CONCEPT
Class as Happening (Not Thing)
Thompson's foundational refusal to treat class as a static category imposed by economic structure — insisting instead that class is defined by men as they live their own history, through shared experience and collective struggle.
Thompson's most influential theoretical contribution was his reframing of class from noun to verb. Class is not a thing waiting to be discovered by the analyst, assigned on the basis of economic position, or deduced from relationship to the means of production. It is a happening — a historical process through which people who share a common relationship to the economic order come to recognize that commonality, develop shared understanding of their situation, and create the institutions through which their shared interests are collectively articulated. The making of a class is active: the class makes itself through its own cultural practices, organizational innovations, and political choices. The framework travels directly to the AI transition, where a new class relationship is being produced through the accumulated effect of millions of individual decisions restructuring who directs work and who is directed, who captures gains and who absorbs costs.
