Social Class

The Classic Class Formation Paradigm

The classic paradigm focused on how social classes could form as coherent groups in the context of the dramatic social changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that were associated with industrialization and urbanization. Attention focused on how structural economic inequalities might give rise to social, cultural, and political solidarities (for the best collection of articles that lay out this classic paradigm, see Giddens and Held 1982). Marx saw capitalism as differentiating between a small class of bourgeois property owners on the one hand, and a large wage-earning proletariat on the other. He believed that since the profits earned by the bourgeois class were ultimately generated by extracting “surplus value” from wage earners, there was an inherently antagonistic relationship between these classes, which led to social conflict and oppression. He believed that capitalism would tend toward the accentuation of these structural divisions. This would ultimately generate class consciousness and political mobilization by the working class so that they would move from being a “class in itself” to become a “class for itself.” This view was not shared by all Marxists, including the [Page 1311]Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, who felt that without political leadership by a revolutionary party, the working class would not become aware of their oppression and would remain restricted to a form of “trade union” consciousness.

The same concern with class formation was developed sociologically by Weber, who argued, in opposition to Marx, that there was no necessary reason why “economic classes,” defined by common labor market positions, would lead to the formation of social classes, who were closely bonded to each other and felt common cause. Weber emphasized that status—based on honor and esteem—and political mobilization could override class divisions, and only in specific historical situations might one expect to find class politics becoming central. Weber was also more interested in the potential of different middle-class groups to prevent any simple polarization of class relations on the Marxist model. His concerns with status have proved especially influential in North American sociology, which has been less enamored of the concept of social class as a means of analyzing social stratification, in large part because of its association with Marxism.

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