ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three questions about class struggle under neoliberalism. First, the Amsterdam School (AS) has developed a flexible historical materialist framework for engaging with history. Its historicist orientation is exemplified in its core notion of 'concept of control'. Take the concept of fraction of capital – a notion explicitly intended to capture class agency. Drawing on Marx, AS scholars have reappropriated fractional analysis to identify proto-concepts of control corresponding ideal-typically to the interests of profit-producing or money capital and then explored how these are combined in comprehensive concepts of control as the basis for the historically specific class alliances that underpin specific capitalist regimes. While AS scholars have not explicitly reflected on their uses of history, this does not mean that they must fall into a structural trap. But it does make it hard to determine whether history serves either to add some details to a pregiven theoretical narrative or to substantially modify that narrative.
