrete actors who adopt this structure will make family, locality, nation, body, memory, medical history, and community relations appear only as the image permits.
When some differences are extracted, others are simultaneously downplayed. How family care is distributed, how local relations provide or deny support, how national memory and language figure in recognition, how bodily recovery limits action, and how institutions handle medical histories and records may not all retain their original explanatory standing within class compression. They do not cease to have consequences simply because an image has not placed them at its center.
In concrete relational fields, some differentiating units do indeed carry great weight. When wages go unpaid, employment relations and payment deadlines immediately change life; when a workplace injury occurs, whether the facts of the work can be established directly affects compensation; when unemployment strikes, resource buffers and waiting time narrow or expand choices. These judgments concern consequences within events; they do not proclaim an eternal center of society. High weight does not imply any inherent hierarchy. The fact that income carries great weight in one event does not mean it determines outcomes before anything else in every relation; the same income can also connect to different consequences depending on differences in address, medical history, family support, household registration, and institutional eligibility. Weight within a concrete relational field cannot be directly rewritten as the sole main axis of all social relations.
Here lies the crucial transformation in class theory: it organizes differences in labor, wages, property, debt, risk, and domination that repeatedly gain weight in certain relational fields into a total image of class; it then uses this image to determine in advance where other differences should ultimately be placed. Family can be described as reproduction, locality as surface relations, nation as occlusion, and body and memory as derivative material. The material need not be denied; it may still be stripped of its standing to change judgments independently.
Rejecting a sole main axis does not mean flattening all differences into equal importance. Different events still require judgments about which materials, relations, and responsibilities are entering into consequences. What must be rejected is the use of a total image to decide the outcome for all differences before an event even begins; this turns high weight from a judgment open to examination into a naming of society that cannot be revised.
Acknowledging that class theory can draw out real pressures is the starting point for dismantling it. If wages, labor, debt, housing, risk, differences in timing, and relations of domination are described as inconsequential, the critique will be even further removed from people's daily lives than class theory is. These differences narrow people's ways out and change who can wait and who must bear the consequences immediately; they cannot be brushed aside. Their weight must be preserved; it is another matter to project them as class entities, natural communities, or what society fundamentally is. The various mechanisms are connected to one another, yet each still has its own relational chains through which it produces consequences.
Dismantling the total class image must not throw people back into individual blame, nor break pressures into unrelated fragments. It requires placing the labor, wages, employment, property, debt, housing, risk, domination, and ways out drawn out by class theory, together with the materials, responsibilities, and relations it has downplayed, back within concrete consequences. Doing so does not eliminate judgment; instead, it makes judgment open to scrutiny: who arranges time, and where; which record can be recognized; what deadline is approaching; which relational chain transfers consequences to whom; which differences are becoming weightier at this moment. A class image can depict part of a situation; interpreters who adopt class theory must not let this image speak for society itself, still less use it to monopolize the interpretation of suffering.
Limited explanation also compresses, but it must still account for what it has drawn out, which materials it has not yet addressed, and what consequences might force a revision of its judgments. Class theory does not earn exemption from this responsibility merely by grasping real differences. Limited economic differentiation analysis must be kept separate from class theory. When researchers trace a case of unpaid wages, a debt relationship, ways out in housing, property use, labor arrangements, the shifting of risk, or concrete domination, and restrict their conclusions to what the available materials can support, this kind of analysis can be revised in light of family caregiving, ethnic relations, local recognition, legal qualifications, and other materials. It addresses how specific differences enter into consequences; it does not automatically become class theory merely because it studies economic questions.
Whether an analysis enters the class theory criticized in this book cannot be determined by researchers' self-designation, nor simply by the breadth or narrowness of their research. The key lies in the explanatory structure: once an analysis first forms a class image and then uses a total class image to prearrange the explanatory positions of other differences, fix the meanings they are supposed to have, or digest counterexamples anew as evidence of class occlusion, false consciousness, and deeper class relations, it enters Model C: total-image subsumption. Narrowing the scope will not turn this kind of class theory into Model A, Model B, or an ordinary limited tool; what can be retained is limited analysis of concrete relations involving wages, debt, labor, property, housing, risk, and domination.