Class as Happening (Not Thing)
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.
In the AI Story
Thompson's insistence on class as relationship rather than category was a response to the structural Marxism dominant in the 1960s, which treated class as a position in a mode of production independent of what workers themselves thought or did. Thompson rejected this abstraction as both analytically sterile and politically condescending. It denied workers their agency in making their own situation intelligible and in responding to it collectively.
The formulation has specific consequences for the analysis of the AI transition. The workers displaced by AI do not yet constitute a class in Thompson's sense. They share the objective condition of displacement, but they lack — for now — the shared recognition, the common vocabulary, the organizational infrastructure through which class formation occurs. The scattering of the affected across industries, geographies, and employment categories makes the recognition of common condition extraordinarily difficult.
The class structure emerging around AI has at least three tiers. At the top are the owners of AI capital — a few thousand executives, founders, and investors whose decisions shape the technology. In the middle are the skilled practitioners using AI to augment their capabilities — the audience The Orange Pill primarily addresses. At the bottom are the workers whose labor is being directly displaced, the largest and least represented group in the discourse.
Thompson would have insisted on naming the people in the third tier — Sarah who spent eight years in medical transcription, Marcus who trained as a paralegal, Priya who built a freelance translation business — as specific individuals whose specific experiences constitute the evidence any honest analysis requires. Their absence from the discourse is not oversight; it is a structural feature of a conversation conducted by and for the people least affected by the transition.
Origin
The formulation appears most clearly in the preface to The Making of the English Working Class (1963), where Thompson articulated his methodological program: to recover the working class not as an abstract category but as a historical formation, made through the experiences and choices of the people who composed it.
Key Ideas
Class as relationship, not position. Class is defined by the relationships people develop as they live their own history, not by abstract placement in economic structure.
Active self-making. Classes make themselves through cultural practices, organizational innovations, and political choices — not passively reflecting economic conditions.
Three-tier emerging structure. AI capital owners, skilled practitioner beneficiaries, and displaced workers occupy structurally distinct positions producing distinct interests.
Absent constituency. The third tier — the most affected — is the least represented in the discourse, a structural feature of who writes books and attends conferences.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, preface (Victor Gollancz, 1963)
- E.P. Thompson, "The Peculiarities of the English" (Socialist Register, 1965)
- Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class (Verso, 1986)