[...] Thinkers who identify with the Marxian tradition maintain that the category of distribution fails to capture the full depths of capitalist injustice because it neglects the relations of production and fails to problematize exploitation, domination, and commodification. [...]

[...] The working class is the body of persons who must sell their labour power under arrangements that authorize the capitalist class to appropriate surplus productivity for its private benefit. The core injustice of these arrangements is exploitation, an especially deep form of maldistribution in which the proletariat's own energies are turned against it, usurped to sustain a system that benefits others. To be sure, proletarians also suffer serious cultural injustices the "hidden injuries of class." But far from being rooted directly in an autonomously unjust status order, these derive from the economic structure, as ideologies of class inferiority proliferate to justify exploitation. The remedy for the injustice, accordingly, is redistribution, not recognition. Overcoming class exploitation requires restructuring the political economy so as to alter the class distribution of benefits and burdens in the Marxian view, such restructuring takes the radical form of abolishing the class structure as such. The task of the proletariat, therefore, is not simply to cut itself a better deal, but "to abolish itself as a class." The last thing it needs is recognition of its difference. On the contrary, the only way to remedy the injustice is to put the proletariat out of business as a distinctive group.

[...] class misrecognition can impede the capacity to mobilize against maldistribution. [...] a politics of class recognition may be needed both in itself and to help get a politics of redistribution off the ground.

[...] when misrecognition is equated with prejudice in the minds of the oppressors, overcoming it seems to require policing their beliefs, an approach that is illiberal and authoritarian. For the status model, in contrast, misrecognition is a matter of externally manifest and publicly verifiable impediments to some people's standing as full members of society. To redress it, again, means to overcome subordination. This in turn means changing institutions and social practices--once again, by deinstitutionalizing patterns of cultural value that impede parity of participation and replacing them with patterns that foster it.

[...] Fair democratic deliberation concerning the merits of recognition claims requires parity of participation for all actual and possible deliberators. That in turn requires just distribution and reciprocal recognition. Thus, there is an unavoidable circularity in this account: claims for recognition can only be justified under conditions of participatory parity, which conditions include reciprocal recognition. [...]

The solution, accordingly, is not to abolish the circularity in theory. It is rather to work to abolish it in practice by changing social reality. [...]

[...] Unlike Marxist theory, likewise, I do not conceive class as a relation to the means of production. In my conception, rather, class is an order of objective subordination derived from economic arrangements that deny some actors the means and resources they need for participatory parity.

[...] markets do not simply dissolve status distinctions; rather, they instrumentalize them, bending pre-existing patterns of cultural value to capitalist purposes. For example, racial hierarchies that long predated capitalism were not abolished with the dismantling of New World slavery or even of Jim Crow, but reconfigured to suit a market society. No longer explicitly codified in law, and no longer socially legitimate, racist norms have been wired into the infrastructure of capitalist labor markets. Thus, the net result of marketization is the modernization, not supersession, of status subordination.

critical theory must eschew the Durkheimian assumption of a single, overarching pattern of cultural value

The distinction between affirmation and transformation can be applied, first of all, to the perspective of distributive justice. In this perspective, the paradigmatic example of an affirmative strategy is the liberal welfare state, which aims to redress maldistribution through income transfers. Relying heavily on public assistance, this approach seeks to increase the consumption share of the disadvantaged, while leaving intact the underlying economic structure. In contrast, the classic example of a transformative strategy is socialism. Here the aim is to redress unjust distribution at the root--by transforming the framework that generates it. Far from simply altering the end-state distribution of consumption shares, this approach would change the division of labor, the forms of ownership, and other deep structures of the economic system.

deconstructive remedies are in principle dereifying, as they aim to destabilize invidious status distinctions

[...] grants would guarantee a minimum standard of living to every citizen, regardless of labor force participation, while leaving intact the deep structure of capitalist property rights. Thus, in the abstract they appear to be affirmative. That appearance would jibe with reality, moreover in a neoliberal regime, where the grants would effectively subsidize employers of low-wage, temporary labor and possibly depress wages overall. In a social democracy, however, the effects could be dramatically different. According to proponents, if the level of the grants were set high enough, Basic Income would alter the balance of power between capital and labor, creating a more favorable terrain on which to pursue further change. The long-term result could be to undermine the commodification of labor power. In that case, an apparently affirmative remedy for maldistribution would have deeply transformative effects with respect to economic class subordination.

[...] nonreformist reforms seek to spark transformations in the status order--not only directly, by immediate institutional intervention, but also politically, by changing the terrain on which future struggles for recognition are waged. Thus, for recognition as for distribution, this approach represents a via media between affirmation and transformation that combines the best features of both.