Previous chapters in this book have outlined what we have termed an emergentist theory of class composition and struggle that avoids a static notion of capitalist productive relations from which classes and class consciousness are seen to derive directly and correspond (see Chapter 1). Instead, our emphasis, as detailed in the focus on agents and structures (see Chapter 2), recognises emergent processes of class formation through which particular communities experience new structures of exploitation and points of antagonistic interest as a process of becoming. Recall that this emergentist theory of class derives, among others, from E. P. Thompson, who does not ‘see class as a “structure”, nor even as a “category”, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships’ (Thompson, 1968: 8). Elsewhere, Antonio Gramsci, in his focus on the ensemble of social relations, similarly emphasised the struggle for hegemony as a dialectical process of ‘becoming’ defining the contradictions between state–civil society. ‘If history’, he wrote, ‘is taken to mean, precisely, “becoming” in a “concordia discors” [discordant concord] that does not have unity for its point of departure but contains in itself the reasons for a possible unity’, then the historical development of these processes has to be identified ‘in the system of explicit and implicit “private and public” associations that are woven together in the “state” and in the world political system’ (Gramsci, 2007: 186–7, Q7§35). Our argument is that this emphasis is carried forward in E. P. Thompson's focus on the positionality and situatedness of class processes when he writes that ‘in any given society we cannot understand the parts unless we understand their function and roles in relation to each other and in relation to the whole. The “truth” or success of such a holistic description can only be discovered in the test of historical practice’ (Thompson, 1978: 133; see also Cox, 1987: 355). From that basis, the focus on class identity – as an emergent process of becoming – has been advanced in the earlier chapters of this book from our internal relations perspective to argue that society is structured in class ways through historical and social processes.