Class: Category of classification or action unit

The manner of speaking of classes, even with some reservation (for the most part soon forgotten), as if they shared interests, systems of values and hence ideologies in the same way as action units do, reflects the influence of historism, often associated with historical and ethical relativism, inasmuch as according to historism standards of judgment and methods of argumentation in general are unique to an epoch. Historism is thus implicit in Marxism (but not vice versa), since the latter's determinism underlies a theory of historical development in economically, socially, politically, and culturally distinct stages. In other words, to attribute certain interests, systems of values and ideologies to social classes in a certain stage of historical development is a corollary of the historist attribution of unique characteristics to a given era. The question is, then, why do such ascriptions more often than not amount to an illicit reification and create conceptual confusion?

The criteria according to which an investigator classifies people as a group in order to analyse what they have in common (or not) are one thing; the criteria applicable to action units are another.