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Class as Exploitation

Karl Marx may not have been the first to use the term ‘class’ in a social scientific way, but he has certainly been the most famous and, whether as direct inspiration or as someone against whom others feel the need to position themselves, the most influential. His views were worked out in the context of the rapid industrialization and turbulent politics of nineteenth-century Europe, and Marx spent much of his early life being chased across the continent by various authorities troubled by his radical journalism and political agitation. Eventually, in 1849, he settled in London, where he continued his usual political activism – participating in the establishment of the First International, an umbrella organization for a number of leftist political groups and trade unions – and the journalistic work that earned him his living. He also, however, spent large quantities of time sitting in the British Library undertaking the detailed research into economics and history that underpinned his masterwork, Capital, the first volume of which was published in 1867.

Class was the linchpin of Marx’s thought, that much is obvious. What exactly class is for him, however, is not necessarily straightforward. The basic position – and the one that most people aware of Marx know – is that there are capitalists, or business owners, on the one hand, the proletariat, or workers, on the other, and that the first exploits the second. Yet if we actually look at Marx’s scattered writings, especially his analyses of particular historical events, whether in Capital, in short journalistic texts such as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx, 1852/1968) or in the many tracts he wrote with his friend and long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels, things are rarely that simple. The label of ‘class’ is applied to all kinds of groups of people that fail to fit the usual bill of exploited or exploiter – intellectuals, bankers, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat (Marx’s term for the long-term unemployed) and such like. He also talks of the ‘middle class’ and the ‘lower middle class’ and multiple strata within the working class and so on. And of course, Marx never himself outlined a formal, systematic definition of class – he nearly did at the end of the third volume of Capital, in the very last chapter, but he died before he could write more than a few brief paragraphs.

This does not mean we cannot make sense of Marx’s thought, though. We can piece together the fundamentals of his theory of classes, and to understand his use of the term throughout his work it is useful to distinguish, following Anthony Giddens (1981), a general model of classes, that is, Marx’s abstract understanding of society and history as being constituted by the struggles between two conflicting classes, and his concrete analysis of classes in particular societies, where the picture becomes more complex.

The general model

Starting with the general model of classes, the fundamental point of departure is Marx’s materialist view of humanity. The basic principle of the human condition, and therefore the driving force of human history, is not, for Marx, to be found in the realm of ideas or consciousness, as the idealist philosophy of Georg Hegel prevailing in Germany in his youth had it, but the thoroughly practical business of working on nature and producing material goods such as food, shelter and clothing so that we can survive (Marx and Engels, 1845/1998). The relations involved in this productive work form the economic ‘base’ upon which all ideas, culture and politics in a society are built like a vast superstructure, and it is through the way in which these relations are organized that social classes emerge, that struggle occurs and that transformations of society take place (Marx, 1859/1968).

Specifically, each society is characterized by a principal ‘mode of production’ – a way of organizing the production of material goods – and in any mode of production there are always two fundamental classes defined by their contrasting relation to the ‘means of production’, or the things which are used to produce those material goods. To be more precise there are, on the one hand, those who use the means of production to produce goods but do not own or control them and, on the other, those who own or control the means of production but do not engage in production themselves. In contemporary Western societies since around the sixteenth century, and in the vast majority of the world more recently, the dominant mode of production has been capitalism, based on the private buying, owning and selling of the means of production such as factories, machinery, materials, land, buildings and so on. The producers are the proletariat, a term taken from the Latin prole, meaning offspring – and originally alluding to those who contribute nothing to the state but their children – but morphing over time to mean the lowest class of society. More colloquially, they are known as the ‘working class’, and they are the people who work in factories making, designing and packing products, whether they be beans, cars or jets, or outside of a factory building houses or more factories. The owners of the means of production, of the factories and machines, are the capitalists, or bourgeoisie (from French bourg, meaning town).

The workers have to sell their labour to the bourgeoisie in order to survive. In his early works Marx stressed the ‘alienating’ aspects of this process – the process of producing material goods, the most natural thing in the world, is no longer controlled or dictated by the worker but by someone else (Marx, 1844/1959). Later he came to emphasize that the buying and selling of labour power, the primary relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, is fundamentally a relation of exploitation. Marx’s reasoning here is steeped in the economic theory of his day, drawing on ideas from David Ricardo and Adam Smith, but the basic argument is that the capitalist extracts ‘surplus value’ from the workers. Surplus value refers to the difference between the value of what the worker is paid in wages (as the means of reproducing their labour power – i.e. they can feed themselves and their families and therefore turn up to work the next day as well as provide workers for the future) and the value the worker produces for the capitalist in terms of goods. In other words, labour power creates more value than it costs to buy, and the capitalist can use that surplus not only to live but, more importantly, to buy further labour power and means of production (called capital accumulation). Think of a worker who operates a machine producing a particular item – perhaps clothes on a sewing machine – who is paid minimum wage, which at the time of writing is just over £10 an hour in the UK (and that is more than many business owners claim is necessary to reproduce labour power, i.e. for workers to feed and clothe themselves well enough). Within that hour the worker may produce goods worth £20, and the £10 difference is the surplus value, which the owner then reinvests.

Let me emphasize that class, strictly speaking, has absolutely nothing to do with prestige or income level as far as Marx was concerned. A highly skilled and highly paid worker may take home more money from their job than a fairly lowly capitalist makes and have a more lavish lifestyle to boot, but the fact remains that they are exploited by their employers whilst the capitalist is not, and therefore they remain within the dominated class.

Now the two classes of any mode of production, in capitalism the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, are always at the same time in mutual dependence and conflict. One cannot survive without the other – the workers need the capitalists to pay their wages, and the capitalists need the surplus value created by the workers, and if one class escapes the relationship then they are no longer a class as such. Yet they are also in conflict because their interests are in direct opposition: the workers are getting a bad deal because they should reap the value that they produce, but it is in the capitalists’ interests that they do not, that wages are kept low and hours long so that as much surplus as possible can be squeezed out.

Inevitably, said Marx, the glaring contradictions of capitalism – the increased concentration of capital in ever fewer hands, the increased production of an ever larger reserve army of unemployed potential workers and so on – will push the proletariat to become conscious of its common situation and its objective interests. Its members will develop, as Marxists put it, ‘class consciousness’. They will then band together and move from being what is often called (Marx himself did not use the term) a ‘class-in-itself’ – a collection of people in the same class position – to being what Marx (1847/1955) called a ‘class-for-itself’ – a body of people fully conscious of their shared position and determined to take collective action. They will eventually overthrow the capitalists, seize the state and abolish private ownership and control of property. The result is communism.

Until then, however, because the exploiting class, who are obviously the beneficiaries of the current system, are also...