What is Class? | Marxism 101 | Briefing #2

“Come and see the violence inherent in the system!”

NOTE: This is part of our series of briefings on Marxism 101. Check out the Introduction if you haven’t already.

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THE QUICK AND DIRTY

• Class is a way to describe socioeconomic relationships between groups of people. Class, in a Marxist sense, is not just about who has more or less income. 

• The capitalist class and the working class are the major ones at play in Marxist economics. Marx called these classes the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie controls the means of production, or capital, in a capitalist economy.  Capital means anything of value that we use to produce more value. The proletariat produces goods and services through their labor under capitalism.

• Karl Marx argued that in the first human societies, there were no class divisions.  The earliest humans lived in small groups and worked together for survival. At the subsistence level, there’s very little division of labor.  Agriculture and surplus production made class divisions possible.  This led to hierarchies, and to power structures that became governments.  

• Capitalism, and its modern class divisions, grew out of feudalism. Lords compelled the peasant class to work for them and provide a share of their surplus to them. In return, peasants received “protection” from the lord and from bandits or invaders. Their lords granted peasants the right to live on the land and grow crops for their own subsistence.

• The proletariat, as we know it, originated with the Industrial Revolution. The bourgeoisie created them through a combination of theft, exploitation and violence. During this period, ex-peasants lost what meager capital they had. Meanwhile, the emerging capitalists accumulated all the capital they could.  The proletariat survived by selling the only capital they had left: their labor power. They worked for the bourgeoisie using newly mechanized tools and techniques. 

• The bourgeoisie ended the feudal era.  The bourgeoisie built and accomplished wonders, but through exploiting the working class. Their drive for growth and profit furthered the most destructive impulses of capitalism.

KEYWORDS

Click each term to learn more. Also, search any of these terms on Prole Academy to find more on that topic.

INTRODUCTION

Class is essential to understanding our society and how best to change it. Yet there are plenty of misconceptions about it that get in the way of a useful public debate.  The ones I’m most concerned about are:

• Class groups people based on how much money they have.
• Talking about class is engaging in “class warfare”.  
• Class is a Marxist myth designed to divide us and cause chaos.

This briefing will help you bone up on what class is from the point of view of Marxism. The goal: to be able to analyze for yourself how class distinctions work in society. You should be able to understand what sort of relationships they foster in society. You should understand how class influences “who gets what.” Finally, you should have a sense of how these dynamics could change in the future.   

If you’re inclined to learn more, check out a few books that might help you in that direction.  I read the ones listed below:

BACKGROUND

American politicians don’t like to talk about class, unless it’s “the middle class”.   That phrase speaks to Americans’ desire to be average members of society. Most people want to be “middle” – not rich, not poor, not privileged or desperate.  We’re raised to believe we should be putting in an “honest day’s work”. We’re told that a skilled trade or a reasonable education will help us get a decent job for an employer. We also might be able to build a small business of our own.  When we get this sorted out, we can buy single-family homes and fill them with a couple children and a pet. This will allow us to grab a car or two and a big screen TV, and take a vacation for a few weeks a year. The “American Dream” is summed up here. It’s a vision for middle-class life that seemed quite attainable a few decades ago.  

The “American Dream” is getting harder to achieve, and people have many theories about why that is. Politicians talk about “the middle class” as if it’s a group that includes most of us. If you’re not in it, you’ll be able to work your way into it sooner or later, if not higher. Discussing why middle class lifestyles are now so unattainable pushes people’s buttons.  It exposes the true ideas you hold about the prevailing vision of American life.  

Speaking up to condemn the ruling class, or defend the working class, is risky. Admitting these classes exist means admitting the American dream may be unattainable. America mythologizes that we left peasant-like and aristocratic classes behind us long ago. In this “upwardly-mobile” society, family wealth shouldn’t determine your future.  Yet even if we don’t have proper aristocrats and peasants, we still have a class structure.  If we didn’t, why would so many people be struggling to pay rent, or unable to save $1000 in an emergency?  Why would more than 90% of the economic gains since the 2008 Great Recession have gone to the wealthy?  

WHAT ARE CLASSES?

Class is a way to describe socioeconomic relationships between groups of people. A lot of people don’t like using the term class because they believe it involves dividing people. These folks often say things like “don’t engage in class warfare”, or “you’re not uniting anyone.” , These people are mistaken. Talking about class isn’t talking about division. It’s talking about relationships between groups of people. This involves their relationship to our economic processes. It also involves how we produce and distribute the goods and services that enrich our lives.

Class, in a Marxist sense, is not just about who has more or less income. In conversation, we often group ourselves as lower class, middle class, and upper class. The dividing line between them? How much income and wealth they have, or how much of it they gain each year.  Researchers and social service professionals also talk about socioeconomic class. This kind of class analysis considers income, education, jobs and social status. I’m not saying that kind of talk isn’t useful – it is.  Yet Marxist economics focuses on a different class relationship.  Marxists describe a class by their relationship to the production process. This means who does what when sell-able things are made. It includes what part of the revenues from the sale, and who owns or controls capital in an economy.  

Capital means anything of value that we can use to produce more value.  Acquiring and using capital is the key to generating more wealth.  Pretty much any economist, Marxist or otherwise, can agree on this.  There are many things they don’t agree on, like how value is actually created, or who should control capital.  The economic system we call capitalism involves private individuals owning most capital. Compare this to a system where capital is controlled by workers, the state, or the public.

The capitalist class (or bourgeoisie) and the working class (or proletariat) are the major ones in Marxist economics. These terms come from French, and they take some explaining to fully understand. If you want a more contemporary set of terms to use instead, try capitalist class and working class. I’ll use both sets of terms as we go forward.

The bourgeoisie controls the means of production, or capital, in a capitalist economy. The means of production are the buildings, land, machines, tools, and resources we use. We need the means of production to run a business, keep a factory churning, or grow food. Through using this kind of capital, we produce the goods and services we buy every day. We’ll talk more about capital in a future briefing. For now, know that the bourgeoisie controls these means of production in our economy.  While they own the means, they don’t actually perform the labor to create the goods and provide the services. Instead, they hire laborers to do the work to produce goods and services for them.

aside: THE PIZZA SHOP

The proletariat produces goods and services through their labor under capitalism. They don’t have capital.  They have to work to make a living, and sell their labor to the bourgeoisie. In exchange, workers receive a wage, which is generally enough money to eek out a living.  A capitalist takes the products and services workers create and sells them for a profit. That profit gets distributed by the capitalist as they see fit – it does not find its way back to the worker.  This class division describes the social relationship between workers and their bosses.  That relationship affects almost every part of our lives. It drives the economy on which we all depend. It governs the rhythm of our days and the spectrum of choices we have at home, at work, and in the market.

HOW CLASSES FORMED

In the first human societies, there were no class divisions. There’s a story that gets told, over and over, about how human beings used to be. This was before we built up cars and cities, farms and investment portfolios.  Philosopher Thomas Hobbes had a version of the story he called the “war of all against all”, or a “state of nature”.  In our “natural state”, without a society putting rules on us or policing us, people will be at each other’s throats. Hobbes argues we are competitive, greedy, and hostile toward one another when ungoverned.  Like the Mad Max movies, but with less spiky leather garb. Marxists don’t believe this story. While I need to brush up on this, it seems like the best scholars of early societies don’t believe it either.  One book on my Tsundoku Shelves of Shame is Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History. Another is The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Both poke big freaking holes in the “state of nature” idea.  They argue our earliest history was a lot more interesting than that.

Marx argued early humans lived in small groups and worked together for survival. His version of history begins with hunter-gatherer societies.  When we didn’t have cities and farms – when we were hunter-gatherers – we stuck together as a small group or tribe. We did what we had to do so our group would survive.  This kind of survival was bare-knuckle and bare-bones, though.  We got enough to make it through the day and into the next – in other words, subsistence.    

At the subsistence level, there’s very little division of labor.  In the earliest days of humanity, there was no surplus value. You couldn’t have a society with much division of labor. When division of labor exists, people undertake different tasks or develop specialized skills. In a subsistence-based culture, it’s “all hands on deck”. Everyone needs to contribute to basic survival tasks.  Sure, someone’s going to be hunting for a boar to eat while someone else is gathering berries. Yet another person is looking for firewood or keeping watch for predators. Every able-bodied person is contributing to food, shelter and safety in some way.  Plenty of research investigates how early societies divided labor based on gender roles. Society’s turn to farming to produce food warped and exacerbated these differences.

Early societies tended to be egalitarian.  We didn’t accumulate enough to have much in the way of an excess.  No one sat on a pile of things they didn’t need.  No one had much to trade.  Our social structures followed that logic; most things we had, we held in common.  Who made decisions?  A little of everybody, but working in concert with one another.  And it worked well enough. 

Agriculture helped make surpluses possible.   About 12,000 years ago, humans figured out something amazing. Through agriculture or farming, we could grow enough food to have a surplus. Surpluses are great.  You can save extra food for winter, or as protection from poor harvests in the future.  You can trade it for other goods you do need.  If you’ve got a surplus of food, some folks in your community can devote more of their time to not making food.  They can trade, develop other skills, administer things. They can build, craft, smelt or brew whatever else we need to make.  That, my friends, is how you get towns, cities, and what we now think of as civilization.

Surplus production made class divisions possible.  Humanity’s new trick let it meet its needs efficiently enough to produce a surplus. This surplus was not only in agricultural products, but other things too. I’m talking tools, building materials, luxury goods and more.  When labor is productive enough to make a surplus, you get to fight about how to divide that surplus.  Some people may not have to work.  They can pivot to being a ruling class.  Different societies dealt with this question in their own way. Generally, Marx and Engels observed growing inequality between men and women.

Fights to control surplus resources led to hierarchies of power, which became governments.  This isn’t just the path to class formation – It’s also how you get bureaucracy.  Someone’s gotta administer how that surplus gets used, watch over it, be the boss of it.  That’s valuable, of course, but it also led to those people becoming a social class of their own.  One day, the folks who did that job were not just doing it for the community. Control over those surplus resources set them apart and above the rest of the community.  This led to dynamics like emperors and subjects, or masters and slaves.  Further down the road, you get lords and serfs, kings and queens.  It was messy and uneven, and plenty of folks looked at a wannabe lord or king and said “nah, piss off” and fought them about it.  But on average, over time, we got social classes very different from where we started.

THE ROAD TO (AND OUT OF) SERFDOM

Capitalism, and its modern class divisions, grew out of feudalism.   In a feudal society, you had lords and peasants.  If you’ve ever watched, read, or played a tale of medieval fantasy, you’ve heard the term lords. They led the wealthy, aristocratic noble class in feudal societies.  Lords owned large amounts of land and held fancy inherited titles and privileges. They could call knights and soldiers into their service. They answered only to higher nobles like a king.  Peasants were the poor, farming class under feudalism.  Lucky ones owned small amounts of land they farmed, and could sell some of their surplus on the market.  Many peasants were forced to exist as serfs, bound to the land they worked for their lords and unable to leave.  Yet even these serfs typically had enough land to provide for their families, and the tools to do so. Lords set aside spaces called commons. In the commons, anybody could use the land for grazing cattle or growing food.  It wasn’t much, but it was enough to sustain them, and sometimes a bit extra.  There was also a merchant class at the time. They made a living by using currency to buy goods in one place and selling them for more somewhere else.   They profited off this kind of commerce, too, but this wasn’t the same thing as what capitalists do. We will talk more about that in an upcoming briefing.

Feudal peasants may have had more leisure time, and more self-sufficiency, than you or me.  Believe it or not, you might envy peasants for some aspects of their lifestyle.  Feudal working days were something like 150-200 per year.  Working days under capitalism? They can be 250-300 or more.  And peasants didn’t work at the same rate all year long, either.  They got long rest periods, many holidays.  Many of them wrote off winter altogether. They did not expect to be productive during that season, and survived on their stores of food.  Most of all, they were connected to what they produced.  They made it with their own hands and skill. Their work produced products that led to their survival (except for the share that went to the lord).  And when they sold their products on the market, the peasant got the proceeds of that sale.  

This isn’t to say that the life of a peasant was something you should envy.  They still did rough physical labor to a degree many of us don’t.  They lacked most of the entertainment, comforts and variety that we enjoy. Yes, those are things that capitalism helps to improve upon over feudalism. The world was, in many ways, still riskier, duller and more violent than what most of us experience now. Then again, perhaps some of their struggles are getting more familiar. As my wife noted when she read my first draft, “a big load of them died of plagues, creating a labor shortage. Others suffered due to lacking access to healthcare.”  Surely this is a burden that none of us in the United States could appreciate today.

The peasant class was compelled to work for the lords and provide their surplus to them.  In return, peasants received “protection” from the lord and from bandits or invaders. You know, the way paying off the mafia offers the corner store “protection”. Lords granted peasants who paid up the right to live on the land and grow crops for their own subsistence. The thing is, peasants didn’t exactly need to work for a lord to survive. After all, they already had the land and tools they needed to gain their subsistence, and often a little more.  In fact, they could to some extent produce their own tools and clothing, along with their own food.  They had their own small forms of capital with which to produce goods, and could sell the excess on the market.  Lords and the like had to compel them to work as serfs under the threat of force.  In other words, “grow enough food for me, the lord, to take my share too – or I’ll sic my army on you and make you do it.” 

THE INDUSTRIAL AGE CHANGES EVERYTHING

The proletariat emerged with the Industrial Revolution.  Mechanization exploded during this era. Soon, only capitalists could afford to produce at such large scales. They used their accumulated wealth to build plants, mills, factories and needed machinery.   Smaller scale producers (think artisan producers, mom and pop shops) couldn’t keep up. Their more primitive and small-scale tools were too inefficient. With them, they couldn’t compete in the market with the big dogs. Meanwhile, the increasing division of labor between workers made production cheaper and cheaper.

The proletariat was created through theft and force unleashed by the bourgeoisie.  Once manufacturing processes became developed enough, owners needed a constant supply of workers. They dispossessed the peasants of their lands, forcing them into mills and factories.  Lords stole their land outright. They used force, or issued laws that decreed peasant lands away and evicted those who lived on them.  Those commons I spoke of earlier?  Lords and early merchants confiscated them, slicing them into private plots of land.  Some peasants were invited to stay on the land they once worked or owned if they were willing to pay rent.  If they wouldn’t or couldn’t, they were kicked out.  In 15th century England, the wealthy and powerful began using these tactics on a massive scale. You could say that the lords closed up the “Tavern of Feudalism” one night, saying “you don’t have to go home (because I stole it) but you can’t stay here!”

While ex-peasants lost their capital, emerging capitalists accumulated all the capital they could.   Dispossessed, poor peasants pushed into this plight had no capital except their labor.  The land and tools they needed to make a living were now owned by capitalists as the Industrial Era dawned. This class contained both enterprising merchants and lords looking to cash in. It also included a few peasants made semi-rich through their larger land holdings.  They did everything they could to get land and machinery, by hook or by crook. This was a process that Marxist scholars call primitive accumulation.  I mentioned several examples of this earlier. They included fencing up of the commons, forced evictions of peasants and outright conquest and theft. The peasants, separated from their livelihoods, became a new class: the proletariat. This is today’s working class, according to Marxists.

The proletariat survives by selling the only capital they have: their labor power.  Capitalists can’t produce goods without performing labor or hiring someone to do it. They aren’t about to get their hands dirty, though. Think of those mom-and-pop pizza shop owners tossing dough themselves. Then think of the the big Domino’s shareholders who aren’t gonna go near a pizza oven.  And so their success depended on another class: the working class. These proletarians are no longer peasants. But they also have no land, machinery or resources. They have nothing to sell except their own labor.  While that might make them “free” in a sense, we’re all prisoners to the need to avoid starving. Because hunger and poverty suck, capitalists coerced most of this class into working. But while some “proles” went willingly, and some reluctantly, plenty resisted.  

The state served the interests of the bourgeoisie, as it had the lords before them. The bourgeoisie gained control over the lawmaking process. They ordered dudes with pikes and firearms to threaten, jail and brutalize resisters.  This is when authorities in England passed laws against “idlers, loiterers and vagabonds.” They criminalized not getting your ass to work in ways their rulers found productive.  

The bourgeoisie ended the feudal era.  The bourgeoisie gained strength, status and privilege as their numbers and wealth increased.  They ended feudalism, spearheading the “liberal revolutions” in France and the American colonies.  This isn’t “liberal” in the sense we talk about it in contemporary American politics. This is the age when “liberal” meant replacing absolute monarchies with republics. Liberals valued the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, and free association. They held respect for the sciences. In this sense, most Americans would claim some loyalty to the liberal tradition. Either way, the age of kings and absolute power was ending in Europe.  It’s important to note that for the bourgeoisie, power doesn’t come from the sources kings used to claim theirs.  Many modern leaders aren’t powerful because “God favors them” or because their daddies had power.  It’s because they have wealth.  When the dominant class oppresses the weaker class now, it is more subtle than the age of knights and lords.

The bourgeoisie built and accomplished wonders, but through exploiting the working class. The bourgeois class has masterminded many of our great cultural feats. This includes works of art, sculpture, literature and media. They’ve accomplished great feats of engineering and exploration.  That much of this was driven by profit doesn’t make it less impressive.  But the pursuit of profit that compels the capitalist class is still destructive.  The capitalist has to innovate in order to survive a competitive market. They revolutionize the way they produce goods and the ways they exploit workers.  With this constant force, all of society changes – but this is the subject of a future briefing.

DRAWING THE LINES OF THE CLASS WAR

The bourgeoisie and proletariat aren’t the only classes in Marxist thinking.  Karl Marx also pointed out the emergence of a middle class. This one is much like the one discussed now in American politics.  Then, as now, it consisted of small businessmen, managers, supervisors. It also included professionals such as doctors, lawyers and teachers.  In other words, their relationship to capital is different from the working class. Folks in the middle class may have their own small amounts of capital of their own. They also often have special education and skills. This allow them to avoid the trappings of the wage-work to which proles have to submit.  Note: by “small businessmen”, I mean those who may work for themselves or with a handful of employees. I do not mean those owning industrial or large-scale facilities, offices or businesses.  This “middle class” is what Marx called the petit bourgeoisie.  Its numbers, while considerable, aren’t as big as American politicians and elites make them out to be. 

The middle class is getting squeezed like the working class.  Much like the working class, the living standards of the middle class are falling. The job conditions of the middle class are also getting pushed ever downward.  The pressure built into capitalism drives wages downward so that profits can rise.   “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe”, wrote Marx and Engels. Capitalism urges companies to seek cheaper labor and cut benefits whenever possible. For proof, look at the retirement plans and health insurance companies offer workers. Workers tend to get a worse offer every year, unless they organize. The labor market features increased use of temporary labor, contractors, “gig” workers. Even in universities, adjuncts are replacing permanent, tenure-track professors.  This is affecting the middle class much as it affects the working class.  The capitalist class, in the end, is the only beneficiary.

Members of a class may not realize that their interests differ from another class. They may have no knowledge of how that pits them against another class.  It doesn’t mean that the tension isn’t there, but it’s often not recognized as such.  We find ways to mask the scent of it.  And this isn’t just true for the working class.  While the middle class’s interests often align with the working class, many do not realize it. They still support bourgeois leaders and policies in any conflict that arises.  There’s also what Marx called the Lumpenproletariat. This is the “dangerous class” of vagrants, criminals, the chronically homeless or unemployed.  Marxists go back and forth on whether they could be allies of the proletariat. Some believe capitalists can easily bribe, co-opt, ignore or suppress them. I’ve seen relatively little written on this area of Marxism so far, so I will be hunting for more down the road.

OTHER PERSPECTIVES

There are other ways of perceiving and identifying classes in society.    This briefing has focused on the Marxist conceptions of economic class. To review, we discussed the bourgeoisie, proletariat, petit bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat.  Where you fall among those classes is determined by how you relate to capital, or the means of production.  But that’s not the only way to talk about class.  Researchers like German sociologist Max Weber continued to develop the idea of class.  They often de-centered capital from their discussions of social class. They considered income along with factors like opportunity, education, and social status. This research fed into today’s use of categories such as the “upper class, middle class, lower class” and so on. You’re more likely to hear someone say “that’s the upper class neighborhood with the McMansions” than “the bourgeoisie exploit the proles for their labor”.  While they’re not what Marx is discussing, these broader categories of class are still very useful to understanding our social system.  Hopefully we will get to read more about them and explore what they mean for our lives.

Marx’s categories had a bias toward 19th century European customs and history. This was inevitable, but it’s still pretty unfortunate.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were products of their time and place. They were 19th century European men. Their conception of history centered on Europe, and how that continent developed.  They were also limited by the scholarship and the prejudices of the time.  As a result, they had some important blind spots. These included how class systems in other parts of the world were set up. They didn’t know their narrative of how hunter-gatherer societies progressed didn’t apply everywhere. Marx also couldn’t predict everything about how social class has evolved since then.  While sociologists have gone in different directions since, Marx remains essential reading.

WRAPPING UP

Marx and Engels argued that all of human history has been defined by this class struggle.

Karl Marx’s partner and patron, Friedrich Engels, wrote the following:

“all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes.”

From the 1883 Preface of the Communist Manifesto

“Wherever independent proletarian movements…show[ed] signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted down”

From the 1888 Preface of the Communist Manifesto

Marxists argue that class warfare is going to happen whether we talk about it or not. It’s always been happening. Why should only one side be fighting it?

Supporters uphold capitalism as efficient and fair, claiming it ensures human freedom.  Marx and Engels counter that the “freedom of the market” is only freedom for the bourgeoisie. Sure, there’s a lot more products (and a lot more pleasurable, fun, and labor-saving products at that). The lives of pre-capitalist peasants were pretty rough.  Most Marxists don’t argue otherwise. Still, before capitalism, workers at least owned their own means of production. Under capitalism, that’s no longer the case, even though they are still the ones doing the work to produce goods.  Those labor-saving capitalist inventions don’t seem to make our lives less stressful. Our workdays haven’t gotten shorter since union movements won the 40-hour standard. In fact, we’re backsliding on that in many ways. Marxism’s central argument alleges that this system is more than unfair and unjust. It is built on violence. It’s inefficient. It’s destructive.  In the long run, Marxism claims, capitalism will sow the seeds of its own destruction. When capitalism collapses, our society and our planet’s biosphere may be ruined as well.  

The next two parts in this series will explore other core concepts of Marxist economic theory. We will discuss commodities, property, prices and how they matter in capitalism. We will also describe how Marxists believe labor creates value, and why this is so important to the profits that drive this economic system.

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TIRED OF READING?

• Halim Alrah created a great 10 minute explanation of class struggle that you might enjoy.  It’s pretty funny (and profane) as well as coming from an explicitly Marxist Youtuber, so keep that in mind.

• Here’s a clip from Youtuber Midwestern Marx that covers how primitive accumulation happened in Europe and the United States.  The fella does it in just over two minutes.  I’m impressed.

• Check out this clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail instead, in which King Arthur encounters a couple of medieval peasants discussing their class system.  Pretty much says everything this briefing did in three minutes.

Cover Photo: Strike of workers in heavy industry. Photo by davit85 on Adobe Stock.

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