Class

Class is a position inside an endoreality, not a fact about a person. The classification is made relative to an endo-ideal, so the scale exists only because a group has installed an idealized figure at the top of it, and where somebody stands on that scale measures distance from the figure rather than anything they have or do. Move to another endogroup and the ideal changes, and so does the ranking. Under wealth endo-idealism, which Marsh identifies as the modern form, the idealized figure is the holder of money. Billionaires serve as the anima bank of the arrangement, which is why they are defended with the fervour usually reserved for religious leaders. At the far end of the same scale sits the negative image. Poverty in that scheme is the Dalit caste or scapegoat of wealth endo-idealism and provides the same communal sacrifice, and wealth in Marsh's account cannot exist without poverty because it is extracted from misery. Reading class this way answers something the purely economic accounts struggle with, which is why deprivation is defended so fiercely by people who gain nothing material from it. If the scale is what holds an endogroup together, the bottom of it is a requirement rather than a malfunction. Her verdict on the word itself is blunt. Class, she wrote, is of very little use in describing our interactions and their repercussions, and she groups it with quantum entanglement and narcissism as terms that explain nothing.

Karl Marx defined class by relation to the means of production, owners set against those who sell their labour, and made it the engine of history. Max Weber split the idea three ways into class, status and party, separating market position from social honour. Empirical sociology mostly works with socioeconomic status, a composite of income, education and occupation, and Pierre Bourdieu added cultural and social capital to the ledger. All of these treat class as something measurable about a person's real position. Marsh treats it as a construct produced when an endogroup ranks people against its own ideal, which makes the ranking an artefact of the endoreality rather than a description of anything outside it, and she regards the word as too imprecise to do much analytic work.