Class

Class (or specifically social class) refers to the historically-determined discriminatory hierarchic stratification of people in any economically non-egalitarian society on the basis of, generally, who is at the top or bottom or middle of that society in terms of access to economic wealth and all that flows from it in terms of socioeconomic well-being. So, for example, in many societies of today, those at the top (the elites), on one hand, enjoy a material lifestyle of abundance in socioeconomic possessions, ranging from mansions to hired help in their homes to access to private jets to membership of exclusive country clubs (not to mention possession of bank accounts overflowing with millions), and on the other hand, they have direct or indirect access to economic and political power in society to determine what opportunities others who are socioeconomically below them (e.g., the working classes) will have to improve their general quality of life--access to and type of employment, fairness of pay, quality of schooling, the strength of the social safety net, the weight of the tax burden, etc., etc. 

We associate this class differentiation into social strata with societies that range from slave-based societies to feudal societies to modern capitalist societies, but not with such egalitarian societies as the hunting and gathering communities of the Amazon basin or the rain forests of the Congo or the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa (or socialist societies—at least at the theoretical level). 

At the heart of class differentiation, therefore, lies economics from which flows everything else--including such other forms of differentiation as race, ethnicity, gender, etc. However, how this differentiation comes about is, today, as it has been in the past, a matter of intense debate and disagreement among those who study this subject; witness the thousands upon thousands of books and academic articles on it. Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that all explanations are rooted in one form or another in the theories of two principal social thinkers of German heritage, Karl Marx and Max Weber; where the former argued that class differentiation arose from the historically determined division in society between those who came to own (or control) the means of economic production--factories, farms, businesses, etc.--and those who did not (and therefore had to work for those who did), while the latter stated that differentiation arose from a combination of factors that also included things such as social status in society and what political affiliations one had (e.g., in the U.S., whether Republican or Democrat). 

For our purposes the explanation that is of singular relevance is the one concerned with determining who has the ultimate power to determine the quality of life of a large number of people in a society; such as, today's capitalist societies. That is, depending upon one's purpose, while the Weberian explanation of class differentiation has its uses, it is the Marxian one that concerns us given our objective of determining pathways to true social justice (authentic democracy) for all, broadly understood to include people differentiated by--besides class--race/ethnicity, gender, and so on. Simply put, a person of high social status in the Weberian sense (e.g. a former president of the country) is not in the same league as someone who owns or controls a multi-billion dollar transnational monopoly conglomerate employing thousands of workers all across the planet. 

Therefore, in capitalist societies, one can identify, at the very minimum, two fundamental interdependent but antagonistic classes: the working class (also known as the proletariat) and the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie; also known as the upper class, or the capitalist class, or the ruling elite, or the plutocratic elite, etc.) where neither of whom can exist without the other. Yes, but what about the middle-class? From the perspective of power relations it doesn’t really exist. Because, in terms of objective interests (which will be defined at the workplace in terms of how far from, or how close to, the bourgeoisie or the working class it is) a section of it will generally be allied to the bourgeoisie while the rest will be allied to the proletariat. Consider this example: in a government bureaucracy the objective interests of the supervisors, in terms of who has power, are not going to be the same, for the most part, as those of the cleaners--even though they may all consider themselves as members of the middle-class. 

In the Weberian sense the middle-class, of course, exists, as well as its many other variants, depending upon who is defining it (e.g. upper middle-class; lower middle-class; lower, lower middle-class). So, from the perspective of Max Weber's definition, the issue here is not power but distribution of resources--e.g. who makes how much in terms of income.

Class Struggle: refers to struggles in capitalist societies between the economically powerless—the working classes—and the powerful—big business or the corporate capitalist class—over issues of authentic democracy, which concerns the third part of that famous phrase in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In the absence of meaningful procedural democracy, in a capitalist society the minority (the capitalist class) has the economic power, through its monopolistic ownership and control of society’s major means of economic production (factories, farms, etc.), to determine if the majority will have food on the table and a roof over its head at the general level and, at the specific level, how it will be treated in the workplace in terms of pay and working conditions as the capitalist class seeks to maximize its profits in its unending quest for limitless accumulation of wealth. 

In fact, the roots of the bulk of the European diaspora all across the planet (from South Africa to United States, from Canada to New Zealand) that emerged with the onset of industrial capitalism lies in this fundamentally tyrannical character of laissez faire capitalism. The majority (the working class—includes the so-called “middle class”) has only one source of power to ensure that the minority does not deny them the means of access to life’s necessities and/or exploit them in the workplace, and that is their potential ability to bring a capitalist enterprise to a standstill—by withdrawing their labor through organized industrial action (e.g. a labor strike)—by means of trade unions.[1] Not surprisingly, throughout the history of industrial capitalism, up to the very present, the capitalist class has always opposed the formation of trade unions, sometimes using violence if necessary. Therefore, an important inherent dimension of industrial capitalism is class struggle, which is the constant struggle between these two dominant classes that emerged with the rise of industrial capitalism, and which has its roots in the production process where each is pursuing diametrically contradictory ends: profits versus livelihood. 

Displaced Class-Struggle: the existence of class struggles as a permanent feature of all capitalist societies does not necessarily mean that the working classes will always be aware of all instances of such struggles (and their roles in them). What is more, an important weapon of the capitalist class aimed at ensuring their victory in class-struggles is to convince, by means of propaganda through the media (much of which is, by the way, capitalist-owned), large sections of the working class that their interests are the same as those of the capitalist class—usually through the technique of subjectification of objective interests. A well-known tool in the European-American ecumene to facilitate this subjectification is the ideology of racism—which in modern times found its most potent expression in Nazi Germany. This is a classic “divide-and-rule” strategy. One may refer to this phenomenon as displaced class-class as indicated, for example, by racial/ethnic divisions among the working classes in their class struggles against the bourgeoisie (or the ruling elites, or the capitalist classes). Here is a concrete example from the United States: the racism of the white working class prevents it from allying itself with the African American working class in their struggles against the capitalist class for a more equitable and just society (authentic democracy). (See also Capitalism, Surplus Appropriation.) 

Class Warfare: refers to the systematic assault in capitalist societies by corporate capital on authentic and/or procedural democracy for purposes of enhancing its accumulation activities, through profit-maximization, by whatever means necessary, legal or otherwise. In other words, any activity on the part of the capitalist class and its allies that is deliberately designed to, for instance, reduce the public wage (and thereby undermine authentic democracy) in order to enhance its capitalist accumulation activities qualifies as class warfare. A good example of class warfare is the pollution of the environment by a capitalist enterprise. Another example is the corruption of procedural democracy by means of bribes (including “legal” bribes in the guise of lobbying) paid to legislators, government officials, and so on; and through the deliberate misinterpretation of the U.S. Constitution in favor of corporate capital—e.g. in the instances of First and Fourteenth Amendments—by, historically, one of its key government allies, the U.S. Supreme Court.[2] Those consequences of capitalist enterprise that are referred to in standard economics literature as negative externalities can also be considered as an expression of class warfare. Note that this definition does NOT incorporate the Marxist view that any capitalist accumulation activity constitutes class warfare. 

Note: even if the following terms have not been explicitly assigned, for test purposes you must also look up these terms in this glossary: Bourgeoisie; Capitalism; and Meritocracy.