Social Classes, Reclassificatory Processes and De/Renaturalizing Critiques

By reflecting on reclassificatory processes, this paper analyzes the relationships between “social classes” and de/renaturalizing critiques. Reclassifying processes refer to persistent transformations and disputes over the ways of dividing, qualifying and hierarchizing the social and natural world. We are always modifying past, present and imagined future reclassifications, since there is no original ahistorical “classification” from which all others begin. The modern category of class, conceived as “social”, refers both to the intrinsically collective character of socio-economic stratification, and to the historical transformations that crosscut its members with their practices, beliefs, bodies, etc. It implies a critique that denaturalizes non-modern and modern relations of domination, fissuring the naturalized and individualistic definition of homo economicus of liberalism and neoliberalism.

However, acute analyses of the concept of “social classes” have highlighted its interconnections with other categories. The hierarchies and attributes of those other categories are legitimized through their supposed “nature”: i.e., gender relations understood as “natural divisions between sexes”; or “racial” and “colonial” segmentations of ethnicity based on physiognomic traits. The groups related to these degrading categories have deployed critiques that denaturalize themselves seeking justice against exploitation and subalternization. Such critiques have ruptured the reclassificatory boundaries between the natural and the social. Then, more complex and ‒even‒ blurred links between the human and the non-human ‒objects, animals and artifacts, such as algorithms‒ emerge. How do these reclassificatory processes mold and tense the relations between social classes and other collective categories? Are we facing processes of de- or re-naturalization of the ways of dividing, qualifying and hierarchizing the social? The paper will address these questions.