“Essential & Necessary”: Political Economy, State Classification, and the Making of a Crisis Class

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Abstract

During moments of crisis, state elites and allied economic actors may deploy selective language to construct new categories of people to manage emergency conditions. This paper examines these processes of social construction by comparing the classification of workers deemed “essential” during COVID-19 (2020–2024) to those identified as “necessary” or vital to national interest during World War I (1914–1918). It investigates how such crisis classifications can crystallize into durable social classes. First, I argue that modern states construct durable classes through political and normative classifications. These categories are neither innate nor neutral; they are strategically produced to satisfy political and economic interests. In both cases, state actors relied on rhetorical political devices, most notably the language of “essential” and “necessary”, to constitute new social groupings during periods of social disruption. Through this language, the state identifies certain workers as indispensable to national order, drawing boundaries between them and others within the political economy. Second, I develop a general analytical model of state-facilitated class formation grounded in these two historical cases. Class formation emerges as a historical process in which the state, through acts of classification, shapes the defining characteristics and boundaries of a social group. Third, I contend that classification itself serves as a mechanism of class construction. State actors operate as relatively autonomous agents in constituting a new “crisis class”: workers whose exposure to harm during national emergencies is structured and managed by state and capital interests. Although members differ in occupational status, they share patterned racial, gendered, and socioeconomic characteristics, and their labor sustains economic productivity and social order. The durability of this crisis class depends on the interests of those who produce classifications and the broader social context in which they are institutionalized.

Author

• Shane Asante Appiah, Northwestern University