Preface: Why Step Out of the Class Image
Am I writing this book because I cannot see labor, poverty, debt, unemployment, wages, housing, medical care, workplace injuries, and risk? Quite the opposite. All these things are real. They can crush a person’s daily life, force a family into a position where it has no choice, and drive people to the point where no exit remains. Precisely because they weigh this heavily, I cannot accept gathering everything into a total image called “class.”
In the intellectual context of mainland China, class theory is the root of communism. It certainly includes political propositions and carries a critique of society; at a deeper level, it puts a pair of glasses on people through which to see the world: first it compresses a complex society into a class image, then declares that image to be society as it really is; first it nails people into class positions, then explains family, locality, nation, clan, faith, rites and customs, the private sphere, community, and private life—all of them—as outer shells, appearances, or appendages of class relations.
I oppose communism, and what I oppose first and foremost is this way of seeing the world.
This opposition must be brought to bear at different levels. The name “communism,” the theoretical structure that arranges reality through a total class image, historical traditions from different periods, actual organizations and institutions, and the actions of specific people must not be conflated into a single, undifferentiated subject. A name can suggest where to begin verification, but it cannot replace identifying structures, materials, authority, and consequences; nor can differences within historical traditions absolve an interpretive structure that employs class entities, class enemies and friends, and historical mission of responsibility.
The core structure this book opposes is an interpretive structure that uses class entities and a total class image to arrange in advance the positions of family, nation, locality, faith, the private sphere, and other differences, and organizes reality through divisions between enemies and friends and through historical mission. Judging whether a particular text, organization, institution, or person’s actions enter into this structure requires corresponding evidence. Distinguishing these levels does not soften the stance of opposition; it simply refuses to let names replace proof and refuses to treat abstract labels as things that act on their own.
I do not deny inequality in reality, nor do I defend the rich, power, capital, exploitation, debt, or the shifting of risk onto others. Some people have not received the wages they are owed; some families are dragged into debt by a single illness; some workers suffer workplace injuries but cannot produce evidence to establish responsibility; some young people are so bound by rent and the risk of unemployment that they dare not quit their jobs—none of this is empty talk. Labor, wages, employment, property, debt, housing, risk, relations of domination, and the width of available exits tangibly change a person’s living circumstances, action space, the risks they bear, and the exits they can choose. A social theory that cannot see these things is far too lightweight.
Seeing these real differences, however, does not mean having to acknowledge “class” as what society fundamentally is. What actually enters into social consequences are concrete differentiating units and the processes through which they operate in nodes, relational chains, weights, and write-back. What is called a class image is an explanatory image formed when a set of high-weight differentiating units undergoes low-dimensional compression, projection, and naming. Partial explanatory power comes from these real differentiating units and the processes of extraction, weight assignment, connection, and compression applied to them. The class image is only a low-dimensional output; interpreters must not pass it off as reality itself, still less use it to demand that the whole of society operate according to its logic.
The most dangerous thing about class theory has never been that it is wholly false. A theory that cannot stand up at all can be dismissed at a glance. The problem is that it grasps some of the real weights bearing down on people, then compresses all these weights into the same total image. First it makes you think you have seen all of reality; gradually it makes you forget that what you have seen is actually only part of it. In the end, it is not content to explain wages, labor, debt, risk, and relations of domination; it wants to explain everything: family becomes class reproduction, nation becomes the occlusion of class contradictions, clan becomes a remnant of old classes, the private sphere becomes backward relations, culture becomes an instrument of rule, and local community becomes false consciousness. Even people’s familial affection, memory, shame, loyalty, trust, and sense of belonging must be translated into a position within the class image.
Society has never been a sheet of class paper laid flat. A person’s position in labor can cut out only part of their social reality; it cannot define their entire situation. The family has never been merely a unit of resource transmission: it preserves familial affection, obligations, memory, care, and long-term trajectories of life. Local society carries complex connections of familiarity, trust, reputation, and local relations; it cannot be reduced to a mechanism for distributing benefits. Still less is a nation a container for economic contradictions: it holds accumulated layers of language, rites and customs, shared experiences, and a sense of boundaries. As for community, it is certainly not an outer shell temporarily slipped on only for class mobilization. People live within layer upon layer of relations. Kin, language, the body, official documents and credentials, debt, occupation, illness, local memory, accent, credit, ceremonial cash gifts, household registration, school, religion, historical scars, institutional status, caregiving responsibilities, and private space grow heavier or lighter in different relational fields. They change a person’s position, qualifications, risks, evaluations, responsibilities, choices, and consequences; they are not decorative trim around the edges of the class image. I call these units of difference differentiating units.
What Social Differentiation Network Theory sets out to do is to unpack the reality swallowed up by grand concepts. Faced with grand terms such as “class,” “state,” “market,” “nation,” “culture,” and “family,” it does not rush to treat them as already constituted entities. Instead, it keeps asking: in concrete relational fields, exactly which differences are extracted, who or what mechanism assigns their weight, and how do these differences pass through institutions, nodes, and relational chains to connect with resources, risks, and responsibilities? Some differences are amplified in this process, while others are downplayed; some are seized by explanatory images and pulled into the foreground, while others undergo occlusion or are left behind in the dark.
Social Differentiation Network Theory is concerned with how society takes shape in concrete relational fields and enters into real consequences. Reducing it to an ordinary list of factors would lose the theoretical judgments it contains; using it to exclude other valid explanations would repeat the errors of a single underlying entity and a total image. Neither state, nation, market, family, nor culture can replace class as a new single axis. What matters is to turn away from this temptation: in concrete relational fields, differentiating units undergo extraction, weight assignment, connection, transmission, and write-back, forming a constantly changing differentiation-network order.
Oppression in reality must be faced squarely; on this point there is no room for equivocation. I oppose communism because it carries a deeper explanatory violence: crushing three-dimensional society into a class plane, crushing living people into class positions, crushing communities into class instruments, crushing history into class struggle, and conscripting all differences into the same total image.
Communism has proposed some mistaken policies, but that is not the whole problem. The deeper problem comes from its grounding in a mistaken social ontology: treating the class image as reality itself, treating a low-dimensional projection as the three-dimensional world, and treating limited distinction extraction as ultimate truth. It thinks it has explained society; in fact, it has merely flattened society.
This is where this book begins.
This book faces squarely the pressures that genuinely exist in society. Wages, labor, debt, risk, and relations of domination all carry a real weight that cannot be ignored. But interpreters who adopt class theory and its total image have no right to monopolize the explanation of these pressures, still less to use a single plane to swallow up family, locality, nation, the private sphere, community, memory, the body, and the concrete days of people's lives all at once. Analysis and judgment are themselves necessary. What must be rejected is the practice of total-image subsumption of differences, of compressing reality through a monopoly on explanation, and of translating every inequality into class as what society fundamentally is.
The starting point of Social Differentiation Network Theory is precisely the refusal to surrender the world to a single total image.
Society is not a class plane. Society is a differentiation network.