Class

In general, the term class refers to a group of people who have the same social or economic status such as the working class or a professional class. Within the social sciences, two views of class have dominated: those drawing on Karl Marx (1818–1883) and those drawing on Max Weber (1864–1920). Given that he wrote after Marx, Weber often is said to be engaged in a dialogue with the ghost of Marx on the matter of class. Although he was interested in many of the same questions as Marx, Weber came to quite different conclusions. For example, Marx believed that workers' alienation (by which he meant how workers gradually lost control of the product of their labor such that the shift from feudalism to industrial capitalism in Europe transformed workers from relatively self-sufficient peasant farmers into wage laborers who did not own what they produced) would eventually be eliminated when workers finally owned the products of their labor in some future workers' state. Weber, however, believed that alienation had little to do with who owned the means of production (e.g., factories, mines, financial institutions) but was rather a consequence of bureaucracy.

For Marx, class is primarily an economic category derived from the differential ownership of the means of production, with the structure of such ownership subsequently determining how the product of society's labor is divided. According to Marx, the fundamental division in any society is between those who own the means of production and those who do not. Under capitalism, this means that workers (the proletariat), who do not own the means of production, must sell their labor power for a wage to the capitalist class, which does. Marx maintained that such a class system is not inevitable but has its origins in the historical development of human societies. Thus, he argued that class systems began to develop once humans moved beyond hunter–gatherer societies and beyond a level of social development in which everyone produced for themselves and their immediate family members. Once agriculture had been invented some 10,000 years ago, there developed a social relationship in which some people came to control the means of production (e.g., land, tools) and so, ultimately, to control the product of others' labor. In formulating a general analysis of this development of class relations over time, Marx relied on the historical materialist approach to understanding the forces of history. Finally, Marx made a distinction between a class-in-itself, by which he meant a group of individuals who objectively share a similar social and economic situation, and a class-for-itself (by which he meant a group that has developed a consciousness about its own existence, i.e., that workers recognize their class position as workers relative to capitalists). In the Marxist schema, class is defined by social relationships—the relationships between those who own the means of production and those who do not—rather than by statistical categories (which might see, say, all of those earning more than $100,000 a year as being in one class and all of those earning less than that in another). Although Marx argued that there could be movement of individuals between classes, such individualized movement should not be seen to negate the existence of classes themselves.

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