Class Struggle

Marx's account of class begins with a simple but far-reaching idea: what really groups people together into a social class is not religion, language or nationality, but their shared position in the process of production -- that is, whether or not they own the means of production, and what role they play in making and distributing goods. People who occupy the same position in this process share the same underlying interests, whether or not they are yet aware of it. Classes themselves are not fixed; they come into being historically, as the technology and social organisation of production (the 'mode of production') changes and generates conflict with the classes that existed under the older arrangement. The rise of capitalism is Marx's key example: as the feudal agricultural system broke down, serfs and small peasants were thrown off the land they had depended on, forced into cities, and eventually pushed by economic necessity (and by law and policing) into factory work. This created an entirely new social group -- workers who owned no property and had to sell their labour to survive -- and this shared, propertyless position in the production process is what made them into a class, the modern working class. Facing this class stood the bourgeoisie, who owned the capital, machinery, factories and land. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously opened by declaring that 'the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle', tracing how every historical era had its own pair of opposed classes -- freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, and now bourgeoisie and proletariat. But Marx was careful to note that opposed economic interests do not automatically produce open conflict: a class also needs to become subjectively conscious of its own shared interests, and of its opposition to the interests of the other class, before real conflict -- and potentially revolution -- can occur. This is complicated by the fact that in every era the ruling class tends to promote a dominant ideology that justifies the existing order (for instance, encouraging poor people to attribute their povert …