Class is more than a sociological concept. It is a story of how people, working for a living, come together as they begin to realize that what they need in order to survive is precisely what their neighbors need. Of course, people with needs that are antagonistic to theirs come to be viewed as an entirely different class in opposition.
Before I became interested in Marxism, I had a professor in college who taught history using the philosophy of E.P. Thompson. He made history come alive by making it a story of real people and how the lived, struggled, and died. We never memorized anything. We simply talked with each other, making personal connections to what we learned, and wrote papers. Later on, I found out that he was a Marxist of the 1960s New Left, someone who made history by participating in Vietnam War protests on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This view of history translated to his public life: he treated people like equals, regardless of their income, education, or position. The historical was always personal.
E.P. Thompson humanized the history of the English working class in a very similar way. His approach was to view class as a historical phenomenon, to remove it from structural understandings that abstracted it and made it a topic of study for specialized academics.
To him, class is a process. It can't be understood simply through snapshots of history. The way men and women of similar economic backgrounds come together, recognize common interests, and fight for those interests by changing history informs our view of class.
Thompson argues that class is not a thing, it is a relationship: “But if we watch these men over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas and their institutions.” I think this is something that Howard Zinn - whether implicitly or explicitly - tried to do with A People's History of the United States. There will always be something intriguing about this kind of narrative based social history that attracts regular people. Maybe its that they can see themselves in the reflections of working class people in the past. Maybe its the romance of tragedy that ultimately befalls so many of these historical figures.
Marx famously quipped in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that "men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please." Human agency is limited by historical conditions, but it is the key to changing the world. Conversely, E.P. Thompson provides us with an understanding of our starting point for changing the world, that of human agency: "class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.” Class consciousness is how we make history and this story how we define the relationship of class. This is how we make history personal.
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