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

Shane Appiah, Northwestern University

During moments of crisis, state elites and allied economic actors deploy selective language to construct new categories of people to manage emergency conditions. This paper examines these processes of social construction by comparing 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 explores how crisis classifications crystallize into durable social classes. First, I argue that modern states construct durable classes through political and normative acts of classification. These categories are neither innate nor neutral; they are strategically produced to serve political and economic interests. In both cases, state actors relied on rhetorical devices, most notably the language of “essential” and “necessary”, to constitute new social groupings during disruption. Through this language, the state designates certain workers as indispensable to national order, drawing boundaries within the political economy. Second, I develop a general analytical model of state-facilitated class formation grounded in these cases. Class formation emerges as a historical process in which the state shapes the defining characteristics and boundaries of a social group. Finally, I contend that classification itself functions as a mechanism of class construction. State actors constitute a “crisis class”: workers whose exposure to harm during national emergencies is structured by state and capital interests. Though varied in occupation, members share patterned racial, gendered, and socioeconomic characteristics, and their labor sustains economic productivity and social order.

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 Presented in Session 2. States, Politics and Society