ABSTRACT
This chapter details the origins of anti-capitalist descriptions of class before moving on to contemporary conceptions of class. From Karl Marx’s Capital (1867), it is clear that class and class antagonism are produced by capitalism. This idea is picked up by Thomas Piketty to explain how inequalities are increasing in the twenty-first century, and that the justification of inequality is now prevalent. Thomas Docherty focuses on how inequality is exacerbated by the emergence of literature and its study in a marketised university system—a system that used to put checks on capitalism’s free reign and the entrenchment of class divisions. Global theories of the working classes from August Carbonella and Sharryn Kasmir detail the continued reworking of the working class throughout the world, while Lynsey Hanley explains how upward social mobility is not unilaterally positive. Paul Mason’s theory of postcapitalism is also detailed. This chapter takes these ideas and offers readings of hyper-contemporary literature, focusing on class and dispossession comparatively in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black (2018) and Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018), on class and social mobility in Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) compared with Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black, and on class and geography in Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone (2018).
